skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That analysis is contrary to a mainstream understanding of economics in a way that is a little like violating the second law of thermodynamics.

Because all transactions incur a transfer of wealth from one party to another there is no implicit creation of value unless the purchaser ultimately derives more utility from the product than the producer expended in effort and resources in order to produce it.

Because the definition of waste is the purchaser not getting any utility from the product, the economy has a net loss in wealth equivalent to what the producer expended in making the unused product. If there were a magical way to convert consumers into people who only get what they want, the max price they'd pay for a satisfying meal wouldn't decrease, because they wouldn't be receiving any less utility. The farmers on the other hand would have a lower minimum price for providing a satisfying meal, because they'd have to spend fewer hours and less water producing it.

The larger difference between the min selling price and max purchasing price is made up of producer surplus and consumer surplus.

Efficient conversion of inputs into outputs really is one of the primary concerns of the economy, and this is not a velocity of money issue.

However, any plan intended to minimize this waste is likely to create more problems than it solves, but that is because it is difficult and expensive to attempt to control people's behavior.
Hey, I agree this is awesome. I have noticed as I've optimized my workflow that I actually make a huge number of typing errors when I'm programming. Other typing programs don't test the whole set of symbols we use, so they're not as useful (and I type English considerably faster than code.)

One thing I would say is that it would be nice if it showed stats while I was typing, instead of just at the end.
Cooler: space elevator
I am a pilot (not an airline pilot). It is absolutely mandatory for the pilot-in-command to have complete discretion when dealing with passengers on their aircraft. While I may have let this man board my own plane, this pilot-in-command used his own judgement to determine that the passenger presented too large a risk to the safety and comfort of other passengers.

It is completely within his duties to do that. It is also completely within Delta's duties as his employer to question his judgement and fire him for being a racist later.
This is one of those fallacies that just refuses to die, no matter how many times it's debunked.
DealScorcher: Deal Alerts From Across The Web
It seems to me that any character that needs to be typed using alt gr can't be detected (using Firefox as my browser and BÉPO as my keyboard layout).
I thought that the Hacker News community was a lot more alert to avoiding upvoting linkbait articles like this.

First of all, the entire main story point of the article is based on PRESS RELEASES, not on peer-reviewed articles published in good-quality scientific journals.

Second, even if a statement like the premise of the article were published in a peer-reviewed article in a good-quality scientific journal, you would still want to check the methodology of the study described in the article for the "Warning Signs in Experimental Design and Interpretation" that Google's director of research, LISP hacker Peter Norvig, is always warning us about.

http://norvig.com/experiment-design.html

Third, the article is about a public policy proposal, so it's not just about physics, it's about economics and the psychology of the general public as well. As Thomas Sowell has written, "The first lesson of economics is scarcity: There is never enough of anything to satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics." What the public wants is as much energy as can be humanly desired, with total safety, and at nil cost. The efforts of politicians to reconcile these contradictory desires may very well result in a regulatory pattern that doesn't let this new technology thrive. As a matter of economics, this technology should only thrive if it genuinely provides a better cost-benefit trade-off than other proposed energy technologies, which the article hand-waves away as an issue.

Discussions on Hacker News are better if they are launched by submission of better sources. This source, on this subject, is below general community standards. We can learn more about new possibilities in energy technology from (for example) Technology Review (several HN participants regularly submit articles from that source) or The Economist (I am one of several HN participants who submit articles from that source) or the better professionally edited mainstream newspapers or general news weeklies. We don't need to rush ahead to speculate about every new press release here.
From his "about" page on his MathOverflow profile:

"Mathematics is a process of staring hard enough with enough perseverence at at the fog of muddle and confusion to eventually break through to improved clarity. I'm happy when I can admit, at least to myself, that my thinking is muddled, and I try to overcome the embarassment that I might reveal ignorance or confusion. Over the years, this has helped me develop clarity in some things, but I remain muddled in many others. I enjoy questions that seem honest, even when they admit or reveal confusion, in preference to questions that appear designed to project sophistication."

Such beautiful modesty from a brilliant mathematician who inspired many.

[1] http://mathoverflow.net/users/9062/bill-thurston
I created them using Photoshop, and used GPUImage to parse the files it created. I tested each filter on a sample of iPhone images in different lighting conditions.
Drag the Lake is a quick weekend project to store articles worth reading.

Thought someone might find it useful.
> So where are all the "biological clock is ticking" articles for men?

A part of that is because the risk is a lot higher for women than men.

http://www.notsuperhuman.com/2010/02/pregnancy-chronicles-wi...

"University of California-Davis researchers studied close to 5 million births during the ’90s, a decade when autism spiked in the state.

"A woman’s risk for having an autistic child rose 18% for every five years she aged.

"40-year-old women had... a 77% greater risk (of autistic child) than women who gave birth before 25."

Being a new mom at 40 increases autism risk by 77%, vs. the 2% increase in autism risk from being a new dad at 40 or older.
How Bamana Sand Divination Conjured The Digital Computer
Now app ties Instagram photos to venues to uncover local events
the two founders were Apple employees before.... and i think that helped too..
Well, I know India wastes a vast amount through a combination of subsidies and corruption.

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/48039343/ns/world_news-south_and...
Not if you have different goals. Most web dev shops (and their consumers) just want to build things that don't break.
> a cramped airline fuselage isn't the ideal place for your political protest.

Free Speech
(but only when we say so)
You can skip the CC (button on bottom left), We thought we'd try and put that in the sign up flow to see how many add vs. skip. :)
You do not stand in a theatre and shout "fire!" unless there is a fire.

You do not use the "bomb" word in an airport, unless you suspect something is a bomb.

How many people need to be pulled off flights for people to understand that sometimes you just don't need to wear the t-shirt (that looks creepily white power) covered in BOMB DEATH KILL.
The hash character and numbers don't work on Arch Linux, dvorak programmer layout.
I'll bite.

You'd be surprised at the expense involved in creating clean water. In NA, we're particularly lucky to have fairly fresh drinking water, but in other parts of the world this isn't the case. However, let's focus on NA for now.

Not every city is next to a glacier field, which provides some of the purest water -- mainly because it is from the rain, it is a water source, and because it is difficult to get to it which limits its pollution. The majority of people drink water that is provided by rivers and reservoirs. These sites are easy to get to, which means it is also easy to pollute them with (a) boats, (b) nature, (c) industrial pollutants... the list goes on. The farther the water travels, the more likely it is that it will pick up pollutants.

The water that comes out of your tap has some fairly strict healthy and safety laws attached to it, keeping it fairly pure to drink. Even then, there are a lot of nasty bugs in there. Just about every household tap requires water to be potable, which means safe for human consumption. That water you are washing your car with? Drinking water. Sure, it doesn't taste Brita-fresh, but you can still drink it without getting dysentery.

So....my point to all this is that access to fresh, clean drinking water is actually very difficult and expensive, and is best thought of as a modern world luxury. If we're putting most of that water into crops and food that will be wasted, we're slowly slitting our own throat and wasting a luxury. All the while, more and more people are occupying the same piece of land, increasing the load on the fresh water supply.

Great invention of all time? Sewage systems. Before that, people used to throw EVERYTHING into the same place where they drank. There's a reason people preferred to live upstream. There's also a reason why everyone pre-1900s used to drink beer or tea (heat kills most water-borne diseases).

Edit: I forgot to mention groundwater aquifers as a water source, but my point stands.
Last time I went through airport security the TSA agent kept pestering me to empty my pockets, after I found a dollar bill in one. When I produced a kleenex (tissue), he got all indignant "You can have nothing in your pockets, sir! That's not nothing, it's something!" so I placed it in a plastic bin and told him "here, you can scan that."

I was really annoyed but I knew they stopped exercising any judgement at all when they made it illegal to bring a bottle of water through security, even if everyone is 100% certain that it contains only water.

Unfortunately the airport is not the place for this kind of activism. This should be as self-evident as the TSA's idiocy.
'Someplace safe' would be the Trinity site. It's already irradiated, owned by the government, and no one is ever going to live there.

I now this, you know this ... preaching to the choir.

Bombarding the moon would have the side effect of kick-starting a space program, however.
Yeah, let's all make up our own narrative of what happened.
No, it's really not, unless you are arguing that what was copied from Apple (designs) is not something that should be subject to protection.
Yeah, com'n people - little common sense here.

1) If everyone is leaving food on their plate, cook smaller portions.

2) If occasionally there is food on the plate, or it just kids "being kids", stick it in the fridge.

I agree with the very top post - food is simply wasted out of laziness in the US.
I wonder about the rationale to use HTTPS for everything, especially about the SSL part. It seems that by the choice of SSL over a web of thrust (WOT [1]) approach one imports the problems of certificates and CAs into the protocol. Especially it would be possible for a server with a root CA to impersonate other people. On the other hand, a social network is about social relations, which could also directly serve to sign and validate public keys in a WOT. This could then serve as a authentication against the same social network that is stored. For example a chat software could show Alice that the person she is chatting with is indeed Charly, the friend of Bob ( Bob signed Charlies key).

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_of_trust
The author keeps saying "logical" before saying something that is completely illogical. The author also uses the word trope a lot...
License plates scanned at border, data shared with car insurance group
"Unfortunately the airport is not the place for this kind of activism."

Then where is? Facebook?
oops, sorry it was not more clear! I intern at Referly, which is a YC startup that specializes in rewarding social referrals.
> "If she's full, the food is wasted whether she eats it or it goes in the trash."

That's simply not correct.

If you take in more calories than you need right now, your body will simply store them away for later, and you can eat a little less later on.
We really need another version of Godwin's Law, but for slavery instead of Nazis.
When I worked at Morgan Stanley, which owned Discover card, our corporate cards were, of course, Discover cards. They also assigned us Amex cards in case we were somewhere that didn't take Discover cards. And also Visa cards, in case we were somewhere that didn't take Amex cards.
I'm basing it off every work relationship I've ever witnessed. not a huge set, but varied enough to form an educated opinion
Good blog post, we have a similar one we're posting shortly about our experience with App of the Week. And sharks. :)

We're a small company and our app Opuss (opuss.com) was app of the week for UK/Ireland. While we were contacted in regards to "brick" sized artwork, we had no such expectation and just dutifully provided what they requested.

For the next 4 weeks we got a nervous twitch each Thursday around 5PM GMT (about an hour before 10am Cupertino) as it can also set a precedent for other stores. (In our case the Nordics and Germany as well). If your server logs look fishy around this time and you have EC2 or equivalent, fire up a few extra servers for those few hours. Trust me.
I was taught in typing class that its better to skip errors and then come back and correct them when you are done. Not that I follow that advice especially often, but I wonder if it would be more helpful to do that. I didn't like during the demo that I was forced to correct the problem before continuing.
It doesn't appear to respect my keyboard layout - I'm using colemak (which works fine) but with UK symbols instead of US (which works everywhere else, including the HN comment box, but not in Typing.io where it wants me to type US symblos: eg " and @ are swapped).
Doesn't he say that the heirloom plants saved the farm for 15 years?
Very Very cool.

I don't want to use your service (sorry!), since I don't want to have any other services inbetween my and the users, but I love the idea, and the regex list.

I'll implement a clone of this on my own side.

Thanks!
FTC Approves Instagram Acquisition
It's not interesting from my perspective. It's a good idea. Many companies could benefit from it. Not Valve, but many companies.
For the record, I meant key combos that don't use modifiers unnecessarily, similar to GMails, where for example, just pressing “u” goes to your inbox. Modifier keys aren't necessary with modal interfaces.

Of course, at that point, basing your modifier keys on VIM just makes sense :).
Good question! I wanted to focus on helping users practice typing code with its often cumbersome symbols. The majority of comments are prose, comfortably near the home row, which I didn't feel deserved as much attention. Plus some comments (like the ones in the Guava projects) are longer than the code.
> An article posted here a couple days back mentions the hot zones around Fukushima are 3x less radioactive than downtown Denver. This is something to think about.

Radiation is like cancer: one word to describe many different, related phenomenons. Denver radioactivity comes from radon, which is a relatively harmless gas as long as you allow it to disperse rapidly. OTOH pollution from nuclear accidents mainly comes from caesium which mimics calcium and get fixated on bones, thus provoking long, continuous, deep exposition to radiation.
I've had this intuition as well, and tried to put it to use when redesigning the Ubuntu Software Center's ratings system. Ratings are fundamentally ordinal data -- higher is better, but the difference between 4 and 5 is not the same as the difference between 3 and 4.

This implies that the arithmetic mean is a broken concept, however the _median_ should still survive intact. I thought about ways to implement this in Software Center, however I'm still not quite sure what a good algorithm for ordinal rating data would look like.

Please feel free to post ideas on this stackexchange question: http://stats.stackexchange.com/questions/19115/how-do-i-sort...
Except when you get back to that "same old" and now have to make up for the month that was lost!
I learned that I NEVER type '}'
Stopped at level 3, for a break, and because I couldn't see the exploit so easily. But still, amazing site design and great fun.

Would love to sit down with it for a bit longer and crack on.
> There's no free lunch.

Of course there is. No sign-in at all.

My question should have been: Why do I have to sign in?
> And I would argue that arguing bout what a unit test is and isn't has missed the topic of this parent post entirely.

You do raise a valid point: we're arguing about a definition. I don't think that misses the point though, because this thread is specifically discussing the use of FactoryGirl in unit tests. Where I disagree with you is on the importance of definitions. I think it's important to understand the definition of a unit test vs an integration test vs a system test, because without agreeing on those definitions, we don't stand a chance of having a reasonable discussion. If we have different definitions for a word, then our arguments will be talking past each other.

> Tests and code don't always fall into these neat cult buckets we've drawn up for ourselves.

(I'll ignore the loaded language, because that's not conducive to rational discussion.) From this point on, you use the word "tests" instead of "unit tests," and your points are valid because you're talking about the broader category of tests. I'm not. I'm specifically discussing unit tests, which has been the topic of discussion for this entire thread, going all the way up to the top-level comment by indrekju.

> because every single codebase is different for a variety of reasons

I agree with you here. Every codebase is different, and so are their testing requirements. For small gems, I tend to write all integration tests with few unit tests. For larger Rails projects, I write mostly unit tests with some integration tests to catch the cases where an interface changed but I forgot to update a fake object. If you're saying that different codebases differ in their relative requirements of different types of tests (unit vs integration, etc), then I agree. In fact, I would take that a step further, and say the testing requirements also depend on the team. But if you're arguing that the definition of a unit test changes depending on the codebase's testing requirements, then I can't agree.

I'm not refuting the usefulness of FactoryGirl in integration, system, or acceptance tests. Just unit tests.

Having definitions for jargon gives us tools to learn and discuss things at a more abstract level. That doesn't necessitate applying those ideas dogmatically. If anything, I think it helps you understand the trade-offs so that you can be pragmatic, because pragmatism depends on understanding.
Very impressive.

Things I particularly liked: not making me type the indentation (because any sane editor will do that for me), allowing backspace, providing examples in numerous languages.

Things that bugged me (and which only become an issue because the example otherwise proves sufficiently realistic that any remaining differences feel awkward, like an uncanny valley for typing code): showing faded-out code I'm not expected to type and skipping it, not allowing any navigation other than backspace (I frequently "correct" errors by ignoring them until I finish typing what I wanted to type and then going back and correcting them, which means the "collaterally typed before backspacing" characters are not wasted keystrokes), not allowing copy-paste (particularly important for lines like #include or import), not showing incorrect characters I've typed.

Things you probably can't do anything about: typing a file in a more natural order than top-to-bottom (the Haskell exercise starts with a giant export list, and the Python exercise starts with an import list). Normally, you'll extend those as you go, rather than typing them all at once.
Metacompilers Part 1: Build a compiler in Javascript
Some guy wrote an article about a 2 line script that most people who are savvy enough to pirate already know how to do? Stop the presses, HN
Entrepreneurial Happiness Is Possible
So, you're saying we are the 1%?

Actually i was thinking about this issue the other day with regard to that 99% movement not too long back. We really do have more than we could ever need in the US, and should honestly try to be responsible with it
Are you American? Have you any care for history? Do you honestly think theres something wrong with protesting what you think is an enormous government misstep with a t-shirt?

I assure you your grandma is a strong woman. Get real.
Canada Attractions Reviews, Rating, List and Map for Tourist
The morale of the story is don't fly Delta.

They're a business and they have every right to throw someone off the plane to enhance passenger comfort. He made it through the TSA checks so we can't blame them. The only way to explain to Delta that you don't want your freedom of expression or speech violated is to not fly on their planes. Let all the passengers that want to overreact to a t-shirt, something completely benign, fly Delta and everyone else can fly one of the other carriers.

Everyone's freedom stays intact.
It seems their core business is to provide the oauth login.
The feature with the alert is just a neat add-on.
Does the cost of food not factor in the expected scarcity of fresh water?

If not, why not?
Just in case I wasn't clear, I absolutely agree that you should force users to correct errors. It's just that the interface right now makes it harder to see how to correct the error, since you don't get visual feedback on the "wrong" characters that you've typed.
I agree, they aren't. But here we're talking about TSA agents (who more or less acted appropriately, in my opinion) and Delta employees. I expect neither of these to perform well when balancing public safety against antagonistic attitudes. Especially the Delta employees.
Facebook Revamps Messages to Look More Like Email
Dick-move by Instagram
Presumably for keep track of statistics reliably.
Who is building this? Who designed the protocol, and will publish/veto the standard?
Union-Find and Disjoint-Set Forests in Haskell
Metrics engineering position code submission ideas
Hey everybody,

Long time lurker, first time poster. I am finishing my M.S. degree in CS and looking to head into the workforce before pursuing a PhD doing mostly low-level development. My background in heavy in mathematics and statistics, and one of the positions that interest me is engineering metrics.

I would like to get some ideas on what problems to solve for a code sample directed towards this position. I plan on writing in C.

Here are some I'm thinking:
1. Implement a service that provides really fast (subsecond query time) regular expression search over the Linux kernel source code (Credit: Stripe).
2. Solution to 1D or 2D Heat Equation problem using message passing.
3. Picking a problem on Google CodeJam and solving it.

Any help, suggestions, and comments are really appreciated.
That's what training is for. If it's ineffective, then it needs to be more effective. If the employee hasn't received it, then they shouldn't be handling customers. Same with the NFTA officers.
Does anyone know how many events/sec Logstash can handle? I've only
seen people talking about 250 events/sec on the Google Group, but
we're a couple orders of magnitude greater than that.
It certainly does, but unstable food prices also factor into the electability of public officials.
If anyone is looking to get involved I have (unoffically) started a project to write a testsuite against the protocol. Contributions would be appreciated.

https://github.com/lucaspiller/tent-testsuite