skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think our ideas are mutually exclusive — what you're describing is the notion of abstraction as it is applied to writing code. FP gives programmers incredible power with regards to reusing code (macros, first class functions, etc) at the expense of taking a little longer (in some cases) to wrap one's head around.

I was merely commenting that I think part of the reason people have been drawn to FP lately is that the industry as a whole has matured to a point in which more people recognize the need for and have developed the skills necessary to embrace such abstractions.
Superficially, the answer to this question is, obviously, yes. We reason spatially and with mental simulation, but we also reason by applying the linguistic conventions learned from our culture (e.g., "if this statement were false, then ...").

What most people seem to fail to realize is just how different people are from each other cognitively, and how many different ways there are of getting to a particular conclusion. "Intelligence" is like a country's GDP -- a complicated, non-stationary mess that, taken together and measured in a way our culture deems important, ends up representing our "Gross Cognitive Product".

So, dual n-back probably improves working memory in most people, which will probably improve their problem solving ability, most of the time. But there are, without a doubt, many other subtle, complicated, and idiosyncratic aspects of cognition that are likely to have far more dramatic effects if appropriately tweaked.
Pro-Tibetan activists become victim of Spear Phishing
Pyspread - a non-traditional spreadsheet in Python
Rocks with enough metal ores to be useful and in sizes that can make it through re-entry with a useful quantity of material left tend to do other undesirable things, like smash stuff, just ask the dinosaurs.
Female pronouns are used in many contexts to counteract the too-common use of male pronouns. I assume jubos was doing this because he knows the tech-world is flooded with male pronouns.
The Upcoming Collision Between Search and Display
The Stripe minimum charge is currently $0.50.
Argh, sorry. One of the grand parent posts was too long, I didn't read the parents above it.
If you are not in the USA (and maybe Canada) and you sign up to Facebook, you are signing an agreement with Facebook Ireland Ltd., a company registered in the EU and, hence, subject to EU law.

One part of EU law is that people have the right to access all personal data that a company holds on them. Here's an example of how to make such a request. http://europe-v-facebook.org/

You might claim "people voluntarily choose to join a free service, what right do you have to demand anything?" however that's not how laws work. Facebook is legally obliged to give non-US customers their data.
If it is the case that innovation in HW is lagging behind innovation in SW at this time, then it would seem that investors have something to do with the phenomenon, not just the entrepreneurs. When I read the line below today, it was alarming to me:

>Then he hit a roadblock. A big one. Migicovsky couldn’t raise more money. Few investors were interested in betting on a hardware startup, or dealing with the headaches that often come with manufacturing goods [1]

Perhaps the bulk of entrepreneurs and investors are after the "quick money". I know some pure finance types currently at Tristate area hedge funds contemplating a switch to Venture Capital (I urged him to reconsider, for a variety of reasons). If hypothetically, investors pat the entrepreneur on the back for the quick flip web startup, and the entrepreneur pats the investor on the back for financing his quick flip web startup, then is it any wonder that perhaps, HW entrepreneurs get lost in the fervor?

Hypothetically.

[1]http://go.bloomberg.com/tech-deals/2012-04-17-rejected-by-vc...
What would be annoying? The comments with the highest votes would still be at the top. He/she said nothing about randomizing the comments. The only effect of the idea would be to eliminate "celebrity" votes.
A Chat with Amanda Taylor: Founder of YouTube’s DanceOn
I was assuming you'd have parachutes to avoid vaporizing the rocks when they hit the ground.

And if we have parachutes then we can wrap an ablative capsule around the rocks.

Add a guidance system to make the lawyers and citizens happy.
I'm not sure about that. There are a lot of issues to consider, like how you get the materials back to earth and how you avoid creating lots of debris that poses a hazard to other spacecraft.

Those are probably solvable, but not very easy. And it's not unimaginable that we might not want to take some of the materials back to earth, but rather use them to construct things elsewhere.

In other words, maybe Google really will build a moonbase someday. I just hope I live to see it.
Modern C++ vs Managed Code: Performance vs Productivity
Factual error in the article

>The scientists, Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller, taught free Web-based courses through Stanford last year that reached more than 100,000 students.

ONLY Andrew Ng taught a free online Machine Learning course last year.
A definitive guide for parsing numbers with regular expressions
A Two-Euro Plan to Break Up the Euro Zone
This is a solved problem.

Wrap your cargo in a capsule. Add parachutes.
Now that I actually read the whole thing, I think it's kinda a joke...I hope.
SEO: Lifeblood of the Indie Filmmaker
aye, like an individual Manhattan project
I 'm with you on the hardware angle. Seriously, where's the SDK and the apps for my programmable home cleaning/general purpose robot? It's not like it costs much nowadays to stack a robot arm on top of a roomba. What about cars, where is my inspector-gadget car that parks itself and doesn't let accidents happen? Embedded software should not be limited to flashing leds with arduinos.

Edit: Somewhat related: http://earlywarn.blogspot.com/2012/04/global-robot-populatio...
Ask HN: Please assist me in being 'ramen profitable' with direct-sell ad space
'Ramen profitable' is 'a startup makes just enough to pay the founders' living expenses' ( http://paulgraham.com/ramenprofitable.html ). Since I am an individual founder and my overhead is just $1500/month, I can be ramen profitable rather easily.

My site, http://ycuniverse.com, gets several hundred "uniques" a day. That's not much, but it's solid traffic by founders and people looking to do business with start-ups. And that's a key demographic if you are also a founder or looking to do business with start-ups.

If I did AdWords, which I've already tried, I would effectively be giving Google what seems like 99 cents of every advertising dollar. So I'd like to test the idea of selling flat-rate direct-sell ad space. If anybody is interested in buying flat-rate ad space on my site and testing my attempt to be ramen profitable this way, pelase don't hesitate to contact me.
why is there no "peer to peer" social network

Probably the closest there is is the blog-o-sphere and/or the internet in general? I can host my photos on a website, and email that to a friend? Someone can subscribe to my RSS feed of my blog, etc.
less stripe gallery, more stripe canada.
Meh. Because I'm a Real Man with Real Big Balls I still think terminal text should come in one of three colors: green, amber, and page white. And you choose the color when you buy the terminal.

Kidding aside, I do do all my coding in an xterm that's had the font set to Glass Tty VT220 and the color set to one of those. Text decoration for highlighting purposes is done with our old friends bold, underline, and reverse video. But I'm retro like that.
If someone is 'addicted' to Facebook, is technology really controlling them, or is it more that they have lost control of themselves? Are they really addicted to technology or just addicted to hanging out with their friends (which technology -- e.g. smartphones + Facebook -- enables to happen anywhere, not just when you're able to schedule time to meet in person).

Also:

1. Perhaps Star Trek is an unrealistic prediction of how man will interact with technology in the future.

2. Perhaps your (and the author's) view of things is skewed by selection bias. I.e. you're around people that are more 'addicted' to technology than others.

3. You're forgetting that in Star Trek the human race has had a sort of epiphany centered around first contact with an alien species.
Mathematicians solve for x, not for $unknown_quantity.
I'm with you, to an extent. Interestingly it was the recent excitement around the Pebble watch that made me realize how indifferent I'd become to a lot of new consumer WEB products.

I guess I realized Pebble was exciting because it was a new platform with new opportunities and possibilities. I think that explains a lot of the excitement around the upcoming "SmartTV" frontier too. Even mobile is still young enough that new, exciting applications are still pushing boundaries and blowing minds - though it's maturing rapidly.

But as far as classic web products - the web is a much, much more mature canvas with much more solidified players. Of course it'll lose some of that excitement, naturally...
We (Railsonfire, a continuous deployment service actually) deploy regularly to Heroku (up to several times a day) and the timeout is a few seconds max. We are on cedar stack though, which might make a difference there.

Working on startup time definitely helps getting that number down, but they did a pretty good job in starting up on Heroku fast I think.

You can take a look at how we deploy your code to heroku here:
http://help.railsonfire.com/deployment/Heroku-Deployment.htm...

You can deploy to staging on every build and deploy to production only when you push to a specific branch for example. So you still deploy continuously to staging, but trigger deployment to production manually.

Basically to set it up all you need to to is install our gem and run railsonfire create in your application folder.

We are going public with our Heroku Addon as soon as possible, but you can login with your GitHub account or email/password as well (and even connect all 3 of those logins into one account).

If you have any more questions send me an email to flo@railsonfire.com
I cannot decide whether Krugman is dishonest or incompetent, but way too many of his assertions and op-eds can be factually contradicted; deninger used to do that weekly until he got tired of it.

Did you notice that between 1-Jul-2010 and 31-dec-2010 the BPP was >=2.3 (closer to 3% most of the time) while the official CPI was at <1.3% (closer to 1% most of the time)?

The BPP was constructed to be similar to the CPI. If you constructed it to be close to the CPI of 30 years ago, it would have been higher.

> But I still dislike your original implication that people asserting a different number for inflation are dishonest.

It's not arbitrary people. The number of people who decide the CPI formula is ridiculously small - there might be 20 economists working on it, but ultimately it is a political decision by a handful of politically motivated people at the BLS to switch to a new computation, and the entire economic profession just accepts it as gospel.

And I stand by my assertion that these politically motivated decisions do not have any "scientific purity" (whatever that might mean) or the people's well being in mind -- it has specific goals in mind, which end up harmful (through no direct malice)
OTOH, you can easily be buying someone's first project, that would traditionally have been a total loss for them.
You probably had separate bank accounts once too. You merged those, what is holding you back from merging paypal accounts? Seems like it would be the easier of the two operations.
This guy is simply failing to see the forest for the trees.

Yes, the past 30 years have been an amazing whirlwind of development of consumer computing technology. Yes, things won't be jumping by leaps and bounds the way they were when the basic hardware and bandwidth were getting up to speed. The latest social app is not going to blow you away the same way, say, the invention of the Internet did when you first discovered it. But I'm sure it pales in comparison to the wow-factor of the telegraph when it was first invented.

We live in a time when computing technology has filtered out to the mass populace. It is an interesting time to be sure. But we are just scratching the surface of what is possible with computers. There is tons of work to be done to refine the art of computation, which I believe ends with creating AI that can do things we are incapable of doing as humans. That is still a very long way off.

And assuming all goes smoothly without any major natural disasters or self-destruction, after that, there will be a new chapter in human existence where I believe we will have to come to grips with having automated everything and no longer having to employee people en masse. Where will we find meaning once the struggle to survive is pushed so far from our daily concerns?

The point is things are constantly evolving, and there is no chance that things are about to get boring. "Web", "Social", and "Mobile" are only "done" if you are tech pundit looking to summarize the state of the world in a tidy 800 words. The reality is that these things are just building blocks whose novelty has worn off, but whose ultimate utility is far from being realized.
'datum' often is a more appropriate name. 'data' is ambiguous w.r.t singular/plural.

However, I prefer 'item' and 'items', as that completely evades any possible confusion. Especially useful when iterating over generic containers. Compare:

Foreac
I've worked around this in the past by changing my e-mail address in my current paypal account, and then just creating a new account. (and then deleting my previous, now useless account). The limit is large enough that I so far have only needed to do this once. (I don't trust paypal enough to link it to an actual bank account).
Great writeup, Avi. Good luck with the new adventure, and thanks for telling me "you should start a company.." the last time we met, it was good advice to take :-)
Perhaps you can elaborate why this is a terrible argument?
I like the idea but it seems overly complicated. I think if I were to sign an agreement like this, I would simply insist that any patents I assign to the company be encumbered by a requirement to obtain permission from me before any attempt to enforce their claims.

All of this feel-good language about "defensive purposes" sounds vague and easy for lawyers to twist. Instead, if I'm going to design land mines for you, you have to give me a switch to disarm them. Problem? Hire somebody else.
While I can't read the article. My answer to this question was always along the lines of "Oh I'm sure you can, but the problem is that thanks to the Dunning-Kruger effect, dumb people won't feel that they need to put in the effort to get smarter."

So the smart get smarter and the dumb get dumber; so to speak.
Does anyone have trouble with tmux displaying colours?

I tried a custom git log query that coloured the custom ordered responses. Rather than showing the text in colour, there were inline codes being displayed.
It would cause numerous numerous other problems.

It's non-trivial to convert bitcoin into a regular currency, you have to use 3rd party sites that have a terrible record with security

It's not understood and accepted by most people.

You can't do chargebacks.
I'm afraid that the end conclusion of that blog post would be the same that jashkenas mentioned in the GP: serve your whole site over HTTPS.
Another thing which is sad but true is some developers feel the need to face off development tools and technologies in some sort of 'coolness' competition. When in fact, there are many more reasons behind why one might choose a particular implementation than "what is the current flavor of the month?"
Next-Gen Network Drumbeats: Going With the OpenFlow
But they're not doing it for nefarious reasons. Having all this information together is genuinely useful for users. That's why they do it! People want it, and for good reason.

The side-effect that all this information provides an unsettlingly complete snapshot of your life, trusted to a single entity, is an inevitable byproduct. Facebook has certainly made a few mistakes, but the things people complain about aren't specific to Facebook -- they're inherent to any useful, complete social network.

Is there a consumer-friendly solution to this dilemma? I'm not sure. Privacy-wise, you can't have your cake (super-connected with your friends) and eat it too (keep the site from knowing about all those connections).
> These are endeavors normally left to nation states.

The logical conclusion of that is feudalism, and I think with more or less the same consequences. Basically:

• You'll get some good kings and some bad kings

• Some will be into exploration for wealth, prestige and to further an ideology

• Wealth and power will be passed down through families

• A person being a good king is probably a bad predictor of their great grandson being a good king

Democracy and a strong central government aren't an optimal solution to the distribution of power, but they do tend to average out systematic performance over time to produce less ups and downs. Technology and finance seem to be the largest pseudo-king making disciplines these days, but I'll leave musing over their relative distribution of good and bad kingliness as an exercise to the reader.
I'm thinking that his point (which I agree with) is that if a photo-sharing app with twelve people and no revenue can come from nowhere in less than two years to threaten Facebook's very existence, Facebook may not be worth $100 billion. I think the crux of this debate is whether you think Instagram was poised to become a real threat in the social space to Facebook. I think Facebook overreacted, and given this information (that Zuckerberg essentially bought it up himself) the disconnect from a realistic valuation seems even more likely. But then again, they may never get a chance to buy up companies with stock that possesses so much hype.
The "Constitutional problem" copyright seems to create with respect to music is "inability to listen to newly-released songs by favorite musicians without paying for them".

Bandcamp and the iTunes Music Store are not the 2012 equivalent of record labels. Lowery spent a good deal of time trying to dispel exactly that misconception. The record labels financed albums. They provided advance payments to artists. They accepted the lion's share of the downside risk of investing in a music recording: if the music didn't sell, they were left holding the bag. As Lowery is at pains to point out: for most musicians, the labels never made a satisfactory return on their investment. Things only worked out in the aggregate.

iTMS does none of this. iTMS doesn't pay artists to record albums. iTMS accepts albums fully-formed from artists, holds no inventory, is exposed to no downside risk, and collects 30% (and forces musicians to incur 9% fees to "aggregators").

And for the nteenth time: Lowery is not upset about iTMS. He points out that the economics don't make much sense, but he understands how the market works (perhaps better than you do, since he's a musician, a music industry veteran, and a former quant). But iTMS (a) isn't the whole story of the tech industry, and (b) for damned sure isn't replacing record labels.

It's the mentality of this comment --- "Copyright, Constitution, Copyright, Youtube is the Radio, Copyright bad, iTMS is the record label now, it's Copyright's fault" --- that spurred Lowery's rant. The whole point of it is that once you dig deeper into those claims, the whole story falls apart: businesses are getting something for nothing, consumers are getting something for nothing, and artists are getting nothing at all in return for substantial investments of time and actual capital. How can we stand for this? It seems so amoral.
I agree with you that the Facebook hate - especially from non-techie peers - seems kind of foolish to me.

Just thought it was funny though - that your local Reddit group convenes on Facebook. I thought the self-serve subreddit platform was made for that micro-community purpose! ;)
I actually didn't know that welding was something with varying degrees of skill. That wasn't said out of condescension but rather ignorance. I guess "cashier" would have been a better example. There are people who want to work like cashier but get paid middle class incomes. They are "middle class cashiers & stock boys".
Tell HN: CISPA Town Hall Debate At CNET Studios, Thurs. 7pm, Apr 19
Join panelists from Engine Advocacy, EFF, and other both pro-CISPA and anti-CISPA voices for a lively discussion. Tomorrow, Thu Apr 19th at 7pm at the CNET Studios offices on 235 2nd St in Downtown SF. Find out what the current status of the bill is and why the diverse representatives hold the views they do.
Fandalism: 400k users, but how to make money?
Might want to add [2005] to the title.
There's nothing novel about individuals being vested with the power of a nation state. Up to about 150 years ago individuals were often permitted to operate private warships (letters of marque) carrying weapons that were quite powerful for the time. They practiced a form of legalized piracy against enemy nation states, and some did so in rather murderous ways.
I rarely read outdoors, I guess. In any indoor lighting environment I've tried, the iPad works well.

I will probably buy a new kindle one of these days to try out the latest. My current one is the first generation device which is a bit less ergonomic.
What the hell are you talking about?

I found somebody to go to a movie with because he posted on our film group saying:

"This film is playing in Tempe tonight, who wants to go?"

And I responded with a "Me".

>Did I mention that your friends list isn't private, law enforcement can get all this data at any time

No, and I'm glad you didn't, because that sounds like utter bullshit. "At any time"? Do you mean "With a court order"?

This "oh no I'm so scared" reaction to facebook is neo-luddism at its finest. The point at which facebook turns into a magical black box is too high for some people, and they get scared of it.

Here's the big bad secret: facebook isn't doing linguistic analysis on your messages, and if they're using information about what youtube videos I've "liked" to serve me more relevant ads, then good, I'd rather see information about bands or lecturers I'm interested in visiting Phoenix than I would about penis pills and weight loss "secrets".
Banjo hit 1 million users faster than Facebook BECAUSE of Facebook.
100% agreed to this
You really need to brush up on the history of worker's rights, even just in America. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homestead_Strike#Battle_on_Jul... Basic rights were literally fought for. Remember when child labor laws didn't exist?
The thing is, though, that there is considerable agreement among economists that there is such a thing as aggregate demand. The Keynesian, Monetarist, and Neo-Classical orthodoxies all acknowledge this as a useful concept though a monetarist will tend to think of AG in terms of (M*V) while a Keynesian will think in terms of (C+I+G+NX). You would have to talk to an Austrian School economist or someone even further from the mainstream to get criticism of aggregate demand as a concept. It's really hard to talk about how we can have low unemployment in 2007 and high unemployment in 2012 without using this, because the overall employment loss is much larger than just the housing sector.

And I'm not sure why you think that Milton Friedman was opposed to monetary stimulus in general. In fact, he rather explicitly was calling for monetary stimulus during Japan's crisis in the late 90s[1]. Yes, the fact that investors form expectations means that the Philip's Curve doesn't describe an economy with an active central bank, but this is very different from saying that monetary policy is ineffective. In fact, the idea that monetary policy won't work now is the typically Keynesian position (see "Zero Bound").

[1]http://www.hoover.org/publications/hoover-digest/article/654...
Parody: Pivotal Tractor