skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I generally prefer Lisp-style ✲dynamic✲ variables. They basically work the same way singletons do, but they can be set and reset at a block-scoped level (great for test mocks and the like, and makes your control flow easier to understand), and they play much better with threads.

Rust doesn't even have singletons or global variables, since they aren't threadsafe. It has thread-local storage, which dynamic variables are built on top of.
Ask HN: Are you interested in a "recent weather" app?
Hello everyone. I'm the pressureNET developer and I'm frustrated not just at the lack of good forecasts but also at the lack of easy-to-access recent weather.

I have made a similar post to r/android asking if they are interested as well, since this will start with an Android app before it goes anywhere else. See http://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/15l0fw/is_randroid_interested_in_a_recent_weather_app/ if you're interested.

When travelling to a different city it's nice to know what the weather will be like. But for me, it's much, much more important to find out what the weather was like recently. For example, I'm in Vancouver right now but I'll be in Toronto and Montreal in a few days. Now, I happen to know that there was an epic snowstorm there because I'm a weather nut and I don't live under a rock. But what if I didn't know? The forecast is sunny and cold for the next little while. I've also been thinking about this since we just put our pressureNET data archive online with our visualization tool at http://pndv.cumulonimbus.ca. It struck me that...nobody else seems to be doing that!

So I'm starting to build this Android app to show you the recent weather for whatever city you'd like. I'll probably add widgets. And pretty graphics of course.

Does this interest you? I could probably have a Beta ready within a week, and of course the source code will be open and published on GitHub.

I have an additional motivation for this. pressureNET is now costing more than $100 / month and I'm looking for a way to get Cumulonimbus to be profitable. Our one app for sale is T minus, but it has some bugs and doesn't provide as much utility as I was hoping, so it's not bringing in much cash. It will be possible for us to directly monetize pressureNET in the future, but that's likely a long ways off.

There doesn't seem to be anyone building a "recent weather" app (if you know of one, please tell me)! So I figure if we do a good job, we may have some small financial success with a freemium model for Recent Weather.

What do you think, Hacker News? Is this a viable idea with any demand for it?
Or even this if you don't want explicit numbers, but don't want that many zip/list/dict/range/etc.:

attrs = ['bold', 'dark', '', 'underline', 'blink', '', 'reverse', 'concealed']

ATTRIBUTES = dict((k,v) for v,k in enumerate(attrs, 1) if k)
# or
ATTRIBUTES = dict(zip(itertools.count(1), attrs))
On your epicycle to correct the accumulated burden:

That's essentially how tax-deferred retirement accounts work, right? (or other structures, like an investment company or REIT)

It would be interesting to let people set up these more easily for individual purposes. There would be some corner cases like a non-rental property (do you tax the OER instead of the full amount?)

All of this starts to get really complex. I wonder how much of the capital gains vs. income tax issues go away if the rate of each is the same and very low (<10%). At some point, transaction costs would start to dominate.

The other solution would be lower taxes and higher inheritance taxes (even up to 100%). If there weren't family businesses as ongoing concerns, and all assets were financial, I think there would be a pretty reasonable argument for lower income and gains taxes and higher inheritance taxes.
Didn't several of the political leaders recently become millionaires in china?

Ah, per ABC News "There are now at least 300 billionaires and almost 1 million millionaires in China. "

I guess china is also getting it's 2% running the 98%
Mistook the E La Cart logo as Fla Cart.

I usually just look at yelp/chowhound on my phone for pictures and recommendations while checking out the menu.
> Feels like that PM is trying to micromanage

I didn't get that from this piece at all. At what point did the PM in question appear to be micromanaging?

> spec the 'what' very broadly.

That's laughable. No client or internal stakeholder is ever going to spec the "what" broadly for any definition of the term, and if you let them you're setting yourself up for failure (because they're not going to like what you make, and they sign your check).

> Make sure the programmers create a product that the designer can 'skin' afterwards

And what if the programmers leave something critical out of the design? What if the designer was expecting behavior that is different from what was created?

> Have the QA work with the actual product and not a spec - the users will be using the product after all, not the spec.

QA resources use the spec to create a test plan from which they test the final product. If they don't test against the spec, what do they test against? If they're not testing against the spec, they're not exactly doing quality assurance, are they?

Your comment shows a strong lack of understanding of almost everything that was mentioned in the blog post linked to by the OP.
Anyone else find the second-person narrative distracting?
My personal blog http://www.russellheimlich.com/blog/

I run 2 Google Adsense ads on individual post pages and it more than pays for the cost of my shared hosting account. I haven't blogged in over a year after a pretty good run.

I also run http://dummyimage.com with a single ad which covers the increased monthly VPS cost to keep it running.
Intel Business Plan, July 1968
Are psychedelics useful in the practice of Buddhism? (1999)
It allows you to move the computer to your data. There are lots of places where power can be an issue (solar collection only), a full 'computer' would take up a lot of power and space. A micro like this would allow you to process signals on site and only send back 'important' information over potentially limited bandwidth. The device is inexpensive and generic, so you can program it do to what you need, there are many custom devices that do what this board can, but they are either expensive or fixed function.
I like those platforms in principle, but I don't think investors reallly understand what's in it.
The truth is, you're creating your own asset-backed security based on loans originated to refinance credit card loans or finance personal projects for what is (I assume) a pretty narrow slice of the population.

Just like banks and other players (ahem rating agencies) before the financial crisis assumed ABS were safe because they were diversified ("the housing market cannot collapse uniformly accros the country"), they can actually become very correlated in a very short amount of time.

So even though peer-to-peer lending is an interesting proposition, it is important to understand that it can potentially become ugly and sticky...
Cool! I'll give it a thorough read
Also this: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4800972

I am very glad I don't work with web frameworks. It seems that they attract drama queens.
"So the product manager winds up actually having to use the software, by hand..."

maybe this is startup-land naivete speaking, but I pity the company whose product manager doesn't routinely use their own product.
PH7 - An Embeddable PHP Interpreter
Mapping China’s Red Nobility
1st. World. Problems. Get over it.
Not sure I see the point of this with tools like RVM and rbenv around.
Forgive my bluntness, but my impression of domain sitting is essentially the same as patent trolling. It's not contributing anything to the economy or society, it just seems like legalized extortion of companies who just want to do business.

Is there something I'm missing about this?
This is a great approach. Many of the best in tech are outside of tech. You have to just think about your day-to-day activities and observe ways to improve things. That is where you usually find great opportunities.
Some time ago, during the winter we went to visit the Atacama Desert with my wife (she was born there). We rented a small car and my wife told me "are you sure this will work at 4,000 meters high? (13,100 feet)" - we were going to be travelling around some small towns and one of the roads reached that altitude. Stupidly enough, I replied to her "sure... these are modern cars, with fuel injection and smart oxygenation".

The roads were covered with snow, and suddenly we got stuck in a snow-covered road. Being a firefighter (trained in rescue) I had some idea of what I had to do... but of course, no shovel or any other tool to remove the snow. For 1 hour or so I tried to remove the snow with no luck. I got into the car, told my wife that the smartest thing would be to stay in the car. If necessary, the fuel in the car would keep us worm for days.

After some time, a car came down the road and helped us out... only to get stucked again, this time because the car actually got de-oxygenated at exactly 4,000 meters... Luckily this time the same car was behind us for a few minutes and we could push the car until the downhill.

Now we tell the story with friends and laugh about it. But if you ever go to some place that you have a slight chance of getting stuck in the snow: pack a shovel or at least make sure you have the fuel tank full. And never get out of the car wandering to find something.
Since FDA-approved treatments for nicotine addiction can't crack 10% in real studies, this 30-40% number seems quite dubious. Faulty studies for nicotine give similarly high percentages.
Troll elsewhere ;)
I invested in a CrossFit gym three years ago with 2 partners and we've done about 40x our original investment in dividends over the last three years. It was a lot of work the first 18 months, but now it's a solid business with good recurring revenue and a staff that runs it very well.
Twitter became popular because Firefox / Chrome got rid of their in-navbar subscribe button

When Firefox 4, the first version without the button, was released, Twitter had already 200M users.
While interesting, actively buying/selling does not sound like "passive" income, though.
do you play live or online? and at what stakes?
Actually, I like menus with lots of choices. It would be nice to have more pictures, though.
Show HN: A Python client for Scratch
Shhhh - you're breaking the code (of silence)!

Renting quality generics is a good way to go these days as well. Frank Schilling's portfolio collectively pulls more traffic per month than Twitter but he's still managed to largely stay under the radar screen....
OP here: I don't have a hard time horizon or criteria on outcomes, just some idle assets that I don't want to put all into the stock market.

I believe there are lots of ways to generate returns on assets in compounding ways, and I'm interested in ways people in the HN community are using their skills, knowledge, and analytical brains to do this.

I'm not so interested in pure speculation per se -- in fact, one of my reasons for looking for alternatives to the stock market is that many stocks themselves meet the characteristics of speculation to me. (Just because you wrap it in quantitative comparisons to related-industry multiples and so on doesn't mean the whole market isn't overvalued.)

Thus precious metals, bitcoins, etc. aren't very interesting to me either, though they're interesting enough suggestions (as alternatives to leaving assets in dollars, if nothing else) for the purposes of this discussion.

That all said, I'm willing to take lots of risk in small doses, if the return dynamics are there.

Angel investing meets a lot of the criteria for me (and I've done some), but I don't have enough capital to make many bets of typical angel investment size, ie to have a sufficiently diversified portfolio to get EV returns.
> 5-6% global growth of the 1950s-60s

> The overarching story is still faster-than-exponential

I've heard a lot of people lately incorrectly using the word "exponential" to just mean "pretty fast." It has a specific mathematical meaning which you clearly don't know, but which you should know if you're going to throw around words like "exponential."

If growth over the period you're talking about has 6% per year as an upper bound, that's really saying it's bounded above by some curve of the form

f(t) = k0*1.06^t

where k0 is the GDP at the start of your period. The function f(t) is an exponential function. So your growth is not "faster-than-exponential" since it's bounded above by an exponential function.

The only way you can get faster-than-exponential growth is if the percentage growth of GDP is itself growing every year. Needless to say this will eventually become ridiculously fast growth: If we started out with a GDP 1% a year in 1950, and say GDP advanced .5% per year after that, we'd currently be experiencing 31% economic growth per year. Insane!
True. However I’d say you have to start somewhere. And Ruby’s as good a place as any.

After that you can move on to HaskellDrama.com and PrologDrama.com. And once we’ve got the geek community’s head on straight we can dive to the source with DramaClubDrama.com
People forget how well connected Systrom and Instagram were/are. Systrom worked at early Twitter, worked at Google, close with people at Facebook, and seeded by Andreessen ($75mil off a $250K investment). At the end of the day, it's about people. The speed of the transaction helped too.
I came to this party rather late, but here are my $0.02.

I don't pretend to be a super well-traveled individual, but I have traveled a bit.

I feel both Jonas Bentzen and the article he refutes are wrong to some degree, though Mr Bentzen seems to be making a less severe generalisation.

What I see occurring here is a classic example of metonymy and cosmopolitan and metropolitan cities vs. perceived 'real culture'.

Metonymy: A country seems to be defined by its major city or cities--to the outsider, the fewer cities represent it, the better.

Cosmopolitan cities: The problem is these major cities tend to be cosmopolitan cities. Think Alpha-, Alpha, Alpha+ and Alpha++. These types of cities tend to strive towards homogeneity. I had a history prof (who leaned towards socialism) lay out and explain how, historically, the bigger a city gets, the less unique and further away from its ancestors and traditions it culturally becomes. Cultural hegemony.

Metropolitan cities: Then there are 'medium-size' cities, or 'second major cities' that fight to keep some traditions and cultures from their respective countries. Some metropolitan cities strive to be more cosmopolitan, and have that sensation; I'm thinking of a few (very few) Beta-, Beta, and Beta+ cities here.

During the French Revolution, there were two major schools of thought in Spain. One went like this: Bonaparte wants to modernise countries and wage war on 'tradition'; let's join the French movement and abolish our backward traditions. These people, in Spain, were called 'afrancesados' ('Frenchifieds', pro-French), pejoratively. They were found in major Spanish cities.

Here is the really important part: people outside of major Spanish cities thought they were protecting the 'real' Spanish culture; they were often of humble birth, people that had given rise to what people outside of Spain thought was 'very Spanish' (flamenco, cante jondo, running of the bulls, gypsies, etc.) from a cultural perspective. They had traditions; old traditions. They were superstitious, street-smart, but they were also deceived by kings and, to use a modern term, their governments.

I don't see much has changed with regard to cultural representation.

The government projects/sells an image of their country to foreigners. Some people buy into it. The reality is that not only is each country vastly different, each region and city is.

We should be comparing cities with cities, not countries with countries.
Opinionated BDFLs tend to elicit opinionated feedback. Rails (DHH) and Linux (Linus) tends to have similar levels of "drama" or whatever you want to call it. However, is that a bad thing? DHH and Linus have a lot of passion, and produce a great product...

It would be interesting to compare and contract that style of management with something like Python's PEP. Is there any academic research on that sort of things? Guido has made equally tough calls, and you don't see things like PythonDrama.com out there. (Insert joke about Monty Python being a comedy troupe here...)
They are not requiring a credit rating (which is offered by many companies) They want a service from a specific company.

Edit: someone would go to jail after not complying with some court order. Example: google VP in brazil went to jail earlier this year for not taking down a youtube video. Those orders may come way before an actual trial
This is an unlikely avenue for me given my geography, but out of curiosity and for the purposes of the discussion, are you basing the return on equity invested or on total value of the land?
This couldn't be further from the truth. Have you read Edward Bernay's book called "Propaganda"? Do check it out. Your impression of things is no doubt a result of a good spin job.

Domain investments are a proper alternative asset class and many people (some of whom have gone to the best schools in the world) are active players.
In my experience, generally product managers expect to be using a finished product. If the product manager is finding bugs that means that the QA process didn't do its job.

I'm a lot more hands on, but only because I've never experienced a QA process that actually did its job.
I prefer to mix both dependency injection and singletons for the best of both words. Classes accept dependencies in their constructors but as optional parameters -- if the parameter isn't provided, a default reference is pulled from a singleton.

It saves a lot of extra typing when 99% of the time your dependencies are fixed.
Most things I do are interconnected
TCS has developed the Indian Railway Ticket booking website , which is being accessed by millions of Indians every hour for transactions.Being such a populous country , you can expect how high the load and scalability of the application should be .My opinion is that , services companies like TCS do what the client asks them to do.There are many research projects done by TCS , including 'Eka' the world's most powerful supercomputer at its time when it was developed. So how come one say TCS is nothing ?
This year was low (number of trades) because I was patient on a trade that went south. It eventually turned around, but locked up all my capital until it did.

Basically, I refuse all conventional stock investing advice. I never diversify; at most my portfolio has two positions at a time. And I invest upwards of 90% of my cash on most trades. I do not trade on margin (well, technically I do because I don't wait for trades to clear before taking my next position)--but I don't buy stock than cash I have in the account. I only buy heavily traded equities; trading volume over a million shares and over a billion dollar market cap. And I focus on stocks with more or less sound fundamentals that are showing recent swings in price. Apple is a good example.

But as for a being highly methodical and data driven--I'm not. I have a few simple rules and am patient. I generally exit positions after 1-3%. And then I have a few that I let ride. It doesn't take much to hit 40% that way.

I spend less than an hour a week doing research and monitoring my position. I don't have any magic edge. But I'm making money, so continue chug along. A bull market definitely helps, but I've also done ok in a bear.
Its often said that the best characteristics of a person/thing are often times also the worst. I think its becoming clear that the irreverence that made Ruby on Rails so exciting initially is also manifesting itself as plain old immaturity.

Please guys, knock off this snarky name calling (over nothing really). It really is a poor reflection on the Rails community at large.
Are you opening additional locations? Was it a full-time job for the first 18 months?
Can you find anything that says fire was a necessity for survival for paleo-eskimo cultures because I remember reading it wasn't, but I'm having trouble googling a source for or against it.
@jacquesm,
When you say read a lot, I hope you are referring to non-indian sources...If so, can you point me to some
"Grandma bike" is a pretty derisive term for a practical utility bicycle. It's like a guy in a two-seat sportster with a tiny trunk calling a four-seat sedan a "grandma car."

Here in Chicago, people realized many years ago that road bikes with tiny, crack-seeking wheels, rigid suspension, aggressive posture and delicate derailleurs made horrible utility bikes.

So people first started appropriating mountain bikes, adding fenders, racks, new saddles etc. Then people discovered that old Schwinn three-speeds make perfect utility bikes without any conversion.

Now, yes, bike manufacturers have responded by building purpose-built utility bikes.

If you like road bikes then that's great. I actually love riding a road bike from time to time. 99% of the time I'm on a "granny bike" though, and if I weren't for those trips I'd be in a car.
Shared hosting is $50/yr, tops. I made more than that while reading your comment. That doesn't sound like much of an investment :P
In my opinion, passive investing rarely has the capacity to earn someone a substantial amount of money. Large, stable returns occur in only two situations: 1) You invested a huge amount of initial money, so even a low yield returns a lot of money. (This is, from my understanding, how a lot of super-wealthy people do it. Stored wealth perpetually generates income. If one has a massive amount of stored wealth, they earn a massive amount of passive income.) or 2) You invest over long periods of time.

Making large amount of money in short periods of time through investing necessitates either making a very active, labor-intensive investment (like buying a small company or flipping houses), or resorting to speculation. Obviously, this is not passive.

The market is self-correcting. It's absurd to believe that one can earn prodigious amounts of money quickly, predictably, and effortlessly.

However, you should take this with a huge grain of salt. I am not an experienced investor. (In fact, I'm fairly sure that the law prohibits someone my age from investing. Even if it didn't, I wouldn't be in a financial position to invest anyway.)
The main issue I have with singletons is that any mutable global state prevents your application from being first-class within its own runtime environment.

This is of course useful for unit testing, but also reduces hidden state dependencies between submodules.
You guys are still missing the overriding point. "The user base's attention" has no inherent value. Why is this so difficult to comprehend?
Yes. After a quick look at this (very interesting) suggestion, my intuitive reaction is that a lot of the borrowers are likely to repay based on their credit histories and the desire to protect them.

My #1 question, however, is what makes people turn to a source like this?
Google PageSpeed Service Reviewed
While I want this to be true, the Nextweb rebuttal of this article makes a lot more sense http://thenextweb.com/facebook/2012/12/28/no-rage-against-ru.... I'd wait on some better data.
> Photos are Facebook's biggest feature by far

And what kind of revenue does that feature bring in exactly? How exactly does Facebook profit from providing free photo hosting to a billion people?
Just throwing some numbers around, but I remember years ago when a friend was trying to become an import supplier of similar goods, he freaked out at the VAT & import duty being something like 120% on European made products. I suspect that this may still be the case with the price tag on these bikes.