skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The website http://programmingpraxis.com has a ton of interesting puzzles.
I don't understand why high pay has to come with a toxic workplace.
As someone who's in his fifties, I can say that while this is an entertaining concept, it doesn't really map correctly. At least not for me.

The passing of time has always seemed to me to be more of a function of memory.

When I was younger, my memory was _much_ better. And much more vivid. It was in HD. I noticed by the time I was in high school that not only was my memory worse, but that it was of much lower quality. Interestingly enough, though, I noticed that early memories, while less vivid than I remembered them, were often still more vivid than more recent memories. By the time I was in my 30s, things were much worse. My doctor assured me that this was normal, and by the way, expect it to get worse still.

My father, who is now 96, can remember things vividly from 80 years ago and more, but can't remember what town he is living in at the moment. He can remember chemistry and physics he learned long ago, but now he has trouble working the new flat panel TV we bought him. (This is only partly the fault of age, the UI experience on the TV is worse than abominable. Steve Jobs would puke.) This is interesting, because he _built_ the first radio that he ever owned, back in the 1920s.

The most heart breaking thing recently, is that my mother passed away a few months ago. She'd been with him constantly for the last 65 years or so. And he keeps looking around for her, and then after a moment remembers she's gone. He often doesn't remember the event, but it is still fresh as a state of being, even after several months.

So for my father time's passage seems instantaneous and never changing.

Duration is yet another issue.

Current time, you know, right now, passes for me at more or less the same rate. It's much more effected by things like boredom and engagement than anything else. If I'm waiting on something, things can take forever. If I'm doing something, it can go by in a flash.
The concept of a half-life explains why LETHAL FOR THOUSANDS OF YEARS is a bit of an overselling of the situation.

The more radioactive a substance is, the shorter its half life. That is, the sooner it will become less radioactive. And vice versa: if a substance has a long half life, it will simply emit less energy per unit of time.

It's just inverse formulae. Nothing magical.

But people imagine high-powered radioactivity lasting for THOUSANDS OF YEARS. It just doesn't happen like that.
Why Waiting Is Torture
If only there was an online service to automatically log music I listen to and perhaps tracks I particularly love.
Looking at your submission list

http://news.ycombinator.com/submitted?id=jv22222

it appears that your highest-voted submissions have been mostly trend-following submissions, in other words submissions about hot news stories of that day that are being covered by a lot of other sources. I remember that when Steve Jobs died there were more than a dozen submissions of stories about that major news event, and at least some users said that they flagged all of those stories, because they didn't want the whole front page of HN to be multiple stories from different publications on the same underlying news item. Please note that I don't do this. If a story is "hot," I accept that as the news phenomenon of the day, and I selectively upvote whatever source(s) I think report the hot story best. But it may be that other users prefer to keep HN more narrowly focused on stories with the technical and start-up business angles most of interest to hackers, and perhaps they flag stories that are repeats of news-of-the-day items.

Best wishes in finding out what news is of greatest interest to other readers here.
Less new/memorable experiences. Not memorable like, "I'm going to this grocery store they have good prices", memorable like, "camping? what's camping?".

If you ask me the reason is: Monotony consumes memory.
I got 'no', won her, lost her, won her back and she's my wife for over 20 years. I guess it worked for me too :-)
Nope, the Haxe program reads and includes the file at compile time, but only if it's a string literal. If it's an expression that evaluates to a string (which only works if you have static typing, as Haxe does), it reads it at runtime. If its neither it fails.
Like this?

Thanks!
Radon, which is the main source of exposure in Denver, is a gas.
As you point out, Project Euler and other simple puzzles are good for picking up new languages. Of course, Euler actually has a broad set of tough problems, but many people prefer solving the first tenner using one-liners.

It's slightly vintage now, but there is nothing better for getting actual algorithmic problem solving ability per time invested than USACO at http://train.usaco.org/usacogate. It was developed by the US high school competitive programming coaches. If you can plow your way through the first couple of sections, even the toughest interview questions will seem easy.

Serious.
I'll just pick this one: it's almost as if this article was partly whimsical, and the idea was to inspire, not prove anything. And the aesthetics of both the formula and the argument are actually the point here. It's a kind of entertainment, not really science, and that's how it's supposed to be.

Also, this is Everything2, the article is from 2001, when there still was 3 people who knew what Everything2 is.
When I'm interviewing someone the litmus test I use is asking them about the documentation. Anyone who has only superficially used whatever language/library/toolkit it is will generally say the documentation is good (what else can they say?)

Those that are battle hardened will have looked at far more of the documentation, and found it lacking. Consequently if they can explain that it sucks and why it sucks I know that they have learned the topic at hand.

It also catches out the folks who read "programming X in 8 hours" and put X on their resume. They won't be able to say anything intelligent about the documentation.
Nietzsche, Robert Schumann (composer) and Tesla are also notable.

If we factor in brilliant writers who shot themselves. Well, that list is quite long.
They missed the part where you need documentation on how the chip used in the I/O device actually works. This is the 'tricky' bit way to often.
This is not a MySQL Problem. This is an Open Source problem.
Most big corporate research labs did good work. PARC, Bell Labs, IBM Research, Sun Labs, even Microsoft Research have all done "good stuff." Much of it critical to today's understanding of technology and computer science.

Certainly PARC has been instrumental in many areas of technology, I don't think it's fair to dismiss most corporate research. In fact, at least in the land of technology, most corporate research has done good stuff.
This will supply research material for a long time. Thank you.
A well run not-for-profit damn well better be making a profit, it's just not turned back to the owner. They just take their allotted salary. Which is a pretty fine idea too.
Also see http://www.mathjax.org/docs/2.0/tex.html

Used on the most math heavy site I frequent: http://electronics.stackexchange.com/
Prostate-specific cancer drug engineered from Mediterranean "death carrot" weeds
Research article here: http://stm.sciencemag.org/content/4/140/140ra86.abstract
This isn't half bad. (From someone who did this for a living at one point)

Btw, if you're writing a USB driver, most of the time the device uses HID, even though that's for a completely different type of device then what HID is supposed to be specced for.
from http://www.thimbl.net/
"Thimbl, the free, open source, distributed micro-blogging platform. If you're weary of corporations hi-jacking your updates to make money, or if being locked in to one micro-blogging platform tires you — well, then Thimbl is for you!"

http://www.thimbl.net/faq.html
"Isn't this just like identi.ca/ostatus.net?

The similarity is only superficial, in that we draw upon similarities with web2.0 platforms in how we communicate our use-case.

Diaspora, Crabgrass, NoseRub, StatusNet, identi.ca and the rest are just web-apps with some sort of federation bolted-on. None of them are truly distributed multi-tier systems like the classic internet applications such as email, usenet, irc, or finger. Thimbl, on the other hand, is just a finger & SSH client that illustrates that "microblogging" has already been possible on the internet for decades. It's done by simply presenting the data differently and making it look like the now-familiar Twitter interface. You don't need anything from the Thimbl project running on your server to participate in Thimbl, just the software that is already in your repository - namely SSH and xinetd/finger or compatible alternatives."
I second this. Even if the library is just an experiment by someone, has been dead for 6 months, and has a few bugs, it's still going to save our team at least a week and up to several months worth of development time. Time that as a startup is invaluable.
I almost agree with you, but as you yourself point out:

[F]or whatever reason I didn't make things clear to every manager in the company (my fault)

I think that if you had acknowledged your responsibility for this aspect of the situation at the same time you were making your priorities clear to Steve, the conversation would have had a somewhat different tone without loss of impact.
Yahoo Isn't Out Of The Game Just Yet
I also agree. When we get older, we establish a routine: get up, go to work, do errands, etc. When we're young, yes, we might have some routines but we're constantly meeting new people, learning new things, and facing fresh, new situations. For me, ever since I graduated, the past 6 years have been one HUGE blur...
Is this also a carrier unlock?
Groundbreaking? Maybe in that someone actually worked out the math for it (which seems trivial enough) and submitted it somewhere. A very large number of people I've chatted with from 10 years old an on have come up with this same theory, relatively independently, they just never worked out the full numbers because they realize that it's a gross oversimplification.

More specifically, this seems to ignore a small thing called 'nostalgia'. How long were the blissful summers of our youth without this rose tint?
This is sometimes phrased as "fix every problem twice," ie solve the immediate problem, and then figure out what to do so this problem doesn't happen again.

This can be done via tweaking your funnel or workflow, adding an FAQ entry, adding tooltips, restructuring your UI to make things intuitive, solving a technical glitch, etc.

Joel Spoksky has a great article covering this here: http://www.joelonsoftware.com/articles/customerservice.html
Or do they simply seem to be functioning well enough (ie, being productive) that they don't care to get tested?
>Once battery capacities reach the point where you only have to charge it at night for a full day's drive, you've solved the problem and you don't need to swap.

Modern batteries (LiFePO4) can be charged in 10-15 minutes. I know I'm going to want to walk around for 10-15 minutes after driving for 120 miles. Heck, that's even the recommendation to avoid DVT!

High range is one way to solve the problem. Fast-charge is another.
That sounds like a completely unwieldy solution. Is an alarm going to go off every time I lift my legs up off the bed? What if I put a heavy suitcase on the bed next to me? Would you want your company to be known for refusing to allow a nursing mother and father to sit next to each other on the bed? What about a parent and a child?

Further, a hotel owner can't just barge in on a tenant. They have to believe someone is doing something illegal, disturbing other tenants or causing damage.
"They will enjoy hotel level of security and comfort at a hostel price. Suggested night rate 60+ USD."

I always thought hostels were cheaper than that, per night. Is that pretty accurate though?
The key to slowing down life is variety. As a child every year was distinctly different: even today I can remember each school year because I had a different teacher, a different homeroom, etc. As an adult each of my jobs has been on average 4-6 years. Each job is a bit of a blur; the years at the same job are difficult to distinguish from each other. To slow down time, make sure you do different things each year: trips, projects, roles at work, etc. The more your mind can distinguish the years, the slower time seems to move. Try it - it works!
This is amazing serendipity. I was literally just then reading through python's curses docs when this post came through.

Blessings will make my task a piece of cake. Thanks!
Twitter is just hosted, proprietary pub/sub. You could do the same thing with a XMPP server and client for a long time before Twitter appeared. I think the only reason people are asking for decentralized Twitter is they're not aware pub/sub protocols that do the same thing exist.
Even with Stripe, you should use SSL as per their info page: https://stripe.com/help/ssl
Has much changed for 3.0?
Is anyone here but me old enough to know what J. Irr. Res. is? [1]

This comment thread makes me wonder.

According to the chart in the article, I have precious little time left. Please try not to suck all the joy out of my remaining few minutes.

---

[1] Or maybe I'm the last one on Earth who still reads the footnotes?

[2] This is the famous recursive footnote. [2] Please enjoy your trip through the stack.

[3] This tail-recursive footnote should really be optimized into a loop. [3]
I wonder what the formula would look like if it took into account the fact that life expectancy is increasing. According to people like Ray Kurzweil, it's increasing exponentially.
Jacques, I feel reluctant to disagree with you, because to search out the supporting references is a bit of a chore, but I had a good education in physics, I was a very good student, and I am confident that lethal for thousands of years is not overselling of the situation. If anything, thousands of years is underselling, as hundreds of thousands would be more accurate.
I don't have the time to help but I'm a huge fan of your design work, good luck!
John Nash too. Not sure how he slipped my mind.
Wow! Fairly large privacy fail. But then, Facebook is itself a fairly large privacy fail.
2 Hour Aquilaria Agallocha Sale
Definitely agreed, but PCI-compliance wise I 'pass' with the current setup going through stripe.js. But nonetheless, I agree it is a must have for any legitimate site.
Can't connect here (Asia/Indonesia). Is it just my region or the server?
I've known this for a couple of years...

Thought everyone else did too. - I use it when sifting through job applications.
Why does a decentralized service entail high latency?

The article's author takes the single example of email, and, extrapolating from that, assumes that it's impossible to build low-latency decentralized publishing protocols.

And his statement, "Protocols are for when there’s no good centralized way of getting things done," is so ridiculous, I don't even know where to begin.
For anyone interested in how humans conceptualize time and what effects this has on language, I highly recommend "Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Truly one of the most interesting books I've ever read.

For a brief overview of the approach they take to the problem, the Wikipedia entry for conceptual metaphor is a good start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conceptual_metaphor
President Carter's "Moral Equivalent of War" Energy Policy Address (1977)
You are correct that the shuttering of the plants has been bad for everybody. Power is already more expensive and another rate increase (10% or so) is imminent. The air is dirtier. The whole place is a lot more uncomfortable (to comply with mandatory energy cuts, the Tokyo office in which I am typing this very post no longer has any climate control on weekends... I have a frozen gel-pack wrappped around my head and sweat is still running down my back).

As a resident and rational human being, I want those gigawatts back. Modern Tokyo is an especially sad place without enough power.

But I want the gigawatts without the staggering incompetence and the gross negligence and the collusion and collossal failure of oversight. I want the nuclear plants to be equipped with modern emergency procedures that don't start with faxing a fucking paper form to City Hall.

And despite all the controvery and debate, I don't hear much about fixing those things. In terms of whether to turn the juice back on, those things are the problem, more than the accident itself. And that is the point that the well-written article by Dr. Muller misses.

Yes, it is rational for a thinking person to be open to using nuclear energy, despite the inherent risks. I think it is rational if, say, we really do a decent job of trying to mitigate those risks, to have functional regulatory oversight, and make decisions in a reasonably transparent, fully informed, democratic manner.

But when you feel (as I think the public here feels) that there is just no way that part is going to happen, then it becomes less rational to support the nukes.

Personally I love nuclear power. What a fucking thing! Incredible! And, it makes the 1 MW·h or so I personally use each month cheaper and even potentially cleaner.

So in theory sure, I support nuclear energy initiatives. I think you are right, it does make sense for Japan to be open to that.

But instead in Japan (and elsewhere, probably) I think the question actually is: "Do you support nuclear energy in the absence of competent oversight, with reliance on the for-profit provider's self-inspections, with safety precautions that are insufficient to protect from predictable natural disasters, and outdated fax-machine-based emergency procedures?"

The answer to that is less easy.
Hasn't Facebook always done this? I've always done this to vet people I deal with through Craigslist...
> IMO, the whole idea of electric vehicles is a waste of time unless the government (or at least a dominant market player) steps in and standardizes battery sizes for fast replacement at existing service stations. It should take less time to recharge an EV than it does to refill a gasoline tank, not more.

Oh, come on. First World Problem: "My new pollution free cars fills at home, but on the few occasions that I have to go out of my way for energy it takes 10 minutes to refuel instead of 2."

You're ignoring the substantial problems that battery swapping introduces – it introduces issues of standardization, compatibility between cars, more moving parts, more weight, additional vehicle design constraints, and creates enormous inertia in battery technology. It constrains innovation. No company can come out with "The 2021 Leaf, now with 15% denser batteries!" without fragmenting the shared supply of battery packs.

I admire Shai Agassi's business model, everyone seems to be fixating on the battery swapping aspect. It's incidental. The real innovation there is using the cell-phone business model on electric cars.

Imho, an alternative solution with fewer drawbacks would be offering "on-shore" cooling by exchanging a fluid coolant through the charge connector. The charge-rate constraint isn't really the batteries, it's how fast you can cool the batteries. With offboard cooling you could charge a ~300 mile range EV in about 3 minutes without over-sized onboard cooling. You're also more likely to find a use for the waste heat offboard, e.g. melting ice or preheating water.

The down-sides of this system are small – any sufficiently high-current "cable" would already be mounted on a "weightless" articulation rig, or a robotic solution that plugs in automatically when you park (Shai Agassi has been working on this technology).
Oh I know how you feel brother. Fellow DX owner here.
Japans debt is largely domestic (Japan Post / JGB) thus has little influence on the trade balance.

Banking crisis has been going on since 2008 thus why didnt the trade balance suddenly fall this year instead of 2008/2009/2010

What is your explanation for the sudden change in trade balance?
Clojure has a function (comp ...) that composes an arbitrary number of functions, and the macros -> and ->> that sort of pipe a value through a list of expressions. (Still new to clojure myself)
Something like that happens on Quora to. When you enter email adress and not password on login screen, profile image and name of the user which is registered with that email adress are appear.
From another aussie, Thanks for this highly inspiring post.

It's good to know there are other aussies out there with the same drive for motivation to succeed.
I agree my post wasn't coherent. Forgive me I just wrote down what came to my mind and posted it.

That said, I don't understand what you are trying to say either.

It would have been nice if you discussed why my argument "by definition decentralized means no one is responsible" is "flat out wrong".

Also regarding my statement "Realtime protocols like PubSubHubBub and RSScloud are there because that's the only way to make the Web work in realtime", maybe I didn't state it clear enough, but it's not as obvious as it sounds in my opinion. Before RSSCloud and PubSubHubBub, if you wanted to run an aggregator you had to actively poll sites, which was extremely inefficient. With these protocols now aggregators can deliver content in near realtime because they just have to implement those protocols. The point I was trying to make was, even these efforts will never be completely reliable because they are built on top of protocols and standards. Protocols and standards work only when "good enough" is good enough.

For example, building a decentralized version of a stock ticker system sounds cool but in practice its performance will never be as good as the original centralized version.
This has always been a feature. It's useful when you want to find a friend with a common name that you know personally. This seems like it'd only be problematic if you linked your account to a professional email address...