skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I like your rephrasing of my statement on the love of money. You wrote:

"My take is that the blind pursuit of money, to the detriment of other considerations, is the root of (some/all) evil."

My feeling is that as you get more money, as it becomes more of a goal to you, the more likely it is that you will pursue money to the detriment of other considerations.

I'll have think about your last statement. The one about the lack of money. My initial response, without really thinking about it, is that I don't agree with it.
You seem to be knowledgeable in this field. I have no idea about it and would like to get a small insight. Can you recommend a tutorial (Preferably less than 40 pages) that explains some of the main concepts?
It's in their contracts IIRC. You can't talk to the press about confidential Google projects or operations. So they probably expect their software engineers to talk to their manager before giving an interview or writing a blog post for fear of being fired. They have a lot more to lose than a yellow badge.
There is a revival of cursive going on -- it's brought up frequently in the writing, parenting, and education fora a participate in.

Cursive is so problematic in the US not because it is hard to learn, useless, or requires a massive investment of time. It is problematic because we are terrible at teaching handwriting!

Almost all US schools have standardized on forms of looped cursive (e.g. Parker Penmanship, Zaner-Bloser) -- a set of letterforms designed not for handwriting, but for the movable type printing press! Looped cursive was made to be attractive with the fewest unique joins possible so that printers needed to stock fewer pieces for their movable type presses. Looped cursive is slower, less legible, and more difficult to learn than forms of writing actually made to be written (such as cursive italic).

Additionally, almost all US schools not only require that young children learning to write use pencil, but a relatively hard lead (HB lead). These pencils require too much pressure to use, and catch on the paper too much, making it much harder to learn to write properly -- especially in cursive, which has fewer lifts.

When I began using fountain pens, and learned to write in cursive italic, my handwriting became effortlessly quick and neat. My RSI even improved! This is how I taught my son to write, and he has arguably the best writing in his first-grade class, despite a severe speech disability which caused a delay in his learning to read and write.

We aren't the only family who have figured this out -- almost all of the home-schooling families we know use the same cursive italic my son and I learned, and I've seen a couple of private schools adopt it. Right now, it seems that the "cursive revival" seems limited to education-focused families with young children, writers, and doctors, but I think that if more people became aware of exactly how kludgy the writing they were taught is, they might give real handwriting a try and love it as much as we do. :)

Note: The italic and cursive italic we learned was Getty-Dubay italic -- I used the grown-up book "Write Now", and my son is learning with the first-grade book. Their web site is: http://handwritingsuccess.com/
There's nothing to prevent that level of abstraction being built around bitcoin. The average credit card user doesn't understand what's going on in the background, just that money from their bill is transferred to the merchant.
Four days ago, Bitcoin was under $2 USD. Now it's over $4 USD (depending on when you refresh the page). There are 6 million bitcoins in existence, and trade volume is only about 54,000 according to the biggest exchange. There aren't enough bids/asks to soak up more than about $100 USD without throwing the exchange rate one direction or the other.

For example, right now (as I write this) exchanging $1000 USD for some Bitcoins is all it takes to push the exchange rate up $0.10 from $3.77 to $3.87.

What a lot of Bitcoin newcomers don't realize is that Bitcoin depends on 'mining' to generate new bitcoins. Computers run cryptographic hashes to find the 'winning' has which is less than the current difficulty target number. The computer that finds this hash is awarded 50 BTC. The difficulty target is automatically adjusted upward to keep new bitcoin generation at a constant pace.

Some quick research shows a handful of big players in the mining market who have invested heavily in high-end GPUs for dedicated bitcoin mining, some with over 50 GPUs running 24/7 for months now. These guys are bound to have huge quantities of bitcoin they are eager to unload when the price is right. Meanwhile, news coverage is driving exploding popularity, which appears to be pulling the exchange rate sky high. On paper, many of these guys have become overnight millionaires just by running a bunch of computers 24/7.

Of course, as these players cash out the exchange rate will fall. These guys are too smart to sell all at once and flood the market, but with volatility like this I'm willing to bet a lot are eager to pull their bitcoin out of the game before the bubble pops.

Meanwhile, hardware enthusiasts all over the internet are rushing to buy GPUs to dedicate to mining. They don't seem to realize that the bitcoin system automatically adjusts to keep the bitcoin generation rate constant at 50 BTC per 10 minutes. As the mining market becomes flooded with new 'miners' the difficulty will climb rapidly, until it becomes unprofitable to run a GPU if you have to pay for electricity.

Finally, bitcoin is highly illiquid. My research was brief, but I couldn't find an easy way to exchange small amounts of BTC for USD that didn't look terribly sketchy or involve a lot of fees. Stores aren't eager to accept bitcoin because the exchange rate at the moment can easily swing 10% between when the user presses 'check out' and the transaction is processed.

The bitcoin system is a very interesting concept, and it was clearly implemented by some very intelligent people. But as it currently stands it's just a playground for speculators and market manipulators. Expect some carnage in the coming months.
Biology major was complaining about his grades. I suggested he turn off his stereo when studying. His grades went up.

YMMV
I wonder how hard is the integration of Stackless and the JIT features. That would be killer.
Same situation as you. We have Stroustrup himself here at Texas A&M, so all anybody ever uses is C++[0]. My intro teacher to 121 actually told us to us the Waterfall method by name. All anybody wants to do is go into the video game industry/play flash dames. Pretty awful, but you can teach yourself a surprising amount of CS. I learned enough JavaScript that some of my side projects got me an internship at a "big-name" company.

Also, it seems to me that the people who are ridiculously successful at MIT would probably have been ridiculously successful most anywhere else. Find some smart friends, stop thinking so highly of yourself, and get back to learning.[1]"The best programmer is a humble programmer."[2]

[0]-High point of the class: Stroustrup was guest lecturing in class a month ago. I had seen on HN a few days before he had responded directly to one of Linus' attacks on C++. I raised my hand and asked him how he dealt with guys like Linus. He got all flustered and just went "Linus is a immature fool!" and then went on preach for C++0x.
[1] Read Godel Escher Bach. It will put you in your intellectual place.
[2] Wish I knew who said that first.
This is very, very dark stuff and it has absolutely no upside. Though the essay states the advantages of being able to assassinate another Hitler or Stalin in order to prevent them from abusing their privileges, the reality of a real Assassination Market would look quite different. People would be assassinated all the time, even if they're not really in a position of power.

Can you imagine the last three American presidents surviving a system like this? What about the current president? I think a large number of lunatics would donate insane amounts of money towards his assassination just to see it through.

The idea that this is a constructive mechanism to put more checks and balances in the hand of the general population is horribly misguided. Who would like to live in a world like this? Also, it wouldn't even fix the most pressing problems, like corruption and abuse of power. An Assassination Market would just shift corruption and abuse to another group. The average citizen would be totally screwed, even worse than today (I know, it's hard to imagine sometimes).

There are so many worthwhile ideas to improve the concept of government. For example, I believe it is worth looking into abandoning the concept of representation or at least de-emphasizing it in politics. So many ideas worth discussing. Anonymous Assassination Markets is not one of them.
very interesting.

I shall have to investigate at some point!
Introducing Druid: Real-Time Analytics at a Billion Rows Per Second
I wanted to give some positive feedback since the comments thus far seem negative. The design is fantastic, and I even bookmarked it under examples for my future designs. The logo is incredibly clever and meaningful, something you don't usually see. As a detailed suggestion, I'd keep the font in the text fields consistent with the rest of the site, e.g. use Arial like everywhere else instead of Lucida Grande. I'm guessing you're using the Blueprint CSS framework because it forces the styling of text fields to Lucida despite body font declaration.
There's actually a sprint going on right now (where this release was done), and that was a topic of discussion. I don't think anyone has written up the conclusions yet, but estimate I heard was that it'd be about 1-month of person-work.
Purchasable apps -> app store.
For anyone interested, I expounded at some length a while back about why method patents are well-entrenched in U.S. law and about the philosophical debate surrounding them over the years (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1171821). Software patents, of course, fit within that mold and, in light of Bilski, will not be subject to any form of categorical challenge for years to come in the courts. The issue lies with Congress, and this piece sets forth an excellent way of making the right kind of policy challenge (in contrast to the more superficial "this is ridiculous" kind of point which, though sometimes true, the patent bar is usually quite good at rebutting, at least based on existing legal standards - see, e.g., http://hallingblog.com/2010/05/26/patent-ignorance/).

In the analog era of patents, the U.S. courts went nearly two centuries in which the idea of a patent was strongly tied to that of a "machine" and where they often held that, while an original invention was in itself patentable, an improvement upon that invention was not. For example, in 1875, the Supreme Court held that "it is no new invention to use an old machine for a new purpose" (I cite and discuss this in the linked item above). It was not until 1952 that Congress overruled this line of cases in amending the patent statutes, setting the stage for what became an eventual flood of software patents as the digital age began.

The policy issue making software patents problematic in our digital age is that patentable software innovations, though supportable under current legal standards, basically are creating an ever-complex web of closely-interrelated and incremental improvements in any given area (e.g., mobile devices) such that no one can develop anything there without getting entangled in the web. It is not just tricky. It is impossible. The only way to defend is to make your own web (your "defensive patent portfolio" or your "defensive pool") and use that to catch others before or as they catch you. If you don't have that, you are in trouble.

Is this, then, what was intended by the Progress Clause of the Constitution (Article I, sec. 8, cl. 8) when it provided that the Congress shall have the power "to promote the Progress of Science and useful Arts, by securing for limited Times to Authors and Inventors the exclusive Right to their respective Writings and Discoveries"? Just how do these tangled webs of 1-and-0 based incremental improvements that are a normal part of all software development in the first place manage to promote the progress of science and useful arts?

The cause for reform in this area will be won or lost based on how the issues are framed and here we have a good example of how to begin to mount an effective challenge.
at 2) I couldn't decide on a good title, hence some disparity. The URL itself contains a third version.

at 1) Actually GNOME has since forever been an Apple copy, the newest Unity thing even moreso, but I really really like the Launcher. I feel like it's just innovative enough while being sufficiently familiar not to throw me off completely.
I agree, but the answer to your question is that it has no wings.
FYI, writing caused me pain if I did it for more than a line or two, and was always a slow and laborious process. It turned out I'm predisposed to RSI -- a load of vitamin B6 plus learning to write cursive italic, plus switching to fountain pens really improved my writing and eliminated the pain.
Data Rights We Must Demand from Companies
He doesn't seem to understand the difference between being an employee for a company that was hired by Google and being a Google employee

He differentiated between being a red badge contractor and getting many of the on-site perquisites, versus being a yellow badge, who gets no (visible) benefits whatsoever.

He also clearly states that Google leaned on his employer to fire him, not that Google fired him.

I don't see how your statement is correct.
I created a list two years ago when I was promoting my mobile app. Here it is as a Google Spreadsheet:

https://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=0AqvAQlclIWYPdExaNll...
Fantastic... Christian worked hard on Stackless and I think it`s a great feature. On Pypy it would be easier to maintain and add functionality, unfortunately, I struggle on Stackless internals and it`s low level C gimmicks so I can't help on it.
It would be great to have something like a good framework in the future to make it`s adoption easier. We have the Stackless Examples project to address this initial learning curve thing. http://code.google.com/p/stacklessexamples/
Probably no point in me commenting just to agree with other posters, but that "The ACL is Dead" talk is fantastic.
A US dollar futures contract represents 1,000 dollars. So that's $15 million per day.
According to Wikipedia:

"Mantophasmatodea is a suborder of carnivorous African insects discovered in 2002, originally considered to be a new order, but since relegated to subordinal status, and comprising the single family Mantophasmatidae."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mantophasmatidae
Cursive is like vim. Hard to learn, doesn't feel natural, requires that you train numerous small hand motions until they are reflexive, and in the end makes you faster and more productive. So it seems like it would be a natural fit for hackers, but the many negative comments in this thread would seem that it is not.

Perhaps the problem with it is that it is too beautiful. In that it is quite unlike vim.

I just wrote cursive for the last hour or so, since reading the article. I haven't written it since grade 6 or so. It was an absolutely bizarre feeling to find that it just came out of my brain the way it did, and when I looked at the page of text I had written, it was covered in what I honestly think is quite beautiful calligraphy.

It's a rather unusual and incredible feeling to learn that you still retain a skill you have not used in decades. Try it, it's pretty neat.
I was not bashing your article. I simply thought it was a case of submitters editorializing the titles. I still wish linux would stop copying others (bad) UI and go their own way. If anything, they should be copying Apple's pixel perfect mockup/design process and sharing of design people across projects.
Discrediting the source or his delivery doesn't change what this looks like on face value:

People of color coming out of a building who have no access to the same perks as other employees and where the intention is clearly to avoid publicity of their low cost labor.
If anyone's in SF and wants to stop by Noisebridge, we're having a BitCoin party today until 5 pm.
The funny thing is that if I point a video camera at a police officer in a public space, I'll get charged with 'illegal wiretapping,' but if Toshiba implants a spying device without user knowledge/consent will they get charged with illegal wiretapping? Doubtful. Even though they are 'spying' on customers behind their backs, it will get less punishment than openly filming a police officer in a public space.
I take it the video was made from the tape "he couldn't find"
I doubt there's much liquidity to be had in these dark pools. More likely they're dark deserts.
We appreciate the list - we clearly haven't started optimizing but will definitely address the points you addressed.
Downvoted because of the ad hominem attacks; the author did not "secretly" videotape anyone, he asked his supervisor's permission first. Furthermore, he never said he resented the fact that his red (contractor) badge didn't give him full company privileges; rather he was documenting how many of them he did get to contrast them with the lack of privileges of the yellow (also contractor?) badges.
Where's the tutorial? Github pages for tutorial not doing anything. I'm very interested as this seems to allow more features than a Chrome Packaged Application desktop app.
That is a totally ignorant viewpoint. Just think of eg applications or music or films or websites. Without marketing the product will most likely drown in the sea of mediocrity.

As a music lover I did not know just how much great free music exists until the netlabel scene rose up in the past years and started promoting music throughout their hemisphere. Nowadays I often find "professional high quality" music under free licenses but since it is not played on the radio or TV (thanks to music industry marketing deals), it does not spread to the major part target audience that relies on those channels for their new material.
If I call a plumber, I want my plumbing fixed. I don't care about the plumber's work benefits, problems, or anything else about his personal life; I want my plumbing fixed; that's why I called a plumber. I don't have plumbing problems enough to hire one personally; that's why plumbing contractors exist.
> here we have a good example of how to begin to mount an effective challenge.

If you want to successfully make something sound like a problem to a government, don't describe it as a "tax" and expect them to think of that as bad.
Kickstarter is supposed to fund artistic projects (some of my non-profit startups were rejected for that reason), that's why I surprised to see Diaspora get accepted. They have great intentions and a cool story (NYU students trying to change the world).
Note that lab grade glassware has been and is currently still borosilicate glass. (and is sold as such to prevent confusion over what you are buying).
I didn't sign up, but I'll give you feedback.

Your main competitor in my eyes is Facebook. The "circles" you promote seem similar to "friend lists," an underemphasized but existant feature on FB. I can publish content to only certain lists with a few clicks. It's kludgy but doable. I manage only one list on Facebook because that's all the granularity of privacy I need. Most people care less than I do, so I don't see a significant need.

Cool design, but the text on the infographic seems off (perhaps it should be actual text and not part of the image). Your about us page is not terribly long yet still wrought with syntax, grammar, and word usage mistakes.
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Thats great. Dynamic languages at say Java like speeds is a real game changer over the PHP/Rubylevel speeds. At the moment we only have LuaJIT proving its possible, but PyPy is the next contender.
Why Starbucks actually helps mom and pop coffeehouse
+1 to italic handwriting.

I used and found helpful this book: http://www.amazon.com/Write-Now-Complete-Self-teaching-Handw...
To add to that, the second floor area of the building where most of the data-entry people sit is open to public, meaning that your Googler friend could take you on a tour. Security/legal are always on look-out for people stealing trade secrets. I would guess "videotaping around google property", "refuses to give the tape", "not full-time Googler", triggered some red flags
I agree with earlier comments that some more info before signing up would be good. I finally found the "About" link, that's a start. The same sparse info is given if you click on an invitation link.

I think the idea is promising but there are still many usability issues (or bugs). I managed to create a circle, invited a "friend" and added said friend to the circle. No idea, how said friend is supposed to know of that circle or if it is only implicit, i.e. people would never know why they receive a certain status update from somebody? I could not find out because after I finally found the "Logout" link I had forgotten my password, and there seems to be no password recovery option.

After logging out, direct to Login page, not Signup page?

It seems circleriot offers very little at this point and to use what's there you need way too many clicks. I don't think this is a MVP yet but I know many people who are not comfortable using facebook or twitter because they don't want to share everything with everybody (or even want to be discoverd by random people) so I think your idea has potential. Good luck!
As a bitcoin veteran, I expect carnage, always. I learn that the hard way several months ago.

Moreover, I tend to be fatalistic about the price of bitcoin. Whether or not the market is manipulated, as long goods and services are popping up in the bitcoin economy, we'll be alright in the long run.
Google profited over 8.5 billion in Q1. There's no way food could be a relevant operating cost for them.
I wanted to sign up but my name was rejected as invalid ("Barrère") - most likely because of the accent in it; you may want to fix that :)
May i ask what your argument is for requesting this?

I didn't realize that there was no "pass through" contact link, so maybe that should be the target of your request.
I think the point here is that the computer was recording and transmitting information about him and his wife without either of their knowledge or consent. If he had wanted LoJack for his laptop, he could have signed up for one of the services that offers it. Once again, hardware manufacturers seem to think they still own the device once you've bought it.
PEM Fuel Cell Powering a MP3 Player 
Polymer Electrolyte Membrane (PEM) cells is the alternative energy source used to fuel the small electronic gadgets which basically uses combination of hydrogen and oxygen, two of the most abundantly available elements on earth, to generate the energy.
You are absolutely right.

This response is relevant to you as well.
http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501121

Sorry for being uncivil.
I don't usually listen to any music, but when I do it tends to be dubstep, house, or idm/downtempo
Should Dropbox & Co be Killed?
also to you as well (see my other comments)

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2501121

Sorry for being nasty. You are absolutely right.
There are lots of white people who come out of buildings at Google every day who don't have access to the same perks as the CEOs. Is this news?

The intention is to avoid someone making a big stink over a non-issue, because empirically people like yourself will latch onto Michael Moore style "exposes" and make a non-issue into a big problem.