skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The article starts by claiming that "Delivery of first-class mail is falling at a staggering rate." I have never seen this to be the case. The article also fails to substantiate this strange claim.

Delivery of first-class mail is succeeding at a staggering rate. I have not had a piece of mail get lost in the US in decades, and delivery coast to coast is often within 3 days.

When an article gets its basic premise so wrong it is usually not worth bothering with the rest of it. It is better to tell the student to rewrite the entire essay and take a look at the second draft whenever it is ready.
Recent college graduates get some startup wisdom
Great article, and some good insight. Like many others I have found that doing a little bit of exercise every day really helps.

I used to (and need to get back to - been slacking off for a month or so now) do burpees. They are relatively quick, with a mix of cardio and some strength training, and hardly take any time at all.

https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Burpees

I usually do the "pyramid" that is start by doing 11, then a minute break, followed by 10 all the way down to 1. It takes me roughly 15 minutes, but I end up feeling really good after that.

Also, taking a break from arduous mental activity is a good thing - watch movies, read fiction, step outside with a point and shoot camera and take pictures. Anything that let's your mind relax for a bit.

Finally, I have found that meditation really helps. It helps to slow you down, improves focus, and the world really seems different once you get used to it. Just concentrate on your breath, for 15 minutes a day (or twice a day) and everything seems a tad fresher and clearer.

Of course, this article (and the comments) have got me thinking about a vacation. I don't take enough time off and I should.
Some people have scripts that automatically move currency to either: 1. themselves at a different address in a misguided attempt to make their coins more anonymous. 2. to (nearly) continuously pay for something, in a certain case people are actually renting bitcoin mining servers, with bitcoins. Yeah, it's kinda messed up, but it comes down to the unknown forward difficulty rate. The person renting out the server thinks that it will go up in difficulty more than the person that is renting it.
How about MacBook Express[1]? - ARM based, Mac App Store only for applications[2], no touch screen[3]. Users can be given a trojan free experience and Apple gets a big stick to nudge developers into the Mac App store?

This would rule the casual, unsophisticated user market. HN readers might have one as a second machine, but would probably get a "real" MacBook with the x86 and the freedom to code.

[1] Initially I thought MacBook Light, but then that's why I'm forbidden to name products. Express is already in the Apple product vocabulary and doesn't carry a negative connotation.

[2] Require a cryptographic signature from the Mac App store before any code can be executed. Remember, this gets complicated when you have interpreters on the platform, you have to control the input to them as well or only permit them in sandboxes. (Developers get some sort of testing exemption.)

[3] I don't think touch screen is a part of it. As great as it is for things on a tablet, the ergonomics on a laptop are awkward, and you need to design the application UI twice for people with and without.
Not to mention that he probably already owns a lot of bitcoins and has a massive vested interest in seeing them become worth more.
You don't want to have to actually instantiate an object using the parent constructor in order to get an object with the parent's prototype chain attached for inheritance purposes, as you'd either have to code all constructors which will be inherited from defensively, or pass in dummy arguments to satisfy the constructor when inheriting, which could preclude using a function with no knowledge of the parent constructor such as this one.

After calling this function, the child constructor's prototype is an object with no own properties, which itself has the parent's prototype, so references to properties of the parent's prototype will resolve and objects created using the child constructor will return true for "instanceof parent".

The other step usually involved, which isn't shown here, is to put `Parent.call(this)` (with any necessary arguments) in the child constructor.
I preferred it when comment scores were diplayed.

While I can only comment (obviously) on the effect that the change has had on my own comment scores, it seems to me that it's changed the scoring for the worse. Nowadays it seems that my highest-rated comments seem to wind up being pithy one-liners (I try to resist writing 'em, but sometimes they just come out) rather than the more informative sorts of comments.

I think not having the comment scores there changes the way people vote. If you see a comment that provokes a positive emotional reaction you're more likely to say "heh, upvote" if you don't know its existing score than if you see it has already been adequately rewarded.
It's not talking about success rate of items that are mailed; it is talking about the number of pieces that are mailed in the first place. The latter number is declining.
Which market are you going to tackle first? You probably can't do all at once. And what's your pitch to new users? Why should I use your site?
It seems to me that a key move to stabilizing bitcoin would be finding a high demand product that can only be purchased with bitcoin. That along with offering retailers incentives (aside from the "no fees" aspect). A group of heavily invested bitcoin owners would be wise to organize such efforts.
Rather I would find radiative cooling cool.
Thankfully it seems like Donahoe, the Post Master General, understands that in order to fix part of the problem the USPS needs to move post offices into convenience stores and supermarkets where they can be staffed by non-union employees. Anyone who can operate a cash register could handle most consumer packages as well as an expensive postal service desk agent.
Show HN: Interactive Bash Utilities
Hello HN,

After some quick hacking, I have managed to extract some of the things in my .bashrc I find useful to make a library.

Maybe the most interesting part is prompt.sh. It displays the return code of the last command along with an error message. The error message comes from a look-up table using the last command run and the return code.

Please let me know what you want to see in such an utility library.

https://github.com/ertug/bash-utils
Instead of peak age, ask about peak condition.

Manageable distractions / rest of life.

No kids yet.
Kids out of nest.
No debt.
Debt (e.g. school) deferred.
Etc.

Health

In good shape, endurance.
Youth means good blood flow to, plasticity of brain.
Exercise, training means good blood flow to, plasticity of brain.
Etc.

Experience
Academic environment places you at "leading edge", seeing and undeveloped opportunity.
Cultural currency... [ditto]
Extensive experience gives you insight into an undeveloped market, niche, opportunity.

Motivation
Whatever it is, whenever it is, you *really* want to do it.

Toolset(s)

School/training has you current.
Work experience has you current.

Network
School buddies (and staff)
Colleagues and business contacts
Early in my career I had a job with a commute from a city suburb into a job at the heart of a major U.S. city.

When I first started that job the commute was ~45minutes to 1 hour each way. Over the years, as the city grew, the transit time started going up. Then all of a sudden, some sort of critical mass hit one year and the roads became absolutely jammed to the point that my commute was 2-3 hours each way.

I went through something like the 7 stages of grief, especially 6 or 7 months of intense "anger" then "bargaining" -- manifest as an endless trying of new routes. Even longer routes were considered more optimal if I was able to stay above 45mph for some percentage of the trip.

When I finally did get to work, I'd lock my self in my office for a couple hours, unable to get any work done, but decompressing from the commute. It killed my productivity.

The worst was the caged animal feeling. Most days I was bored out of my skull, the radio had nothing interesting to listen to, I had exhausted my music library, I started reading books on the way in. But eventually I started behaving like a prisoner stuck in solitary confinement so intense that I wasn't allowed to even stand for 6 hours a day.

The end point was not exactly stage 7 "Acceptance" but instead manifested in a Zen-like turning off of my brain while in transit. I literally could not recall a single thing along the route from my home to work. Sometimes I would arrive at work with a hot coffee in hand, no recollection of ever having picked one up.

In the end I switched jobs for one with a "mere" 1 hour commute (at highway speeds) and never looked back. It was revelatory. Immediately, accumulated stress started to drip away. Constant headaches turned into every-so-oftens, my memory started improving, my mood changed for the positive, my health started picking up.

Lots of people suggested I move in closer, or carpool, or some other method of changing things. But in the end, I didn't like any of the areas I could afford closer in, and nobody in my area carpooled to within a 30 minute walking distance to my employer.

I eventually left that job and have a 15-30 minute drive every day (depending on traffic) and wouldn't look back. I've had offers to go back to that original job at a significantly higher position than I hold now and turned them down flat (unless they had an office out my way I could work from).

I have to agree that my commute was literally killing me, and I advise lots of people not to get into a situation like that if they can help it.
"But just taking sugar pills won't make you feel better. Your mind has to believe in what you are taking to gain the placebo effect."

This isn't true. Again, look at the research:

http://articles.latimes.com/print/2010/dec/22/health/la-he-p...
Looking closer! http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2258693
Personally, my most fundamental rule is this:

4. Invest in stuff that has value.
i think the big thing is that this is based on jquery-ui, not just plain jquery. extra dependency, but if you're already using it, then just reusing the autocomplete plugin is a win.
That depends on what you mean by "few". Here is a chart of the US Dollar index since 2002.
http://futures.tradingcharts.com/chart/US/M?1306686035
The major depreciation trend stopped in 2004 and since then has bounced around in a trading range.
Refocusing the picture after the fact isn't just about being able to focus "right" after the fact, so it's not fair to just compare with "focusing right the first time". With normal cameras, when you focus, you lose information, and it is simply not possible to do what they do in their demos, namely, to capture a continuous range of fields of view. (With several cameras or more than one lens, you can capture multiple discrete fields of view, but not a continuous range like this.) This is only possible because they're capturing 3-dimensional information about where each object is.

Granted their demo isn't impressive, but they're underutilizing their technology, and honestly I can't think of a better demo either, but don't be misled. This light field camera is capturing far more information. Meaningful information. I wonder if it's possible to like, create 3D models of objects in these images? That would probably be more "computational camerawork". What's impressive that that could be done after the fact.
It's true that there are often such debates, but in many cases the person who is right is the one with fewer points.
The brain's 5-million core, 9 Hz computer
That's not really how the real world economy works. The real world economy is all about people producing and consuming things. Banks, even central banks, are just a thin layer of icing on top of the cake.
Leveraged positions are common, yes. They are also behind nearly every market bubble (and subsequent crash) in history.
Holding stocks can definitely hedge against a devaluation of currency. Even domestic stocks or others prices in the currency you're seeking to get out of can work, but are significantly worse at doing so than one priced in a "safer" currency. There are investment firms that specialize in investing in the stock of foreign companies.
Depends on the downtown.
The Visual C++Weekly
I'm not sure I understand - the data has to come from somewhere, and go somewhere. If both endpoints are on the same last-mile ISP, the ISP wins because there's less traffic to and from peers, so their peering costs are lower. Other than that, why would it matter if the data came from a central server or from some other PC?
About that [3]: the first thing I thought is that Apple must have some innovative idea about the ergonomics of a touchscreen on such a device.

A laptop that supported desk accessary (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Desk_Accessory)/Side kick (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SideKick)-like use of iOS apps would be a way to lure existing iOS users to such a device.

And for naming: the OS would be Mac OS X Singapura :-)
Why are you so concerned about the quality of your business cards? As long as they don't look laser-printed, one card's as good as another. This is something that's easy to obsess about instead of doing real work, so I'd be cautious.
This insight, I think, is key. Imagine the power conferred by controlling a nation's currency. People don't just let that sort of power go. The first 1000-fold increase in value has pushed Bitcoin into the spotlight. The next 1000-fold increase will be far more noticed and hence far likelier to attract some counteractions by governments.
"Maybe imitating successful people is the best you can do when you don't know what you're doing?"

I've done this before with good results. I think the ideal strategy is to pick someone better than you, imitate them, and then once you surpass them to pick a new person to imitate, and so on. It's only after imitating five or six different people that you're able to develop your own theories, which is ultimately necessary if you want to reach true mastery.
An alternate perspective is available at http://glinden.blogspot.com/2011/05/eli-pariser-is-wrong.htm...
Thought about integrating it with productivity/music/location-aware services?
If you think Netflix selection is bad, try the Hulu movie selection. If you want movies from the 1930s-1950s, they've got you covered. I have not yet found even one movie they have that is of the calibre of Toy Story 3, which Netflix has right now through Starz. I believe Hulu is pursuing a strategy whereby they can say with a straight face that they've got "thousands of movies", but they really hardly have any.

We've been trying Hulu Plus with a free month trial and we will not be signing up. It's pathetic next to Netflix and it plays commercials. If you aren't an 18-24 year old preferably-male, Hulu is barren, and frankly you've got poor coverage even then.
How about letting users with > 5000 points see comment scores? Surely that segment can decide for themselves. Having devoted that much time to the site I think they deserve it.

EDIT: Yes, that number is biased to include me and not really the fairest way to go about it. I haven't witnessed the 'decline' maybe because I am only interested in a few topics, but the usefulness of HN has definitely declined. Could some moderation duties be traded for comment scores?
I had the idea in 1997 that you could use a scanning tunneling microscope as a hardrive needle. Have a perfectly flat surface in a vacuum and divide it up into a grid. If a square has an atom sitting on it then it counts as a one and if not its a zero. Having a single atom as a bit would be a major milestone for storage. Unfortunately I only have a highschool education and not much money so never had any means to really pursue the idea. Intel and others are doing research on it now, but as far as I know no one was working on the idea at the time I thought of it.

I also had said a number of times to my girlfriend that i want a robot that could fold laundry. She would always look at me funny. Then I felt vindicated when colin angle (iRobot) said in an interview that the next task he would like solved with robots is folding laundry.
I think the poll should frame the questions slightly differently:

a) When I see that someone has written a stupid comment, I enjoy writing a scathing retor that is likely to be upvoted by the mob.

b) When I see that someone has written a stupid comment, I occasionally choose to write a polite response, and sometimes I ignore it but hope that someone else will write a polite response.
What's the betting the next knock on your door is the feds.

Don't you feel in the slightest bit worried by publicly talking about your antics?
I don't know... I've been walking around in a polo shirt and shorts and my millions still haven't materialized :-)
It would be interesting see some stats on this vote. For example, are HNers with high karma more likely to vote for hidden scores? Are newer HNers more likely to vote for displayed scores? How about lurkers vs. frequent posters? Frequent submitters vs. non-submitters?

I'm guessing the poll is anonymous, though...
Would you have preferred your app to be priced in bitcoin instead?
Good point. So what would be someone's motivation for "popping in"?

Meet someone new? Go bowling? What's the mentality behind a sign in?
> They will want to support x64 on ARM anyway, because Windows is going on it.

Could you explain that?
Well, as long as not all nations ban trading bitcoins for official state currency it doesn't completely screw things over. I simply trade my bitcoins for Vietnamese dongs or whatever and then exchange my dongs for dollars.

No, the collapse is more likely to happen on its own. At some point the massive increase in value must draw to a close. What happens then? Big bitcoin holders no longer have an incentive to hold onto their millions of dollars' worth of bitcoins "Hmm, time to sell some of these bitcoins". Millions of bitcoins hit the market and find no buyers at the quoted price. All of a sudden the price is a lot lower, folks panic, drives prices even lower.

In an asset where the only incentive to hold the asset is the massive increase in value, panic selling happens as soon as it looks like the massive increase has gone flat. The steeper the increase, the steeper the decrease. That makes bitcoin unlike gold.
I agree with getting out of the house. For months now I've been taking my dogs on an hour walk each morning. Some days, particularly weekends, I won't want to do it, but after 10 minutes into it I feel great.

This goes inline with working out, but it's certainly harder to convince yourself to do 45 minutes of strenuous workout vs a nice long walk with your best friend(s). I figure, even if I'm sick, tired, and my body aches, I can always walk miles.
A neutral vote ("I don't want to vote") should definitely be present, since many users don't have the ability to downvote (e.g. myself).
>Then I started to realize that there can’t such a theorem.

He accidentally his whole premise.
GPS seemed like a logical add-on, but I haven't thought about music yet, thanks.
In case you don't watch the whole video: http://kernelnewbies.org/

A great starting point for kernel hacking.
This may give you some ideas.

http://www.mir.uncc.edu/docs/goal_Emotions.htm
Stallman cancels Israel lectures due to Palestinian pressure
I agree that if the end points are inside the ISP, it's good.

But peering is different from transit; peering is a delicate relationship where ISPs route traffic to each other for "free", as long as the demands are not too asymmetric. If this software results in a lot of traffic generated from a peering ISP, then it could be causes of worry for the receiving ISP.
The US dollar hasn't existed nearly that long in its current form. The current currency regime began in 1971 when Nixon ended the policy of buying back each dollar with 1/35 of an ounce of gold.

Major changes to the nature or definition of the US Dollar occurred over the past 200 years:

- In 1945 the Bretton Woods agreement made the US Dollar the world's reserve currency

- In 1933 private ownership of gold in the US was outlawed. Gold was forcibly confiscated for $20 per ounce. The price was then raised to $35 per ounce.

- In 1913 the Federal Reserve System was created

- In 1861 fiat "Greenbacks" were issued
Bitcoin has aggravated the "layman talks out his ass about economics" problem again.

1. Gold is a proof of work system just like bitcoin. When someone accepts gold as payment for some other commodity or service they are doing so under the assumption that the value will be stable because it takes at least X amount of time/labor/ingenuity/money to "create" more gold by mining it. This is what backs non-consumption commodities.

2. Fiat currencies ARE backed. They are just usually backed by a service and not a commodity. The USD for example is backed by several things: the fact that it is the reserve currency for buying oil (all oil is sold in US dollars), the fact that dollars are avoid-prison coupons for tax burdens (how most fiat currencies have been backed), confidence that the US will inflate less than other regimes and meet its obligations, confidence that the US will enforce debt obligations denominated in USD with their military if necessary.

I'm getting pretty tired of ALL CAPS hyperbole about gold and fiat currency.
You quite probably won't get decent x86 emulation speed out of an ARM processor. It takes an order of magnitude more transistors than an ARM has just to make an x86 out of hardware. You can do code translation on the fly, but doing that and keeping your virtual environment anything like the server you are trying to emulate.

When it comes to simulating servers, I've been opting for things like lxc and openvz. OSX should be able to use BSD's jail.
"So you're arguing that obesity, neck pain, loneliness, divorce, stress, and insomnia cause long commutes? Or that some factor causes both? What might that be?"

Poor decision making skills. Excepting possibly neck pain (and even then I could work it in), that could underlie them all, and there's a certain amount of evidence to suggest things like willpower and discipline exist as at least statistically-distinct entities, even if you can't quite point at the willpower organ.
Thank you for doing that. It's just really rare that people admit their mistakes and actually challenge their assumptions. None of us are right all the time, but we love pretending otherwise. So, thank you.

To tell you the truth I don't agree with any of this. I think that we're dealing with human beings and you just can't find data on this. What you're searching for is a set of emotional traits that leads to this sort of behaviour, but identifying those traits is something really, really hard (try identifying the traits behind Endymion by Keats. We all know it when we feel it, but can we identify it down to certain x variables of y quantities [whatever they may be]? I really don't think so]. Defining them is harder still ( i.e. narrowing them down to 1 pint of magical substance A + another quart of shiny liquid B + a sword that has been dipped into the holy grail...). So, in my mind all you can do is learn and try. Try again.

I hope that this makes sense.
"Last updated: 7/9/01"

There must be some newer books that would be worthwhile.