skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The problem that I have with your examples is that it requires all actors, including consumers, to have nearly perfect information access, and to be able to act on that.

In the car example, I think we have a difference of philosophy. I think that regardless of the posted speed limit, some people will not exercise the proper judgement because they have evaluated the conditions differently.

In the example of reserve funds, imagine a world with similar information asymmetry to today. Banks are semi-transparent, and deposits are backed to some extent by the FDIC. However, the SEC takes less of an active regulatory role, the result of which is that some unscrupulous banks have started offering insanely high interest rates based on dangerous fractional reserves. People will likely flock to those banks, especially given that the FDIC is backing their investments... and then the whole thing collapses.

One solution is to get rid of the moral hazard inherent in the FDIC, and make it clear that the only way to hold your money safely is in cash, in your home. But one of the signs of civilization is increased specialization of labor; I should not have to do the job of banker and regulator all rolled into one, just to have a place to keep my money. Worse, it's not even clear that this is possible, because of inherent information asymmetry.

We can argue about whether an adequate ad-hoc bank insurance solution would arise, however, I'm not sure that such an invention would increase efficiency in the market.

As for regulation, there doesn't really seem to be any real alternative, unless the direct consequences for the operators of failed financial institutions became much more dire. And criminalizing poor business decisions doesn't seem very Libertarian at all.
This is not a special syntax. It's just ruby 1.9 specific hash literal syntax.
To be clear: you are suggesting that banks have kept low reserves because they took their government requirements as a sign of what was prudent to lend. Rather than asking their many teams of risk analysts, they made lending decisions based on an arbitrary number set by the government, despite the fact that this level has not been raised or lowered in decades, is uniform across all banks, takes no heed of the current financial situation and has never prevented a crash in the past.

If this were true (and it certainly is not!) then the market really would be just as incompetent as its critics say it is.
send me your resume. my email is in my profile.
That pretty much describes what I do, yes.
Smart bombs require GPS info to be precise. It would make no sense for the IDF to jam GPS signals, though it would make a lot of sense for Hamas.
The Crunchies purport to fairly represent the best web technology irrespective of where it is produced. The implication that only projects coming out of California are worthy of note seems bogus.
You just made me so glad that this guy posted what he did. Thanks for making an unpleasant read seem a bit more worthwhile.
An interactive shell (Python, with Excel objects and helper methods ready provided).
Fake Steve Jobs Criticizes Real Steve Jobs
Have it interface with Fluidinfo.com. [which should be going alpha sometime soon]
Ask HN: Learning resources for MS SQL Server?
I'm trying to move from an Access+VBA setup to MS SQL Server at work. I have some very basic half-baked knowledge of SQL and find myself spending a lot of time searching through the help files for trivial things.

Could you recommend any good beginner's tutorials and learning resources? I intend to write a reasonably large app (calculating road traffic emissions for London) over the next couple of months.

I am also beginning to use some R for statistical analysis; so some pointers on using R and SQL together would be useful too. Thanks.
>The problem really is that freedom doesn't exist. There's definitely more freedom and less freedom, but freedom doesn't exist. Why? Because your actions affect me. The fact that some geniuses at Citibank and others screwed up makes it harder for me to switch jobs, means raises are going to be nil this year, etc. The freedom they had took away freedom I had. And so it becomes a balancing act and often I get lectures about freedom as if it isn't such a balancing act.

To be clear, the items you state here aren't _rights_. Rather, they're privileges that aren't guaranteed. If you work and do a great job, you're not entitled to a big house in the suburbs, but you're increasing the odds of being able to afford it.

The Constitution guarantees rights to life, liberty, and property, as well as several other rights in the Bill of Rights and other amendments. But nowhere there will you find a right to have a job or right to make x% interest in the stock market (or right to be bailed out if you get in over your head in the real estate market).

As a nation we have a real problem of mistaking opportunities for rights, and feeling entitled to things that we want.
Almost always. While the links are great, the discussions are what make Hacker News.
Obviously, you know this stuff better than I do (I've been following you for awhile), but for what it's worth, here are my initial reactions to your post:

(1) Ruby and ObjC have inconsistent syntax, which among other things is the reason we have that crappy snake-case encoding. This is true, but like I said, Cocoa's nomenclature is already so bad that wrapping everything in Ruby idiom was a win for me

(2) Ruby/Cocoa has to bridge Ruby types (Hash) to ObjC types (NSMutableDictionary). It's true, but this is only really painful if you're using the bridge "bidirectionally"; the real win is to stay in Ruby, and use Cocoa like a library, not a second programming environment.

(3) Ruby and ObjC have overlapping libraries, like ActiveRecord and Core Data (or a million smaller examples). With the exception of Core Data --- and in retrospect I wish I'd stuck with ActiveRecord --- I just stick with the Ruby side and use Cocoa only for appkit. Just like above.

(4) Ruby and ObjC are storing redundant objects. The bridge makes this transparent. If I cared about performance, I wouldn't be in Ruby at all.

(5) Ruby and ObjC have totally different memory management schemes. Part of the point of writing Ruby is not to have ObjC's memory management headache, which the bridge takes care of, but I admit that I could find out 6 months from now that that was a bad assumption.

(6) You can't call Ruby from multiple ObjC threads, or really using ObjC threading at all. That would be a problem if I was writing substantial amounts of ObjC code, but I'm not. (I'm also an async bigot, so I avoid threads anyways).

(7) If a Ruby name clashes with an ObjC name, you have to preface the ObjC name with oc_ to call it from Ruby. This does not bother me at all; isn't it exactly what you'd expect when merging two independent environments?

I'm sure this stuff kills you if you have a complicated ObjC/Cocoa application and you want to extend it with Ruby, or if you want to do a Tcl-style integration with Ruby glue code and ObjC engine code. Also, I am totally biased, because in my consulting life I've spent years in Ruby/DL and Win32 doing my own manual bridging and runtime code generation; Ruby/Cocoa is a dream for me. =)

Nu is really cool. But none of my code is written in Nu.
Yes, most times. Sometimes I feel that reading the comments first skews my opinion of the article but mostly it's useful to filter out the less interesting links.
I won't be the first to say here that producing and consuming, as this post uses the terms, are not mutually exclusive (and are probably orthogonal.) But I believe we choose how much of each we are.

Now I need to prove this to myself. By my recent activity, I am a great consumer and not much of a producer.
I've yet to find anything they're doing wrong. Honestly a truly amazing hosting company.
my email is in my profile.

The email field isn't publicly visible.
I usually don't even read the links. There is no sense to read a big article...when you can get most of the story from comments...in addition to a meaningful discussion
The Database Programmer: Upgrading Indexes With a Data Dictionary
How Mephisto (popular Ruby blog software) did their security audit
This is probably useful in many cases, but one could imagine where the inserted row bisects other ranges in other columns unintentionally.
I don't much care that they found stuff (I don't use Mephisto), but I thought it was an interesting case study.
No Mussolini or Caesar on the list? Is it English only?

Isn't Mao's Little Red Book one of the most printed books in human history?
I think it is important to look at what I see as the two main sides of 'libertarianism'.

-The Moral Argument-

Libertarianism is about rights & opposing coercion. Other people & by extension governments should stay out of other people's business. Don't tell me where to work or what to do. Don't tell me to wear a seatbelt. Mostly that works fine

-The Economic Argument-

There is the second argument that (when it being criticised) gets called 'idealistic' or 'religious.' This is the idea that by not intervening in peoples' lives & by extension in companies, everything will work out good. Markets will function better. Economic output will be higher. Public good would be increased. This relies on economic theories, theoretically anyway. So far, most countries are really a balance here.

These are seperate & the arguments for them are seperate. On the first, I am pretty clear where I stand: I agree mostly with the libertarian position on personal rights. I am against drug/alcohol/seatbelt/smoking/exercise bans, prohibitions or requirements. I am willing to relax that if the negative public effects are substantial & prohibition side effects are less substantial. So if we legalised drugs & found we ended up with a severe amphetamine problem, I would consider reinstating the prohibition.

My biggest problem is the welfare approach. For a similar reason to the amphetamine prohibition above, I think that welfare/health is essential & should be provided by the state. If it is provided by non-state bodies to a sufficient level, the state doesn't need to do it. I would even extend that to international welfare.

The economic arguments get very technical. It is also an area where theories are rarely good at being predictive. I see the connection between the moral & economic theories. But I am not as worried about the rights of a corporation as I am the rights of an individual.
My apologies. I did not think you expected respect free of charge. Your description of your job as that of a "code monkey" suggested to me that you were at the most entry level of programming work, and had yet to "pay your dues", as it were.

Since you've been working hard at becoming a good programmer, I suspect you'd have the respect of a lot of folks on this forum, but obtaining the respect of those who control the corporate world is a whole other story, and one that I don't claim to understand. I will thus leave you with one more apology for misunderstanding your initial post, and bid you a welcome to Hacker News.
It's not a very cohesive set: the perspectives are all over the place and there are like four different visual styles being used.

Some icons are shoddy and I don't like the harsh jewel aesthetic used for a lot of them.

I wouldn't recommend using these.
The RSS feed directs me directly to the link.
WordPress Founder Turns 25
All the time. I even tell myself to read the story first so I have a base on what is being discussed but I always end up in the comments first.
Atompub as an alternative to WebDAV
I am a huge fan of Excel. It's the program that I use most for doing work.

At the entry user end, there are so many features that are simply unusable or technically way to difficult. For the power user of Excel, there is very little that can't be accomplished. It's power is basically limitless with VBA (or choose your favorite scripting language). Apart from the comment suggesting larger sizes to the sheets (larger than 1 million rows) and being online (something that would really not fly in most corporations) I can't find a problem in here that can't be accomplished with Excel and a firm knowledge of scripting for it. This may be a cop-out though as you must actually script the stuff yourself. This, however; is why I love this program so much.

So as for building a more powerful spreadsheet program for the power user market, it's going to be very hard for anyone to produce something that does more because it's already basically limitless.

For the novice user though, the program is convoluted, confusing and extremely limited. The novice user also represents a much bigger market. I have had several jobs simply because people couldn't do things in Excel that I assumed a monkey could do. Companies love Excel even though 99% of employees at them have no idea how to do basic things with it (summing columns for example). Giving some of the 99% of employees a program that they can do basic to intermediate things without having the limitless back end scripting power would put me out of many of my jobs.

Excel at the start is like a country kid visiting the big city for the first time. There is just way to much power in it and the map for getting around is far too confusing, but once you've been living there for a while everything about it becomes a breeze. Making that adjustment easier would be a huge benefit.

On a side note I enjoy using Google Spreadsheets but one of my top wishes is that Google, or someone, would implement either a Google scripting language or a allow for other scripting languages (Ruby, Python, VBA) to be used.
The Israelis are experts they make cellphone jamming equipment, I think even the US Secret Service owns some of the briefcase models which can jam a 1 mile radius.
It seems like quadriplegia would be like taking a massive muscle relaxant.
...and ironically named the iTouch. guess that means iBuy. haha.
Think SAS. Their customers have been answering this exact question for a very long time. Give me R with a real GUI and a text editor so I can inspect the CRAN package that tells me 2 + 2 = 3.9999995559
Usually I read the comments first. if the comments are good, I'll read the article.

If there are no or few comments, I'll read the article to see if the topic is worth getting a discussion going. If so, I post a summary or comment to start things off.
I almost always check for comments first, actually. If they are good and interesting, then I click the link.
yep - click on 'comments' in gReader probably 9 times out of 10.
I think the future of news is intelligent, curated, aggregation. People aren't going to a single trusted source anymore. News organizations that can become to go-to news hub that aggregates the latest/best stories from around the web, and supplements it with local and editorial, have a chance of winning. At NewsCred, we're working on a bunch of interesting projects to enable this...
I guess it's a good method of second-level quality control. The fact that its on HN is usually a good primary check, so supplement that with good comments and the resulting link is usually a great read.
I do this almost all the time. So far, I've been able to trust the HN community with filtering out dumb stories and I can decide whether it's worth my time to read an article by the first few comments. The exception is when the article has a known URL such as oreilly.com.
That presumes you know more about the domain than the customer. Frankly, I find this an arrogant position for many places.
Always, HN comments are my filter.
Distributed Systems and Web Scalability Resources
I also do this for situations where the article sounds like fluff or link-bait, but involves a subject where an intelligent conversation could occur amongst smart people. There are lots of times when the comment threads are more valuable/interesting than the links.
Yes.

I have limited time, so I mostly browse the comments page. If there's an interesting discussion going on somewhere, then I check out the link.

If I have more time, then I'll go to the main page and check out the articles. If I'm bored, I'll dig through several pages of new articles and click on the ones that I find interesting.

I want to read things that are provocative, and if people are having a good discussion, I'll bet it's worth my time to read. The "score" of an article is secondary.
No, Sharepoint is not fine. At its core, Sharepoint is one enormous ugly kludge.
Become an artist for the art. Dont do it for the money. Of course photography is one of those professions where only a small fraction can make a living and there are always new graduates to keep the pay scales low.

Actually, don't go into software for the money. You won't be any good. Go into it for the art.
Ask HN: Online C++ Resources?
I'm working on a side project that uses C++, so I'm finding myself having to relearn it.

I bought Accelerated C++ by Koenig and Moo, and I've been working through it. It's a great book for picking up the language quickly. I highly recommend it. However, now that I've learned a few languages from online resources, managing both a book and a laptop feels clunky and awkward. I can download Why's (poignant) Guide or php.net or the CSS spec and work on it with no effort on a plane or whenever I feel like taking a short break from my "real" work.

Anyone know of an online C++ training that you'd recommend?
Privatization of fishing grounds, in the form of fishing rights distributed by auction, is a widely used means of managing fisheries. It works well when property rights are actually enforced (e.g. a body of water controlled by only one nation).
Also a Ph.D. student, Karatedo myself. My sensei's on my committee :-)
Please forgive my ignorance...but what does the FriendFeed "Like" feature do?
Facebook had a status feature before Twitter was founded. They made it more prominent after Twitter became popular but I think that was just a coincidence.
It can be when you're in the Military, believe me. Lots of things are funny that the average person wouldn't consider to be.

I found absolutely nothing strange about that bullet point. Although, he joined the Marines, which means as a member of the Army I have to hate him.
Accelerated C++ is here: http://www.amazon.com/Accelerated-Practical-Programming-Exam...

And, of course, there's the STL, but it's more a reference than a how-to: http://www.sgi.com/tech/stl/
If you can, why not buy your own servers and have it co-located. The hardware often pays for itself after a few months compared to leasing.
Rackspace 4gb --> 8gb = $100/month
joshu, you could give the greasemonkey script "HN OnePage" a try. http://userscripts.org/scripts/show/30512 It may not be quite what you are looking for, but it will let you easily view the comments/article for any given submission. There are some other good greasemonkey scripts out there as well, such as HN Splitview, that address this issue.
http://www.flownet.com/ron/fix_excel.txt
Intel: No More Job Cuts Coming
Meet the Super Cow
What If Your Model Is Wrong?
The realization that Xia might attack will probably not come suddenly but slowly

Just like 9-11, Dec 7, 1941, the anschluss, mongol invasions...the Hitties and Philistines versus the Israelites, yeah, military ops are always telegraphed.
I think it may depend upon the school you go to. The CS people at VT, if double-majoring, went to math (to be fair, our CS major all but gives you a math minor already). If it was a more liberal-arts school, it may have gone more towards writing.
Ditto. I actually like it when people take an extra couple of seconds to write "Hi <name>," at the beginning of an email conversation. I like it better than when people start off with just "<name>," which I personally find slightly rude, it's like how a teacher or some other authority figure would start off a conversation where they expect they will be telling you off or something. "John, you didn't do your homework did you?"

I don't find it so rude as to really be bothered by it or feel like I have to mention it, but rude enough that I never do it myself.
my guess would be "rooms", they badly need it...
Slightly off topic here, but as many people are mentioning rsynch, I was wondering if it is possible to get rsynch working on a cellphone/smartphone.

I was intrigued by the idea of making a universal backup/synch client based on rsynch.
What else are they supposed to do? The other side has better weapons.

Sad that humanity is still entralled to degenerate tribalism at the dawn of the 21st century. I wonder if those delusional Bronze and Iron age cult leaders had any idea of the damage they would be inflicting centuries hence.

Laughing in their graves: "Oh, come on, you didn't get it? We thought you could see we were bullshitting!"
It seems to me that the file-sharing and version tracking are two different things that should have two different problems.

If you want this but on your own servers, maybe check out ringlight: http://ringlight.us/
this is fixed now :-)
Often, the discussion will focus on a few sticky points, and skip much of the interesting or least-debatable content in the original article.
I do not use Excel regularly and I thus am certainly not a power user. However, I would think scripting for plots would be useful (like I do in matlab or matplotlib) for repetitive, highly configured, high quality plots with the ability to easily export them as ps or pdf. This may very well be possible now (and I'm just ignorant), but that would be one thing that would be handy that I have not seen.
About half the time on a laptop/desktop; almost all the time on mobile.
You might find dynamic named ranges to help keep things orderly. That way you can refer to the ranges by name, and also not have to worry about your $E$1:$E10000 not being up to date when there's 15000 rows of data instead of 10000.

You could do something like this:

{SUM(IF(country_name = "England",bill_amt,0))}

http://www.ozgrid.com/Excel/DynamicRanges.htm
Presumably he did & he's joking about it.

Yes, it's really quite funny. If you're an American & you can't see the humor, try visualizing China invading Iraq instead.
It amuses me the great lengths people go to trying to downplay 70s global cooling. You're doing it yourself -- a few scientists, a few publications. If it really was only a few publications, and as trivial as you insist, then why does everyone remember it so well? And if it really was a crackpot minority getting undeserved media attention, where was the backlash from the alleged majority of scientists who didn't believe it? The majority these days are pretty quick to discredit anyone who questions global warming. It doesn't seem to me that there were many scientists back then labeling it a crusader's diversionary tactic.
"It's only after we've lost everything that we're free to do anything."

Yeah, I suppose Fight Club quotes are trite by now, but I still believe it to be true.

Before I left for a year to Afghanistan, I had a decent programming job, was going to college, had an amazing girlfriend, and a few good friends left. By the time I got back, I had nothing. I also had no more excuses. I started TicketStumbler with Dan, by some miracle we got into YC, and I am now living and working in Boston, happier overall than I've been at any point in my entire life. Somehow, losing everything I cared about gained me exactly what I'd needed all along.
It would be nice if this were an option. I often end up making two passes at a story, reading it first via the RSS feed and then finding it again on the home page to read the commentary.