skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm sorry, but I have to disagree with you. Calling gold an investment is akin to calling USD or Swiss Franc an investment. It might be but its first and most important function is this of money. Think store of value and not profit.

Currently, an ounce of gold buys you a nice suit in New York. Two hundred years ago 1 ounce of gold was enough to buy a nice suit in London. And 2,000 years ago 1 ounce of gold was enough to buy a nice toga in Rome.

Price of oil in gold fluctuates around 15 barrels per ounce since World War 2.

The list continues... the point is that gold is an excellent store of value reflecting real prices increases much more accurately than government figures (a.k.a. CPI).

Gold is money. Historically, gold has been the best indicator and instrument to gauge inflation. The CPI numbers from Government don't even come close.

At the end it all really boils down to: is the Government provided CPI number or gold better instrument to gauge inflation?

My take is that if something has worked great to gauge inflation for the last 5,000 years then it probably still measures it pretty well.

The CPI number from Government that has vested interest in underreporting inflation? (because of debt). Thank you, buy I firmly believe that is has been grossly understated for for the last 60 years, ergo my numbers probably illustrate the real increase in value of the set better.
These are my personal favorites - Simon and Garfunkel: Bookends (great classic album) - Supertramp: Breakfast in America (another one of my favorites) - Fleetwood Mac: Rumours (one of my favorites to work to) - The Flaming Lips: Yoshimi Battles the Pink Robots (not a classic, but great to work to)
appcelerator titanium, i'd guess - http://www.appcelerator.com/
That actually comes far closer the censorship measures currently being considered across the middle-east, not to mention China's Great Firewall.
My issue with Disqus' pseudonyms is that they don't seem to be personally owned.

I selected a pseudonym, put in an email and a password, made a few comments... then I realized that some girl's photo is next to my comments! Apparently I hijacked her account.
Someone [a designer probably] needs to make one of those really nicely designed micro-sites with a really clear explaination of why SOPA is bad.

For example this is nice: http://rogerdudler.github.com/git-guide/ but what if the same effort could go into explaining SOPA to lay people (and politicians)?
You certainly will if you buy the MEAP. I'm getting a clarification on this from Manning to see if there's a way to get a notification without buying the book.

I'll also be making announcements about the book on Twitter, of course.
The interesting question is how you figure out those curves in a decent amount of time and cost. When you pull a lobster out of a wild population, how do you determine how old it is? Lobsters live way too long to take the sit and wait approach with a lab population, and to date there's no reliable way to determine lobster age. So that's still a real challenge, not least because there isn't all that much interest in lobster aging.

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/06/ageless-animals-t...
Significantly higher relative to life expectancy of someone who makes it to 10 years old, but still incredibly low in the Western world. It's likely close enough to 0 that it just isn't visible on the graph.
That made me extremely hesitant to order from them, but it turns out that I can download all my Manning books without time restrictions. (Clearly inconsistent with the policy you point out; dunno what it all means.)
I wonder if somebody has done any kind of benchmarking with Hip Hop.
Please note that this does more then what the parent suggests doing by "git checkout".

This destroys untracked changes and resets your current branch-pointer to <commit>, removing all the commit-history that comes after <commit>. (You can still recover them from the database, e.g. with "git reflog")
If you registered an account with your email address you wouldn't have been able to hijack someone else's account -- all registered accounts are tied to unique email addresses. Can you reach out to us at http://disqus.com/support with some more specific details? We'd be happy to help get everything clarified.
Thanks, I've never even seen that "Blocked Objects" menu item before. Curious, though, that there's no option to permanently allow blocked objects like there is to allow blocked sites.
Yeah, I expect, if Scala were to go this route, much the same would happen in regards to "inheriting" language features. Sometimes you can neatly tuck them away in the library, sometimes they spill out into calling code. At the least they give you some indication of what you're getting yourself into. I don't really consider that aspect of it to be a problem.

I think Scala has a few tools that, like multiple inheritance in C++ or Haskell's MultiParameterTypeClass, need to have a bit of a warning label so people avoid them until the situation screams for it.
As it turns out, it’s just HTTP requests. The alarm bells should be going off now. So you’re telling me that the part of the O.S. that runs as root and replaces system files is downloaded via unsecured, unauthenticated HTTP? Yup.

Well, I'm not sure it makes a difference. As he later points out, update packages are signed by Apple, so unless you have access to Apple's private key you can't make an update package that will actually be installed.

Using HTTPS instead of HTTP would be wise, but in the end it doesn't make a difference.

On the whole though, this is a fascinating exercise. Thanks!
The vast majority of my techie friends use it all the time. Maybe I just need better techie friends.
Maybe most high schools have gotten that way, but I had a very different experience. Made some chemical mixture in Chemistry that would go up in a puff if it was bumped. In my high school engineering classes, we stripped the motor out of a CNC router, attached a custom built head on it and then connected that router's computer to another control box we used to control two robotic arms, a conveyor belt, and a couple of control valves for water.

There are still a few good high schools left at least.
Jonathan Blow: there's not enough innovation in games (2006)
nuget is still messy compared to maven/leiningen/rubygems, some features are lacking such as:

- a system-wide repository

- an easy way to integrate with .csproj builds so that building in VS will pull up necessary libs. Yes, i know there's the new auto-install feature in NuGet 1.6 but it's still not as easy as with other tools, and it requires the .nuget folder with nuget.exe in it, and i prefer people to have nuget.exe directly in their PATH anyway.

- a simple way to build from the command line and in VS easily (I know this might not be feasible because VS doesn't let you do everything). For example i could just edit a bunch of dependencies in one file (not a csproj + a package.config, even if a tool does it for me it's messy) and compile it in one command or in VS.

- better management of "internal" NuGet packages within a company (NuGet.Server is not so great to use although it works-ish), NuGet hasn't really been design for large-scale use unlike maven, and this is clearly showing here. It's more of a little tool to get exernal libs.

In general NuGet should mavenize itself a little bit (it can't gemify itself since you'll also want to compile stuff, so imitating bundler/gem isn't enough).

And i do love NuGet, i push it everywhere i can trust me :) it's one of the greatest .NET project at the moment.
This is just totally false. You can lay out your C arrays in exactly the same way that Fortran does, if you choose to. Or you can do something else, if that will give better performance. Tools are just tools; they don't determine what you can do with them. (I write matrix operations for a living, generally in C or Assembly; much of what I write is provably as fast as possible on the target hardware, so it could not possibly be faster if written in Fortran).
Only Facebook commenters have "enforced" real names, in that their Facebook name is used. Signing in with a Disqus account or Twitter uses the names that a user chose on that service, which typically is not a real name but some sort of pseudonym.

So while it's true that it's basiaclly comparing Facebook-identified commenters to other commenters, only Facebook-identified commenters are required (assuming they sign in with their actual account) to have a real name.
5 Minutes with Dom Leca (Sparrow's co-founder)
I'd have the opposite reaction, I think: I'd want to learn a language because it introduced new concepts (and thus, terminology). It seems to me that it's a bit pointless to learn a language if you already intimately understand its theoretical underpinnings.
thank you for your well considered reply....good info, and we're listening!!!
I wonder how you differentiate that from old-fashioned high-seas piracy, where it's an unavoidable side effect of cargo ships going slower than pirate ships.
About damn time they invited people who have an idea of what's going on.
Making Big Data Small
The output of "Problem 1" can actually be "yes", depending on the architecture. -1 is "all bits set" on two's complement signed integers but that's not the only integer encoding in existence. If you want "all bits set", write ~0. That's exactly all bits set and defined behaviour you can rely on in a portable program as opposed to an implementation detail.
(I don't know if I have this right -- I've not done Fortran in 15 years, but I feel like I've got about 1/3 of an answer and someone more knowledgeable may be able to finish it off. Any code samples guaranteed to be wrong. ;) )

Fortran 77 doesn't allow recursion, and all arrays are fixed in size at compilation time. That means every array in the source code is allocated memory when the program starts; you can never allocate a new array during program run; either by allocating the memory dynamically, or by making a recursive call that has an array local. I don't believe there's a stack -- not the way C/C++ has a stack for locals and return values. So if we declare a main program and a subroutine, like so;

01 PROGRAM TEST1
02 REAL D(10)
03 REAL E(10)
04 CALL A(D,E)
05 CALL A(D,D)
06 END

07 SUBROUTINE A(F,G)
08 REAL F(*)
09 REAL G(*)
C 10 --- Do something with F and G
11 RETURN
12 END

Then this program has exactly two arrays -- the ones declared on line 02 and 03. The ones on line 08 and 09 declare the type of the parameter passed on 03 and 04, but it doesn't allocates any memory. This idea is true for all F77 programs -- you can look at a program and say 'This program has exactly nineteen arrays'.

So -- this limitation may explain the aliasing problem. A call which passes an array (line 04, line 05) always calls a particular array -- it's not just 'pass a pointer to an array' but 'pass a pointer to memory location 85349'.

So in

04 CALL A(D,E)

then we know they are separate arrays, and when we write

05 CALL A(D,D)

we know they are the same array. We're never confused about whether we are, or are not, aliasing.

There are some notes on Fortram memory allocation and arrays here (http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/languages/fortran/ch2-4.html):

" When the array is declared in the 'outermost' procedure, the compiler allocates memory for it. When you pass the array with a CALL statement, the compiler actually passes the base-address of the same array to the called procedure. When the called procedure operates on the array it works on the same array - uses the same memory storage area, the array is not 'copied' to another memory area (But, it might be in some cases on some Fortran systems)."
I did consider it but it would still be meaningless because there would only be tht one person attending that event. The problem is that the downloads are too sparse within the US, so users aren't able to join each others events as they're too far.
Your second point appears to be a weirdly pervasive myth. Excellent article at http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition....

Key takeaway (here): Yes, tons of research shows that people read lowercased words faster than they read uppercased words. It also shows that the difference disappears with practice -- turns out lowercase is more common 'in the wild'.
Hollywood invests as much as $100M in a single movie, probably no hair style has involved such effort. Perhaps if someone did invest $100M developing one hairstyle, they would try hard to protect it.
By email, how can you prove that the right person was behind the desk and that his outlook or email program wasn't just open and that any person could have relied ?
Same goes for the fax ?
Did you read the article? The author defined quite clearly how they thought the overvaluing and market correction (ie bursting of the bubble) would progress. They even made a graph!
> Even with the flag disabled, Scala will be a more powerful language than any of the alternatives I can think of.

How is Scala more powerful than Haskell, Agda, or Coq?
We age because the world changes:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2011/03/we-age-because-th...

But the degree to which aging is programmed - versus simply an unhappy stochastic decay due to diminishing selection pressures in later life - is a big and ongoing debate. Some species clearly have a lot of programming going on. For example, salmon age at a rate determined by the laziness of bears near to their particular rivers:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2007/12/bear-consumption-...

But there are equally good counter examples for many more species that suggest the situation is that evolution sets up to win the short race, front-loading as much as it can for early success, and then the selection pressure drops off after you had your shot at reproductive success. All that front-loading produces unpleasant later consequences as things fall apart - you're not set up for the long term.

The adaptive immune system is a good example of this - it's a system that could never run as evolved for an indefinite period of time. It's always going to crash and burn at some point, and that's somewhat a consequence of how it's evolved to run extremely effectively right out of the gate in early life:

http://www.fightaging.org/archives/2006/12/when-and-how-does...

For more reading on this topic, you might look into antagonistic pleiotropy - the premature optimization of the evolved world:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antagonistic_pleiotropy_hypothe...
They did nothing to demonstrate non-Facebook logins are actually pseudonymous. I use my real name without using Facebook. I believe many do as well. Even if not true it could be true and they haven't shown otherwise.

They presumed the effect they are trying to measure. It is easy to draw a conclusion when you start with it as a premise!
Well its not really abandoned, after all someone built a house on top of it and have refurbished the living quarters with additional living space.

That aside, one of the things I miss was not buying a missile silo in Idaho when I had the chance. I don't believe any are on the market any more. My biggest concern was the pumping bill (it required constant pumping to keep it from flooding).

Hmm, actually the one in this article is for sale apparently for 1.7M: http://www.silohome.com/missile_base_real_estate_investment_...
Yup; or when they actually created a vector font to reproduce bitmap design: http://www.fonts.com/aboutfonts/verdana.htm Later they were lagging with smoothing techniques because of this pixel-perfection.
True, but I wasn't really referring to us (small firms, freelancers, etc.) but the big companies. Its practically laughable to take out a NY times ad [0], when each of these companies (or their respective founders) could pledge a hundred grand a quarter and dramatically change the industry's presence.

This could be used against small business, but that's not really my point either. I guess my point is that if you won't "play the game," you'll always end up losing, and there's too many billions of dollars at stake to not play the game. Why should Google struggle for years in youtube-based court litigation when they could have stopped SOPA at inception?

Many industries (pharmaceuticals, energy, chemicals) understand this. They don't particularly like it, but they also understand that its in the best interest of their industry's long term growth. I think Internet powerhouses are beginning to realize this now too.

[0] http://www.digitaltrends.com/web/internet-titans-fight-sopa-...

EDIT- This is also just a thought: how many lunches, golf outings, and "beer summits" with Sen. Leahy and Rep. Lamar and their respective staff would that NY Times Ad have bought. I'm willing to wager that the RIAA and big content do.
MultiParameterTypeClasses are a fine feature! It's the ones like UndecidableInstances that you have to be careful about.
Application too complex to design for mobile. Try harder.
And to get access to C# libraries / language features in PHP. It also allows PHP applications to run on top of the CLR, which can offer some performance improvements on Windows Servers at least.
Will this be available as a well formatted pdf?
1) Okay, thanks for the half second.

"Oops: MPAA admits college piracy numbers grossly inflated."

"Former 'Anti-Piracy Investigator' Explains How He Fed Police Cases, Inflated 'Piracy' Stats."

I understand where you are coming from.

If you could open my eyes to a source that can validate how much piracy occurs.. in relation to every user on the internet and how much income corporations would've made per download then I think I would be much more enlightened.

2) I skip a couple of steps.

Torrenting for almost all of my consumer friends (for a lack of a better name grouping) is easy, they turn on their macs, download torrent software and go to a popular or trusted torrent site. The process was < 5 minutes. I consider that easier ( sorry again if this assumption isn't agreeable ) than setting up a Facebook account ( and filling out your profile ), something 500 million people have done.

Step 6? Thats not a requirement to pirate copyrighted material...

Step 5? Movies don't need cracks..

3) What I agree with.

- I agree with the RIAA/MPAA and their recent (and old) actions being a threat to freedom on the internet. I am very much against SOPA/Protect-IP.

- "Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me." Right?

4) Since we're numbering things.

- It would've been nice of you to send me the two studies that show people prefer the legal options over the illegal options when things are presented to them reasonably, I would've liked to look at what products ( Are you referencing Louis C.K.? that was very cool. )

- I don't like the idea of "Oh because the people trying to enforce copyright law have been bullshting us we should just abandon all copyright law all together because FCK you". It is important to protect your assets, its even more important to do it the right way.

- The RIAA/MPAA go about it in a terrible away.

- But I'm really against Piracy man ( cause I pay for it all, I know its hard to make good software & games, so I respect the process and the blood sweat and tears that went into it ). I think it's a big deal. And maybe thats probably where I get in a crossfire with you Y Combinator guys.

- I don't think the piratebay is a good thing so when they are forced to block the piratebay I'm cool with it. And I don't think you should be able to get Iron Man for free regardless of what circumstance or what excuse you come up with. so shoot me (or continue with the downvotes).

Cheers
And fuel cells, too
It's also a bunch of unnecessary math. \

FBI guy: "Hey little brother, we found this remote control car door opener. Can you and your hot grad student talk about math for a few minutes and then tell me who owned the car?"

On tv:

Brother: "Sure thing bro. Prime numbers and encryption 2 3 5 7 11 13..."

Grad student: "I'm a hot female role model talking about elliptic curves."

In real life:

Brother: "Love to help, but I gotta finish this paper so I can get tenure. Why don't you just call Toyota?"
Because they're clueless? There are several posts by Android leads that call out those app makers for a reason. That's like asking why do people use task killers in Android.
There's also the opposite theory: that in a democracy politicians should just listen to the people rather than forming their own opinions.
So it seems like we now have two way of specifying small caps:

font-feature-settings: "smcp=1”;

and…

font-variant: small-caps;

The later is the CSS 2.1 syntax, and will force the browser to create small caps on its own if the chosen font doesn't contain small caps glyphs.

The Open Type version is probably better, since it falls back to lower case glyphs if the browser doesn't support them, instead of an emulated version that probably won't be very legible.
Heh. I'm fighting against the introduction of a duck programming system at the moment. My cunning plan is to make the system generate source code from the config files. That makes it clear that modifying XML is the same thing as modifying source code, because it explicitly makes modified source code that then needs to be deployed. I may have to post the results on HN :)
Are there any other scenarios that lead to Gompertz Law like distribution?
Yohimi is an awesome album for coding! Was going to put that in my answer too.
Do you know if there's a specific reason why the renderer is showing non smooth text?
Sorry for my misunderstanding regarding comments. I got frustrated by some recent Scala bashing posts that had comments disabled, and mistakenly assumed there was a pattern. I meant to respond directly to your blog, but now that the discussion on HN is in full swing, we should keep it here.

As someone who struggled myself for a long time with the design of collections until the pieces fell into place, I can understand your struggles very well. In every language there is a limit of what can be achieved, and there is a grey zone before that where things get messy. I believe that Scala collections pushed the envelope in terms of flexibility and ease of use. But repeating this feat by extending all kinds of collections and collection-like structures generically with your own operations is not at all trivial.

You are absolutely right to point out when things get messy of course, even if it would be only to serve as a warning to others who might follow you.

The question is how to avoid similar experiences in the future. One can either change the language to make simple what you found hard. But before I buy into that, I would like to see a constructive and complete proposal what one should change.

Or, one could make a better effort to delineate the limits and the grey zone. That's what I proposed. Importantly, my proposal would only apply to definitions not to usages. So I'd put implicit conversions and definitions with higher-kinded types behind a flag, but not their uses. I hope this would give pause to library designers that mix advanced features with too much abandon, but it would not hinder users of these libraries at all.
Seconded – I don’t see any evidence that Ryan’s stance has anything to do with Reddit, before or after.

Such strange behavior for programmers – accepting an idea with no evidence, and allowing flattery to drown out reason.