skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you for finding his explanation. I blame Facebook's infinite scroll.

I don't see this as a "hard decision." He cast a symbolic vote to remain ideologically pure. Had our Congress consisted of at least 217 Justin Amashes, their votes would have had the practical effect of denying thousands of people devastated by Hurricane Sandy from having their flood insurance claims paid. That's all the additional funding was for -- flood insurance claims. You can argue about the mismanagement of FEMA in general, but this $9.7 billion had nothing to with that. Voting down this bill would have basically forced FEMA to tell a bunch of people hit by Hurricane Sandy, "Hey, that flood insurance you paid into that you're depending on to rebuild your home? Yeah, you're not going to get any money from those claims until we figure out how much we need to jack up the age of Social Security, sorry."

This is not governing. Look, you can argue that the federal government should not be providing flood insurance (especially insurance that is heavily subsidized) as it encourages people to live in high-risk areas for natural disasters. And you can argue that the current process of allocation disaster assistance from the federal budget should have a better process than "ask for a bunch of money for flood insurance whenever FEMA runs out." I consider these are very valid points.

Yet anyone attempting to govern would make these arguments when they wouldn't interfere with thousands of people experiencing a hardship from receiving assistance that was heretofore uncontroversial, and they would actually then proceed to turn those arguments into legislation and then pass it.

This is what I mean. "Refusal to govern" means doing little else besides casting symbolic votes, which a wing of the Republican party like Rep. Amash is mostly content to do. Rep. Amash is not actually making any "hard decisions" or "right calls." He doesn't have to bear any responsibility for denying people hit by Hurricane Sandy their flood insurance claims, yet he doesn't care to actually solve the macro-level problems behind his opposition to the bill to begin with.

Afforess and anyone else -- I love discussing public policy, so if you want to continue this discussion in a more efficient manner than exchanging HN comments, just e-mail me (see my profile for the address).
Ah good point on the first, and working on the second! want to be a bit more transparent, but basically, its simply a combination of the other factors listed with some logical balancing through multipliers. (ie. stars is weighted more than contributor count)
It says "Made for Mac", but as a Sublime plugin would it also work with Windows/Linux versions of Sublime? I'd give it a go, but I'm on Windows.
What I read into this is a feeling I have to fight in my own work: it's easier, in an emotional sense, to fiddle around with your tools than it is to face the real problem. The amazing things you're imagining creating don't really need a replacement for std::vector to succeed -- people make great art with all sorts of tools way worse than the STL.

The way I fight this urge in myself (and balance it against the real need to occasionally improve a tool or library) is to occasionally make a project where I make a point of doing everything the most straightforward/simple/least-clever way possible, even choosing the hackier way when available as it makes me uncomfortable. I find it helps me reset my acceptability meter. Usually I find the project works out just fine, and all the things I imagined needed improvement were just avoidance.
I'd be moderately pissed off if I got stuck in a drill for 24h+ without knowing it was a drill, unless it was a known thing that drills would be run routinely. There is stuff I'd do for "real" (missing one-off personal events, etc.) which I wouldn't do for training. I'd skip out on a wedding (well, I always do anyway), funeral, etc. for a real security issue, but would quit the next day if I had done so for training without my knowledge.
If you want "least amount of cruft," which is strictly perceptual, then Debian is the way to go.

If you want Linux and you simply to get work done regardless of ideology, Ubuntu is the way to go.
> I would rather take a web based on open APIs and rich clients (running native code) than the kludges we have today.

But that exists. It's called native programs, which are free to access web API's and whatnot just as much as any browser is.

The whole point of the web is you don't have to download software, you don't have to store your data locally. Sure, it's a pain to support the quirks of different browsers and some badly designed web standards, but I'll take that any day over having to program for entirely different operating systems. I fail to see how web apps are a hack at all. Sure, they're not the "original purpose" of the web, but they work awfully well for things like GMail, GDocs, GMaps, etc. -- I'm awfully happy to have all these inside of browser tabs, instead of cluttering up my machine with more installed apps.
My understanding of the point in the video is that the volatility resulting from the systematic risk is a symptom of the market not having enough normal/baseline volatility to clear out the dead wood, so to speak. Quite analogous to forest management, where more smaller fires clear out the fuel on a regular basis so that a large scale fire cannot occur.

Now it is probably the case that the HFT traders make The Market far more intertwined than is sensible, and hence far too combustible as a whole. In the video Taleb points out that he favours many smaller organisations over fewer larger ones for the simple fact that within an ecosystem a few small systems can fail with little negative effects on the whole. Where as if a large system fails it is far more catastrophic.

So perhaps the solution here is to make some sort of upper limit in financial (HFT, Banks, etc) firms so that there would be more smaller ones, where failure would be more common and the destruction of smaller companies should not disasterously affect the system as a whole.

That said, the recent wiping of trillions of dollars in value, seemed to be an effect of the many years of apparent calm. With a lot of companies creating new derivatives with the appearance of safety but were anything but safe.

To bring it back to the parent article, I do agree that everyone on the exchange should be paying some sort of transaction fee, I have to pay one when trading shares, and so should other traders.
Electronic cigarettes - miracle or menace?
I don't mean to sound cynical, but are you sure this is a problem worth solving?

Yes, it's a problem, but it's along the lines of my microwave getting dirty over time, or needing to fill a car tire occasionally. I don't need or care about a service that only cleans microwaves or only fills tires.

If you want to improve on brick-and-morter, feet-in-the-store retail problems, why not, say, show me a big pinterest-style list of everything in every grocery store around me? That would save me some time instead of perusing up and down aisles and not being sure whether I should visit that farmer's market that sometimes has interesting stuff.
Is functional programming really mainstream now? I think knowledge of its existence is mainstream, but interest in it still is not. Most people give me strange looks when I tell them my current programming language of choice is a Lisp dialect.
I had forgotten that one. You inspired me to visit Wikipedia where I learned that the probability of a 3D random walk returning to the origin (given an unbounded number of steps) is about .34 (in 2D, as you note, this probability is 1). The probability of eventual return goes down as dimensionality increases. As you say, get lost forever.
I really want to go traveling. I've already taken a gig being an undergraduate TA this quarter in an effort to save up enough money to take me traveling if my last ditch effort at turning things around fails. One way or another I'm going to see the world before I turn 24.

That's something your little christmas gift helped a lot with - thanks again :)
> If it were any other industry and it was any other critical function of a product not doing this you'd have people screaming that [the companies] were negligent and wanting to sue them left and right.

Are Facebook and Google critical functions?
Time for a new Honey, I Shrunk The Kids.
Cute. You might be on to something.

At Google there's an internal badge system that lets anyone award any badge they create to anyone else. Once it went self-service it became really successful. The badges appear on corporate profiles. Someone even figured out that you can post funning badges on Larry and Sergey's page.
These teams usually work in rotations, so if you have prior knowledge of a personal event then you'd take yourself out of the rotation for that time period.
We have an Ember based application that includes a report display with about the same amount of data as the Discourse topic list.

We have found giving users the ability to sort on each column to be very slow. I noticed the Discourse doesn't have sort or filters. Was this due to performance reasons?
Very good idea, but that'd test threat detection, not threat response. Different teams handle those areas.
You should lead with a feature matrix comparing SNEBU to rsync because you really need to differentiate yourself from rsync, which has been the standard for 15 years.

Everyone writes some kind of recursive backup tool, just like everybody writes their own templating system and TODO list manager. Set yourself apart.
I didn't read it that way. It wasn't just an email and a phone call, he was sending songs for two years. His #2 is "reach out and say hello", but #1 (more important than 2) is "create great stuff".

I too first skimmed it cynically, my natural reaction to any self-help/motivation post. A few of his lines, read alone, do sound ridiculous. "Simply contacting a stranger.." "Just like that, I was in." "All because I bought pizza for a stranger." "Soon after arriving in New York, ... opportunities were everywhere." But I read these lines as obvious hyperbole, used for dramatic effect.

Even though he glosses over a lot of subtleties (its a blog post), I found it rather honest. Yup, it is all about who you know, and it only takes one connection. But there's a more useful truth embedded in the premise, easily overlooked in all the self-glamorizing (again with the dramatic effect): "Create great stuff... [so they can] see something done."
You make a good point, and candidly, we're not sure. The crux of the problem as we see it is that:

- If you enjoy shopping, you're probably pretty good at it, and don't need a lot of hand-holding.

- If you don't enjoy shopping, then a store is a bad solution. A better solution is "don't go to the store at all, we'll ship you the stuff," aka Amazon

What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this? i.e. Willing to go shopping, if stores can just make it bit easier when you get there.

Thoughts?
Discard the unnecessary. It isn't always easy to tell but there are often subtle signs around what is and isn't necessary. Unnecessary things usually feel sort of shadowy in your mind or require an additional effort that doesn't fit square into what you are doing. Think about what it's like to carry too many groceries into the house at once. Necessary things are solid and leap forward into your mind with evident emphasize. Be ruthless with your pruning of those unnecessary branches and your trip down the rabbit hole will be both smoother and more thrilling.
It took me a few minutes to realize that this is about iOS data synchronization.

Good name, and good choice of frameworks. It would be nice to see a complete example including the iOS integration bit.

What makes you different from Parse?
> I'm just pointing out that the photo is more than the headshot.

Not the photo that's actually used. Every photo is cropped, and a lot of great photos were cropped after they were taken. So it is with the photo of her used in the computer graphics world.

Just to make it clearer: There's a valid reason a photo of a human being showing some skin is used. Humans know, at a very deep level, what skin is supposed to look like. If the colors of skin are somewhat wrong, we'll know. We'll also know if the shape of the face is somewhat wrong, for example, which makes it easier to see other kinds of errors or infelicitous compression artifacts. All of this is further helped by using the same image in a wide variety of contexts over a long period of time.
Nice job! Is this on PyPi?
Laundry Solution in India on India News Quick Clean Laundries
Apple iOS 6.1 Reportedly Plagued With Battery, 3G and Syncing Issues
Dinosaur extinction: Scientists estimate 'most accurate' date
That's more about natural disasters, like losing a network node to a meteor.

The Facebook story is about response to attack.
This is a different argument than 'he doesn't need the favor' and as Patrick said about that one this is also a disempowering view. If you're going to look at the world through the lens of power, control and socioeconomic status then you're surely going to find it wherever you look but sure, let's tackle this one too.

Let's define 'kissing ass' as doing someone with the power to help you a favor you wouldn't otherwise do (hence the ass kiss), to get favorable treatment. This would fall under that definition, but then so would all kinds of things like tipping a waiter or buying your date a rose.

So, what can we add to the definition to make it work? The only thing I can think of is that we don't like the idea that the favor is to someone who isn't a peer - someone above you. But Sivers' point is that you are peers in all the ways that matter. To have opportunities open up to you, you just need two things: 1.) be provably somewhat above average at something (even if that thing is just showing initiative) and 2.) get yourself on other people's radar. You can do the first with a website and the second with an email. Back when he started out, he didn't have websites and email so he used 'showing problem-solving initiative' and a handshake.

Sivers didn't just laugh at a joke or pay empty compliments, he took a risk, took initiative, and signaled that he was a person worth knowing. Later when he got a job offer he was not just collecting on a favor, he was also providing value: he worked his ass off for them.

Calling people who show initiative and motivation to open up their options 'ass kissers' is crab mentality.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crab_mentality
Shervin pishevar starts sherpa a startup foundry
Good points. Any specific ideas? The Twitter feed could go, that's definitely true.
> What we're really trying to do is find the segment of the market that cares a lot about this?

Yes. Go do that. Like, right now. Find people you don't know who you think are your target demographic and ask them. They're probably in the grocery store right now.

You'll come back thinking (A) that nobody really this problem, (B) that everybody has this problem, or that (C) nobody thinks they have this problem and you need to show them that it is a problem and that, once you do, you'll change their life forever. B is probably a little delusional. C sounds really time-consuming and expensive.
true. the tea party movement started on good principles, attracted the right wing rabble, and became the punching bag for left wing morons.
I'm a self taught JS coder and I've used Jquery to make basic single page applications with waypoints and scroll to load using a server based REST API and JSON to communicate with it.

My question to the community in this thread is, why all these new JS libraries? Do they offer something that I don't know about, something jquery doesn't?

He didn't even mention jquery in his post, yet he mentioned a ton of other libraries I had never heard of before. So I'm very curious.
> The difference between Monsanto and Apple is that Monsanto's inventions are non-trivial compared to rounded corners and "slide to unlock" type of utility patents. I doubt anyone without a decent lab could produce any of Monsanto's patents.

Way to judge inventions based on your personal scales. So the requisite for patents is having big labs?

Just because something looks simple it doesn't mean it doesn't has value, or didn't had talent and R&D behind it. Do you realize there can be research even behind something as simple as the shape of a device, because there's someone thinking how millions of people will interact with it everyday?

That's the perverse thing about patents. Who has the right to judge if an invention is trivial or not.
Switzerland guns: Living with firearms the Swiss way
I also think the biggest problem they have is the lack of good documentation. I hope they make it top priority to create very simple and complete documentation.
I like it, but it seems like a standard that is too smart. Much like PGP it is too technical to catch on in common use.
I appreciate how you describe what I've struggled to explain to others. The experience is a bit harrowing, and it's easy for a person in that position to discount the "it gets better talk". But it does, and in retrospect obviously so.

Combine your note with ChuckMcM's, and I think you'll come near where I've ended up: there are so many broken systems out there that need someone. In my case, I apply the little tricks I've learned to sidestep engineering problems. I was worried that I'd get stuck in some soul crushing drone job, and instead I found that even the simple systems are pathologically complicated. It's quite nice to know - deep down - that everything really is interesting if you look closely enough (my favorite misquote of Feynman).

Perhaps an alternate worry is that as a person who constructs systems, you'd act as the proverbial person with a (sledge)hammer, foolishly whacking every problem regardless of whether it's a nail or not. But that's just a matter of delicacy: everything improves if it's better understood, but not everything needs to be rebuilt from scratch. I guess experience just tones that down. Or the mind just gets quieter; I occasionally fear that I've lost something in that transition, but I can't seem to support that idea. It's not like the ideas ever go away, they'll just take a different weight, be less horrifically important, blend into the background noise experience and life create. Perspective changes a lot that way.

TL;DR: don't worry about losing your mind, you're neither crazy nor alone (is anyone alone and insane in a global network these days? I hope not!)
Quite a bit on what it takes to control a fuel cell stack in vehicle and stationary applications: www-personal.umich.edu/~annastef/FuelCellPdf/pukrushpan_thesis.pdf

I find it interesting to read that:

o To get the kind of highly variable "transient response" (change in power output) required for automotive applications, the author proposes using a chemical battery as part of the power management system, as the fuel cell system can't itself respond quickly enough.

o The control system is as much or more challenging than that of an internal combustion engine, requiring control of these sub-systems:

__ * Reactant (hydrogen) flow subsystem

__ * Heat and Temperature subsystem

__ * (pure distilled) Water Management subsystem

__ * Power management subsystem

__ * If not fueled by hydrogen, an on-board fuel processor subsystem to break the chosen carbon-based fuel down to hydrogen

With just hydrogen fuel, it still takes an air compressor, three heat exchangers (fuel temp, fuel cell stack heat extraction, compressed air heat extraction), an air humidifier, a water separator, a power converter, a chemical battery (and software of course, to implement the control system) to make it all work in vehicle applications.
Merb and Rails did merge, but that doesn't mean any reasonably sized Merb codebases had any hope to migrate. It's a different framework with a different ORM. All those developers that followed Katz early on got burned when he joined Rails core.

I do believe Rails.app will be released and Katz has recently given an update (it's dated January 27) but the first dozen comments at http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1397300529/railsapp/comm... will show that there has been some community concern that they bought into vaporware/Ember.js. Those comments went on from November 15 to January 25 before a Hacker News post solicited a comment.

In regards to SproutCore, I was referring to SproutCore 2.0 which became Amber which became Ember.js. Ember.js seems to be coming together nicely, but we are already supporting 4 completely incompatible versions of it. Admittedly we are still at ember-1.0.0-pre.2 and I'm sure the APIs will eventually solidify, but it feels like even new patch versions have been radically incompatible.

Definitely excited to see Rails 4, Ember 1.0, etc. for the record. I just have spent a significant amount of time cleaning up the messes of abandoned Merb codebases so I couldn't help but point out that Katz's legacy has been, at best, mixed here.
Site is dead, and the Coral Cache is throwing a 500 error. Anyone got a mirror?
Can you imagine a spreadsheet with first-class functions, and possibly other functional features? What would such a thing look like?

Strictly speaking, Excel doesn't have functions at all, let alone first-class, since you can't define a new function using only cells and formulas. You have to go to VBA.
A quick count of the first 22 votes on his Facebook profile shows 11 yes votes, 11 no votes. How does disagreeing with half of the bills qualify as refusing to govern?

Do you just blindly vote Yes on every ballot initiative?
nice use of jabberwocky - I think I'll switch my lorem ipsum to that.
Gold! "You look like Splinter Cell Bro"
hah, cool stuff, they did good.
Theoretically you can use Chef without knowing Ruby, since if you're using pre-existing cookbooks you can just say what to install by listing the recipes in JSON format.

But practically speaking I'd say Ruby is essential. It'd be a disaster trying to use others' cookbooks without being able to read the recipes, and almost certainly you'll want to do something they don't cover.

On the other hand, perhaps Chef is an opportunity to learn Ruby? Certainly you can be productive with a very superficial understanding of the language, so you could get started pretty quickly. And a Chef recipe is about the flattest, simplest code imaginable.
Definitely don't agree with his politics, but I appreciate the transparency.
It's always the little things.. Mike Bloomberg had a great anecdote in his Chris Dixon interview[1] about getting a friend to let him into the Merrill Lynch office back in the early 80s and he'd bring a bunch of coffee/tea, with/without cream and knock and go into random offices and give the person the drink of their choice and ask if they could talk. No one turns down a free coffee.

[1]: http://techcrunch.com/2011/11/28/founder-stories-how-michael-bloomberg-got-his-start-i-brought-you-a-cup-of-coffee/
If you're thinking of making this an app, consider two processes:

Mine:

1. I realize I need something and don't know where to find it.
2. I look around for a person who looks like they work here.
3. I ask said person.

Yours:

1. I realize I need something and don't know where to find it.
2. I magically and suddenly remember, "Oooh, there's an app for this that I downloaded last night when I was looking for apps that would improve my shopping experience."
2. I pull out my phone from my pocket.
3. I unlock my phone.
4. I navigate around my phone looking for the app which takes a while because I can't remember the name of the app or the icon.
5. I open it and wait for it to load.
6. I wait for geolocation to warm up while it tries to figure out what store I'm in.
7. I finally get a button that says "Ask now."
8. I click the button and wait.
9. A squawky voice attempts to help me, but by now I've forgotten what I'm looking for.

I'm really not trying to shoot you down, but I think you could find a bigger problem to work on. :)