skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You like French Connection?

You like Mustangs? Shelby Cobras?

You said You like Beamers, but of course.

Favorite American muscle car?

introduced he IV measurable waterest imagine grace SUCH
ability displace fearful abilities forenoons remember
incorruption uh_huh Scriptures Etext baptise extremest
letters important intently comfort snare counterfeit ouch
preparing grant wondered Percival compass so_let_it_be_done
cleared sole natures
Good example of "Jugaad" :)
Maybe you've got a wrong impression of humanity?
>> Which for software would mean an absolute maximum of 10 years, with 3 years much more reasonable.

This still devalues the creation of software that is genuine innovation. Think about mainframe software that controls factories, for instance, which can be bought over 10 years after creation. Also consider the prevalence today of Windows XP, which shipped in 2001 (and where any relevant patents would date to the 1990s when it was developed). Microsoft has reluctantly stopped selling it, but I'd argue that we still don't know how long the useful lifespan of WinXP will be. And we're probably ~15 years in from when patents in XP would have been filed.

Before artificially segregating software into a ghetto, ask this: would this innovation be worthy of protection if there were a purpose-built device that performs the same function? If the device would be worthy of protection, then it's going to be hard to argue that the software embodiment is somehow worth less protection. (At least it will be hard to argue this with me, but I'm a chauvinist for programmers.)

Finally, the argument that the old software becomes irrelevant is congruent with equal protection for software. If old software loses relevance, then so do the patents (and correspondingly their utility to patent trolls). I think you mean precisely the opposite: old innovations in software actually become more relevant, so that everyone wants to use them in their own wares. Nobody rushed to shorten the lifespan of vacuum tube patents because they became irrelevant.

I don't think it's reasonable to reduce software patent lifespans to shorter durations than that of the hardware the software runs on, or the cables used to transmit it.
https://github.com/facebook/javelin/issues/10
yeah. has been slashdotted!
The front page is a zero-sum game. Every article that appears does so at the expense of another article. The articles that appear on the front page get the most comments, which drive the community.

I'm not arguing against this article, nor am I arguing that all articles on the front page should appeal to me. However, I am arguing that your final line of reasoning does not hold in general.
XWave Sport
You act like quantum mechanics is an easy thing to understand.
This happens in Venezuela since 10 years ago and it has been proved to be a very bad idea.

However, this is should not be in HN. This kind of politics articles just brings undesired controversy.
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Comic Sans Day 2012
Thanks..
Right word "Jugaad"
Android: A visual history (through Jelly Bean)
This isn't exactly advanced economics though - it's the kind of thing you can easily learn about by reading actual books, rather than an article with a scant few paragraphs. A subscription to The Economist, even if it's current events, rather than economics, will also get you way more articles like it, but with more detail.

And your "moral and philosophical" discussions are exactly the sort of thing that turns into flame wars. I'm 100% sure there are people on HN who think, for instance, that taxes are immoral. Others are for high taxes, especially on the wealthy. Do we really need to get into that? Do you think anyone will emerge with their point of view radically shifted?
Mac vs. PC gap is the narrowest since '90s
CyrusL: could you send me an email (sam@rubiconproject.com)? Can't find an email from your profile.
This is probably the most blatant anti-intellectualism I've seen on Hacker News.

I generally skim walls of text as well but the post was well-written and -reasoned.
As I live here and have a consulting company here, I'm familiar with the complexities of dealing with dollars. I'm a hacker by nature and spend a lot of time now trying to 'hack' the financial world of the Argentine peso. In that sense I think the article is worth posting.

Incidentally, Argentina must do this because they have no access to foreign capital markets due to things like seizure of YPF, devaluation of the peso in 2001, and failure to pay back the lenders they still owe, etc. Foreign currency reserves just keep dwindling. As China slows down and demand for soybeans drops, Argentina is really, really going to have a hard time. So though it seems crazy there is some "reason" for it (I'm not trying to make a political comment, I personally think it's crazy and they should radically open the market, but my point is that it's not exclusively xenophobia that is driving this policy).

Unfortunately the policy just pushes the trade to the black market. One of the interesting things here is that if you need pesos, and you have some access to USD, you make an instant 20-25% on your money. The "black market" (they call it "blue" here because it seems nicer) continues to diverge. If you're a hobbyist economist like myself, it's really fascinating to watch market risk priced into a currency in realtime as seen by the "blue"-vs-official rate spread.
While I agree with your point Open-source is not a silver bullet. I don't see anything other than Open-source as a good enabler.

Yes, pushing back is possible with closed source as well.

The real question becomes, which is harder? and for who? To push back at closed source, you'd have to be a big consumer of them or atleast big enough to be able to sue the vendor. If you're an individual, you're in real trouble. Of course, there are people who play both roles.

And I see Open-source as the best enabler for technical individuals. As far as i can see, of course.
Programming the Universe by Seth Lloyd really helped me to understand this stuff. http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Universe-Quantum-Computer-...
How tiny wasps cope with being smaller than amoebas
OpSci: URIs, indexes and RSS for 72 closed-source publishers and scraper code.
All the economic talk these days is about Greece and Spain, but Argentina seems to be on its knees economically based on the kind of measures they've pursued as of late.

A few months ago, they deployed cash-sniffing dogs in airports to prevent people from bringing large amounts of money out of the country. Yes, cash-sniffing dogs. They have a tax evasion rate of around 40%, and they routinely lie about economic statistics and go after watchdog groups that try to publish the real numbers.

I'm not sure how long that can last as a national economic policy.

Sources:
http://www.globalpost.com/dispatches/globalpost-blogs/que-pa...
http://www.economist.com/node/21548242
The US banned using foreign coins in the mid 19th century as a misguided attempt to bolster patriotism. Americans routinely used Spanish coins in private transactions up until this point. I think (don't entirely remember if) part of the reason was to encourage the use of US silver coins which had been driven out of circulation due to the US government overvaluing gold relative to silver. The basic problem was that by having the US dollar fixed to two exchange rates that one was always being driven out of circulation as the exchange rate changed. This lead to the free silver movement and the Populists getting excited about seeing only silver used to back dollars.

This is a misguided attempt to trap people into their own crappy currency. The US currency isn't any better fundamentally but as of now we don't force citizens to hold dollars for savings.
"This numerical blind spot remains even when the deal clearly favours the discounted product" [1]. Thus, it is an irrationality and not calculated convenience.

[1] http://www.economist.com/node/21557801
We will avoid coffee at our garage ;)

We tried to control cost by assembling stuff, using commodity hardware etc. But did not use low quality stuff. Our UPS is from Eaton, Server components are standard ones like Seagate, Intel, Router/Switches from Cisco, D-link.
The argentine peso inflates very rapidly, then the government slashes zeros off the end of the money. Why on earth would I work hard to exchange toil for receipts that don't hold their claim on human labor? If people convert the peso to the dollar then they can store wealth. What kind of monster forces people to store labor in recipts made up in diappearing ink? Isn't that watered down slavery? To toil and be unable to save any excess for later? Its a fate worse than death for me.
I disagree. I wandered into the comments just to find out what would happen, or what this means to, the market and Argentinians in general.
On a related issue, I'd like to know if there's market for security (mostly appsec I guess) freelancers working remotely? The area interests me, but I have limited time I could contribute to it if it were only a hobby; OTOH, if it could one day transform from a mere hobby into a marketable skill, I'd be much more inclined to make time for it (The "remote" part of my questions comes from the fact that I don't think many interesting jobs will be available in my area, so remote's the pretty much the only option).
Measuring on-line impact
Roaring Debate In China on Population Policy
This is a pretty standard example of capital controls being implemented in non-free countries by the bureaucratic elite in order to impose hidden costs on their people and to prevent the people from responding rationally to terrible economic policy.

The reasons are easy to understand. People are willing to take on the risk of owning hard currency (gold, dollars, euros) if they believe that their nominal currency has greater risk. For example, if a government is spending recklessly, there is serious risk of inflation. Or, if the government has forced interest rates to be too low (well below inflation), then people want to hedge against that too.

By forbidding the ownership of hard currency, the government forces individuals to use the local currency. They must save in this currency, which drives down interest rates and provides cheap capital to their government. And it prevents (for a short time) exchange rates from significantly changing, because it effectively limits the supply of the local currency and reduces demand for hard currency.

EDIT: I forgot to mention the other reason governments do this - it's a great way to force the people to bear the burden of paying down national debt. If the country has significant debt, then the bureaucratic elite have a huge incentive to pursue a policy of inflation, so that the debt becomes less burdensome over time. This well written article from The Economist explains how the west used this technique in the post-ww2 era: http://www.economist.com/node/18834259?story_id=18834259
Sadly, yep... that's true.
I recently moved back to Argentina from Spain, and for example they just released the Samsung Galaxy S II, and it's really expensive.

Don't even think of buying a Tablet, Phone or whatever, you just can't.

Plus, they want us to buy the shitty laptops/netbooks that are manufactured here in Argentina, like Bangho for example, I think we also produce Lenovo, but I like them.

Not to mention we also have restrictions importing books... yes, books!
Is this stuff still going on in the world? I thought that such rules died with the fall of east European regimes around 1990. Well, I'm glad I can open a savings account in all major world currencies (at the moment, following currencies are possible at my bank: CHF, GBP, USD, AUD, CAD, DKK, NOK, SEK, JPY and of course EUR, which is official currency). More, it's possible to mix different currencies in one account.
A lot of anons are actively blocking online tracking technologies, much more than the usual 1% that run NoScript.
Hunchentoot (http://weitz.de/hunchentoot) on SBCL (http://sbcl.org). It works. 100% free.
This still devalues the creation of software that is genuine innovation. ... Before artificially segregating software into a ghetto

I'm not sure if it comes through in my post, but what I wrote I intended for all patents, not just software patents. If your product or category of product (software or not) only has a lifespan of 2 years, patents for that product or product-category cannot be made to last more than those 2 years.

In that sense I'm not devaluing software (or any other products for that matter) any more than the people producing them already do.

That may not fully satisfy you and your point of view, but it seems to me it would address some of your concerns. If you still find it objectionable, I guess that's fine by me. We are all entitled to our opinion.

Sometimes, even reasonable people cannot be made to agree ;)
my Twitch.tv interview about customer research is esp useful
Yes, it is about ideas not words. You can learn the word, it does not forcibly tell you about the ideas. Especially the new one.

If a software has been done, buy it! It will be almost always less expensive than building it.
If it has not been done yet, no book or knowledge can tell you how to do it.

And if an idea you can code is new, you'll hardly have the word for it. It is easier to brag about «well (re)known ideas» than doing new stuff.

Colours you can't see are ideas we have not yet the word to describe them to those who can't see them.
It's funny that in the companies where working from home I think is more likely (big companies with policies about it and such), it would probably be less effective because those same companies probably have locked down computers and firewalls and the users wouldn't be as able to use what they might deem most effective (Google Docs? Skype? Dropbox?)

Whereas with smaller companies where you can pretty much do carte blanche ("install whatever software you need on your PC as long as it doesn't drain our Comcast business internet"), working from home would probably be looked down upon.
Because of the opportunity to promote Bitcoins.
I disagree that the front page is a zero-sum game. A front page filled with good variety has more value than a front page filled with repetitive articles on the same basic subjects. Whether this particular article is good variety or not is beyond what I'm willing to address, but I don't think it's correct to describe the front page as a zero-sum game, and too much conformity can be harmful.
here is a concrete suggestion (vs vague philosphizing).

Since you already know some Python, sign on to Udacity's (free) CS 212 Design of Computer Programs by Peter Norvig. It has 7 weeks worth of classes and teaches you a tonne in that time. It is a class targeted specifically at "I know some basic programming but what do I do to get to the next level?" people.

The official version of the class is over, but nothing stops you from joining today, watching the videos, doing the assignments etc.

Since one of your aims is to 'learn from great coders' this should be right up your alley since Peter is one of the best developers in the world and you can see him developing multiple programs and refining them step by step till they are gems of elegant code, and you can trawl the forums to see questions people asked and answers to them.

Once you work through the class - should take you 7 weeks if you are disciplined -and you understand all the techniques demonstrated there, you'll be in good shape to start/join an open source project in a domain of your interest.

And oh prepare to have your mind blown. Peter Norvig is one seriously good developer.

Good Luck.
Can Flipkart Deliver?
I think there's a point at which people simply stop caring about the details and follow their gut. If you were to try to find the best deal for every grocery item you purchase, you'd spend a lot of time comparing prices per unit/weight, and how available deals affect those prices. People probably rather spend and extra 50 cent and save themselves 5 minutes of comparing numbers on tiny stickers. From that perspective, math skills are irrelevant.
Because google wasn't able to build anything complex with JS, like say, a document editor that synchronises changes across multiple clients.
Commodity hardware seems a good/cheap option - and I don't know, this might be fine for them.

I built a couple of racks for clustered decryption using commodity hardware; after a few months "burn in" the failure rate proved to be way higher than expected. Which, when you think about it, is logical - they are running 24/7 (compared to if you were using the hardware "normally").

After having to replace three servers inside a month we started to cycle into server hardware. This was a lot more expensive up front, but is reliable and the failure rate is almost non-existent in comparison.

So; buyer beware.

Even so; it is good to see someone else hacking together their infrastructure :)
Quantum computers are used in production, as you say in a complete niche. Lockheed Martin bought a quantum computer (and associated research & development) from D-Wave for use in their "most complex computations". [1]

There's no further notice of what Lockheed has done with it, but at least there's one quantum computer in private hands designed to do production work.

[1] http://www.marketwire.com/press-release/d-wave-systems-sells...
You can open US dollar accounts in Canada.
3 Phone Options with Super Camera Quality
This strategy has been tried way too many times before. It never worked and you can tell it is the beginning of a new debacle.

Stuff like this makes me glad that I left the country.
That is actually still in use today.

Working part-time in retail at Staples Canada, I can tell you that all of our prices ending in $x.97 or $x.x7 are clearance; and therefore subject to an additional discount if there is a current promo going on.

As for the random prices, I have no idea. Although it does make it easier when doing prices changes for flyers, because in each section, no two products have the same price (cent wise).
If you're going to take the time to make a comment, how about making a comment worth reading? "Flagged" doesn't mean anything useful.
I agree. Just like dropbox gets more useful when your friends are using it. This is possibly why a google social network doesn't seem to work: all your contacts are already in gmail, there's no added benefit, no viral effect when they add a 'social' network like facebook is. If I want to talk to someone, I'll just gchat.
Because when you read a qubit, you collapse the superposition and end up with a boring old 0 or 1. Which is what you want when the algorithm is completed, but during the execution of the algorithm you want to do operations on the superpositions. So you cannot read the value and feed it back because in the process, you destroy it.
That's presumably why the author had the list sent to him: to manually verify the potential VIP signatories before promoting them in the media.
Klitschko vs Thompson live fight
Half the development team seem to bee MooTools alumni
Problems Clojure thinks I have with C#
Is US government reading email without a warrant?
Sort of. Each board is more or less its own community (much like how different subreddits are independent of each other on Reddit). /b/ and /v/ (Random and Video Games) contain the cause of the great majority of 4chan's esteemed reputation.

The other boards are a lot more calm and enjoyable. But some people enjoy the chaos :)
This is not new, it's been almost impossible to buy dollars since last november, but it has been made official just recently.

The problem with this ban is that there are really no ways to save money here, unless you have a significant amount of capital to buy a house or apartment. What are we salaried workers supposed to do with the percentage of our monthly income that we can save? The only alternative seems the black market, or spending everything in things you might need in the next few months but with no real resale value.

With a 25% inflation rate, saving in pesos equals losing money. What can we do?
How is this any different than software? Certainly there are many cases where a startup or company tries to make a product and us geeks say "It's stupid to pay for that I can redo it in a weekend and put it on Github" and we fawn over the OSS project and grill the original company.

And certainly there are other cases where OSS blazes the trail. But copycat software gets a hall pass when it you get to download it for free? Or is your post just a different iteration on the iOS/Android fanboy-ism?
In that case I withdraw my comment :)

Best of luck - sounds good.
great stuff! I have been waiting for someone to produce widgets backed by a modern js framework (backbone.js in this case). Hopefully this means it is at least very easy to feed it data.
I'm not always in favor of what Christina does, but it is generally good to have a diversity of economic models active in the world, for the same reason biodiversity is important.

While most of the world struggled with the 2008 economic crisis - and Europe still struggles with it - Argentina shrugged it off.

Imagine if another longer lasting crisis occurs within the US hegemonic sphere. Countries like Argentina, which have one foot outside that sphere, will be able to survive and perhaps even lead growth elsewhere.

Life times of economic crises in Argentina have taught Argentines to depend on no one but themselves, which means protectionism sometimes.
A Slick Trick on the NDAA and Indefinite Detention; Don't Be Fooled
> His complaint is about getting hit too hard serving
> the html/text not the images.

Then why is he complaining about things like image pre-loading and 'expand-all' extensions/userscripts?
UFOPORNOOOOOO
The Pinterestization of the Web
So they're successful because they're holistically thinking about the entire supply chain, rather than just think that a cool product will sell itself?

Wow, sounds like another company I've heard of...
We have already switched to Softlayer. Heard good things about Hetzner though.
Google denies that they bought Motorola for the patents.
جدول پخش برنامه های شبکه من و تواز06/07/2012 الی12/07/2012
The results and comments are entirely predictable. It's not good news for your average person in Argentina.

Isn't it obvious?
Meanwhile, the president says "we're resisting while the world collapses on top of us", so many lies.
The North Koreans did something similar a couple of years ago: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/8394987.stm
Superposition can be described as follows. You can correlate two qubits together magically.

That's entanglement not superposition.
kind of interesting to think about this through the context of all the free online classes being offered. Its seems like what people say is, 'well you miss out on interacting with all the other Harvard students'

not sure how welcoming these houses are to those without the right formal educational credentials

"The captains, all women, screen for personalities and occupations, rejecting applicants who are not techies or simply have a poor attitude. Sasha Willins, a 26-year-old graphic designer who is captain of the San Francisco apartment, has a gentle way of saying no. “It’s not so much rejecting as it is asking so many questions until they withdraw their application,” she said."

but it seems like being in the right 'hacker house', could replicate the advantages of getting to interact with Harvard students for a modest housing upcharge

seems slightly more cost effective than cutting Harvard a 50K check