skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Oh wow, your first two sentences were so misleading. "I have been a dreamer all my life." I thought you meant DREAMER, as in undocumented immigrant. "It took me until last year to figure this out." You didn't know you were an illegal immigrant until last year? :P

Your post is pretty melodramatic, but I just want to reiterate that 30 is not too late at all. Plenty of people never come to the realization that you do way past their 30s and turn too late to others for help. I'm glad you realize that you can't accomplish things in a vacuum. (I'm 23, and I still am working on getting my Bachelor's, though most of my friends are in grad school by now. I don't feel like I'm less of a person because I didn't follow the "set schedule" of life, and you shouldn't either)

That being said, another good point that I'm sure has been made already is not to focus too much on being the absolute best in whatever field you try. So you could program for a million years and never be as good as so-and-so. So what?

No one usually starts out and suddenly she's a programming whiz. We all started somewhere, and just because you got stuck at pointers in C++ doesn't mean that you should just give up. No one has just breezed through all programming problems or concepts in the world like they're no big deal. Stop comparing yourself to an imaginary image of perfection and start doing things like the real person that you are.

My advice is to do one thing first: read. Learn! You seem like you have the drive to do a business, but perhaps not much of an idea of what kind of business. So read, or watch MOOC videos if that's how you learn best--really build a solid knowledge base of what it takes to run a business, what sorts of business ideas you'd be interested in, etc.

I think after dreaming and before doing, you should prepare, and that's a step that I feel might be lacking in others' steps-to-success plans for entrepreneurship.

After you've prepared, just (fking) do it. Don't be afraid to fail; failing is how we learn. Don't listen to naysayers who only believe that people can accomplish acts of genius or good in their youth--human history isn't built on the accomplishments of young prodigies alone. Instead, believe in yourself, because no one else will.

And as for luck, create your own!
I've heard lots. You haven't?
Predictably Irrational has a good take on this (Social Norms vs Market Norms). One of it's key points -- once you've changed from a Social Norm to a Market Norm, it's really hard to change back.
In the beginning was the code
Lem's best work (IMO) is the stuff about robot culture, including jokes. Try The Cyberiad and Mortal Engines.

Edit: Though, to be fair, Lem didn't write near-future SF, his robot stories were more like alternate universes.
Apparently more than that EUR 1.7bn, which is enough to make a difference to the depositors. What seniority these are I do not know.
The goal of a colonization effort is never to make the new place more appealing than the old place for the majority of people, or even the median, or even a sizable minority.

You want Mars to appeal enough that you can get dozens or hundreds or people who have both the means and will to do it.
There's a large difference between "would" and "might."
Facebook: Early Adopter Club To Reignite Mobile Experimentation
No. We'll see some bank runs mostly in southern countries, but the deposits are power law distributed and thus the financial majority (in sum, not in numbers of accounts) will probably act more rational than members of the frightened, over-emotional masses that withdraw their 5-10K or so. The rational will transfer their accounts to more stable banks, e.g., in Germany and won't put their money under the mattress.

Of course, it's a bit dirty to grab the money from those <100K too, it destroys trust, no question. But the essential players and movers were protected, that's why we created this small injustice (yes small, compared to what's possible).
Rapidshare to drop unlimited storage plans
Can we please stop saying “unstructured” data?
You don't just sit there waiting to die.

You go out and build things. We'll ship all the stuff the first people need for several years, but they will need to learn to find their own water, manufacture plastics, grow food, and all that stuff.
" the economic differences between regions in the US aren't nearly as large as in the eurozone"

I think the origin of this and other problems is the lack of a significant EU-wide tax system. The US federal tax system serves as a wealth distribution mechanism (some states like NY and CA pay much more than they receive, and other states like OK receive much more than they pay). A similar system in europe would help the net import nations like Cyprus and greece.
> Just because your oncologist doesn't realize you've been cured doesn't mean that's not the case.

You're posing a metaphysical argument. Science is limited to what we can establish with evidence.

> Just because you don't know something doesn't mean it isn't true.

And my describing your argument as religious was idiotic? Check you logic. Asserting the truth of things for which there is no evidence is by definition religious.

> The idea that some number of people are cured of cancer every year isn't controversial at all, even among oncologists and scientists.

Absolute nonsense. Scientists require evidence, and there is no evidence. The reason? We don't understand cancer. Even a person who dies 50 years later of unrelated causes after having had cancer is still officially in remission.

To claim a cure, we would need to know the cause to which the cure applies. Then we would need to prove the cure worked. We don't know these things about cancer -- out methods treat symptoms, not causes.

Your claim is like playing Russian Roulette while claiming the gun is actually unloaded -- until it turns out not to be. It's not science, it not evidence, it's superstition.

Apropos, a cancer treatment center was recently taken to task for claiming a higher success rate than their competitors, on the ground that they were only accepting younger, healthier people, so their claims were tainted by sampling error -- but the reason for the debate was not because that center didn't produce cures (no one can do that), but that they they were making remission claims on slippery grounds.

Reading your posts, I see you just don't get science, and modern medicine is evidence-based, i.e. as scientific as possible. This is why oncologists don't commit professional suicide by claiming that anyone is ever cured of cancer.

http://www.everydayhealth.com/blog/zimney-health-and-medical...

"So can we ever really talk about a cancer cure? In general, the answer is no."

"When talking to your doctor about your prognosis (the course and outcome of your disease), be sure to find out exactly what he/she is talking about. If they use the term cure, ask if they really mean remission. If they use the term remission, ask if it’s complete or partial. And if they do talk about remission, ask about the rates at 5, 10 or 20 years. This will help give you an idea of the odds of cancer recurrence within your lifetime."

Q.E.D.
Because the UK and the US are doing what the smaller states in the EU cannot, i.e. devaluing their currency.

If the UK pound falls by X% against most other currencies, this is equivalent (in the long term) to all inhabitants of the UK losing X% of their income.
This is only happening because the government of Cyprus doesn't have the money to do it.

As for other countries they're as safe as their "full faith and credit" and any depository insurance that it covers.
It's very simple, inside the eurozone you can transfer your euro's from dangerous Spanish/Greek/Portuguese bonds and put them into safe German bonds. Even if the euro were to collapse, the German bonds would be redenominated in the new German currency, chances are it would immediately begin to rise vs other currencies.

So you don't have to exit the eurozone area, you just transfer your money from the debtor states to the creditor states. That doesn't make the situation any better particularly it just drives up bond yields in the debtor countries and makes their situation even worse.

Essentially a decision has been made to save the currency and sacrifice the debtor countries which use it. This is just another example.
It does seem to make more sense to just roll your own static site generator rather than try to learn a whole new framework and language like Jekyll, which then might not even give you everything you want. This is particularly true if you where to use a robust templating engine like Jinja2.
"My 20's are gone." Boo-hoo-hoo. You Millennials make me sick with your constant whining.
Well. No he wasn't.

There's also a real possibility that the technology doesn't exist. There's an even greater possibility that it does, and we arn't capable of comprehending it.
> send enough rocket fuel for a return trip

That hasn't been the plan for a long time. NASA's Design Reference Mission, and the one anyone who has studied Mars missions at any point in the past 20 years, is to manufacture fuel on Mars. In fact, you would probably send this equipment to Mars first so that the astronauts going to Mars would have a fully fueled return ship ready and waiting for them before they even take off from Earth.
>But why is the Euro up 16% against the USD and 23.3% against the UK pound over the last 10 years?

Because the Euro is stupid. You don't want your money to be as valuable as possible! Deflation, when not accompanied by fast growth in real GDP, is bad! There's no excuse for the European Central Bank to be running such a tight policy when aggregate demand in the European periphery is so depressed.

But of course nobody trusts the banking system in the periphery, so all the money from there is rushing into the center causing deflation in the periphery and inflation in Germany. And then the ECB sets policy to accommodate Germany, and threatens to screw the peripheral countries even harder if they don't make the supply side changes it wants.
In "Nineteen Eighty-Four" they talked about telescreens with cameras and microphones spying on you in your home.

In 2013, we willingly have webcams and mobile phones which can conceivably monitor us the same way, and governments that are willing to do so.

Google ain't the only Big Brother.
This makes sense to me. The black navbar is all links with no context. A link in-context is much more valuable: instead of a link to "play" on the top, they can put links to relevant app or media purchases in the search results. instead of a link to 'calendar' at the top when you're using gmail, calendar events can show up in the gmail UI. Instead of a link to +, they've got personal search results showing up.

the other thing i've been seeing lately is google-now style notifications in the top corner of many google properties showing my google+ contacts' birthdays. If they expand that from just birthdays to a full-on google now experience, that's a whole lot more in-context links to google properties.
Ask HN: Would anyone hire an Economics Major Summer Intern in New York City? 
I can hustle, am familiar with code but not proficient, and would consider myself startup literate. My dream is to work hard and learn a lot at a NYC tech company this summer.
Having dealt with teams of developers and existing within them, I doubt this would impact them in any positive way. It would in some animal-farm-esque way empower an individual rather than everyone. People have so many differing opinions on such things, standardisation is hard.
Well, Europe has different dynamics, rooted in ancient times... and a lot of inertia.

It's hard to steer all people in a certain direction, especially from quite different cultures.

We're not Europeans; we're Romanians, Greeks, French, Cypriots and so on. We have a sense of belonging, not to each other, but to our individual nations.

It is a "hodgepodge", but we must keep it together somehow. What happened last century must never happen again.

I'm really keeping my fingers crossed for the EU; not necessarily for my generation, but for my kids and grankids.

USA on the other hand is an "engineered" country, people got there relatively recently and said "Ok, that's it, let's do things this way". Of course you will see more homogeneity and agreement.
And nationalism actually helps keep stuff together instead of dividing people.
They will certainly find people. However these people won't die of old age. Radiation alone will make sure of that.

Whether this project has any point at all is a question of rational thinking vs. mass psychology. Scientists will tell you that it is pointless to send humans to Mars. All research can be done with robots - cheaper and without endangering human life.

However, a human colony on Mars might generate irrational public excitement which in return could lead to governments investing more money into space travel and colonization again.

I said irrational excitement because we know we can do it. NASA simply hasn't done it because there is neither money nor a rational reason for it. If the US government wanted to NASA could have a Mars colony up and running in no time. As the article points out the technology already exists.

Personally I believe the irrational excitement factor will be a strong one and thus these people who basically sign up to die of radiation poisoning will end up being true "space pioneers".

However, I doubt that Mars One will actually manage to secure the necessary funding. So I am not getting excited about this yet.
Ask HN: Comments are disabled in this story, why?
The ECB does effectively print money by buying commercial banks' bonds with newly created money.

Draghi said last year that the ECB is prepared to purchase "unlimited amounts", so if there is a bank run, the central bank will fill up the banks' balance sheets as necessary (in theory).
10% is in the neighbourhood of cost-of-doing-business for a CIS corporate shell. The fact that there was so much pain inflicted on small accounts means someone has an eye out for the island's future as an offshore financial centre (read: Russian tax haven).
Offshore deposits move from Cyprus to Latvia
The language that we use to describe things is actually one of my biggest interests. I usually cite five phrases and terms that I hate with a passion.

1. Technology

2. Computer stuff

3. Computer person

4. Virus

5. Anti Virus

I could go on about why, but I'll save that for a full blog post. In the meantime, use your imagination.
- lose 10% of your money

Allowing the haircut will lead to bank runs which will cause the banks to go bust anyway. There's a high change that it will also cause bank runs in other countries like Spain, Italy and Portugal. Spanish people are already in the streets protesting. "Trust" will be gone. Cyprus is systemic, whether they want to accept that or not.
I think this stems from the memory these people hold that the item (whatever it is, doughnut, site access etc) was once free. People will wonder "why did this change?". It could be many things, but people will most likely jump to the easiest conclusion, the seller is greedy.

Using the doughnuts analogy, I wonder how things would have worked out if they continued to give away the plain doughnuts for nothing, but added a new line of premium iced doughnuts which attracted a charge? Personally I wouldn't mind, and I think that a lot of people would be ok with this.

Stemming from this, you really need to have a good reason to charge people for something they were previously using for free.

Personally, I don't think you can start charging for something that was previously free (without significant value add). By all means offer a paid upgrade with particular value add, but never do the wrong thing by your (thus far) loyal users.
Good luck man, even though you have the community behind you, ultimately it's still you vs. the world.
You are 100% right, I guess I was just taking the concept to a place where I could mentally weaponize it. Thanks!
Rails is not concurrent. Forking the process does not make it concurrent, either. Parallel, yes, but not concurrent.

Concurrency is the ability to do work on multiple things at once, while parallelism is the ability to execute multiple things at once. For example, an operating system running on a uniprocessor is concurrent, but not parallel. Another example is HAProxy, which is highly concurrent but not parallel(it can handle several thousands connections, but is single-threaded).

The distinction is important when you're trying to scale. Adding more threads/processes does not help, as you quickly reach OS limits(eg: C10k problem). Having a concurrent web stack(nodejs, EventMachine, Play, Xitrum, Twisted, Yaws, etc.) does, as it allows extremely large concurrency with a limited resource impact, whereas adding more processes quickly hits memory limits(at least on Heroku).
The real problem here is not that depositors are getting a "haircut", which they should if they invest in non-profitable bank, but that the insurance on deposits under Euro 100,000 is no longer good.

In a theoretical free market, depositors would lose all their money if a bank goes bust, just as stock holders lose their money if a company goes bust.

Banks, however, hold a particular role in a modern economy that regular companies don't. As such, deposit insurance is a necessity for overall financial stability. In the case at hand, the decision by the Cypriot gov't to effectively cancel deposit insurance for smaller depositors is their biggest mistake, since it decreases confidence in both the banks and the gov't.
That's microgravity, or what other people call "zero gravity."

We honestly don't know how much gravity people need to survive. Your talk of people's chests collapsing because you read it in science fiction is just that: science fiction. HG Wells is great but he's not really a good source of science for modern astrophysics.

Odds are, there are many bodily functions that work just fine in a little bit of gravity, and others that scale up as you get more and more gravity.

We really need to get some spinning space stations set up to find this stuff out. Unfortunately, NASA has a really big fetish for "let's spend money on microgravity research" instead of just doing the obvious thing of seeing how 1/6 g or 3/8 g affects people and systems.
Yup, it just depends on what mentality you take with you. If you sign up for this with the mentality that you're going to have lots of fun and how amazing Mars is going to be, obviously the disappointment is going to set it very quickly. But if you go there with the goal of building everything from the ground up and knowing that it's going to be a very crappy place to live in for quite a while, then I think it would be hard to be disappointed. As you said, there is a lot of work to do and each little project would just add to the excitement of living there. At least for me it would.
With current technology (both existing and theoretical), I don't think you'd be able to create a rocket capable of returning with healthy people (even just the returning bit is a practical nightmare). Also, most people underestimate just how big the radiation problem is in space, since we have an earth-sized magnet to mostly protect us (you can't just make a second earth and attach it to your spacecraft). The apollo astronauts are really quite lucky to not be exposed. http://sciencefocus.com/blog/how-apollo-astronauts-avoided-d...

The "send people to die on mars" idea isn't about developing the technology to allow travelling back and forth, it is a compromise with todays technology to say "let's go and explore, until we have the technology". So you can't shoot down the argument with "when we have the technology...".
Have you tried merging geometry?

http://learningthreejs.com/blog/2011/10/05/performance-mergi...
It is strange to forgo the improvements that customized dotfiles allow just because you don't want a system to manage those dotfiles.
The placebo effect applies to other types of surgery as well. Back in 2002 there was a study published in the New England Journal of Medicine that concluded that arthroscopic knee surgery yielded results no better than placebo surgery. That article is cited in both of the linked articles at the bottom of this article, and also in this Wikipedia entry:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sham_surgery
> What exactly is your point?

The euro is up 16% because there are more dollars in circulation chasing the same number of euros. Same for the pound.

A deflationary environment in Europe (what are prices doing in Greece? What is the Spanish unemployment rate?) is exactly what you would expect, and the Euro up 16% against the USD and 23.3% against the UK pound is evidence of that.

Or to put it another way: You quote evidence that supports the point you are trying to refute.

(Perhaps you are being confused by the term "up" in currency exchanges? It makes exports more expensive, which makes the deflation worse since fewer employees will be needed.)
Who Protects Freedom Of Speech When It Isn’t Profitable To Do So?
Amputate a broken leg? Just how bad do you foresee that injury?

It's not like we can't ship anesthetics up there. It's not like a layman can't set a broken bone, although I dunno if an X-ray machine would be there to see.
Should VCs publicly criticize companies?
I haven't had a chance to look yet, but yes, try merging the geometry first.
Thanks for the mention Charlie, we've just done a huge iteration so we're really excited to release the final bits there. Cheers!
The banks are supposed to open on Tuesday. Extending the bank holiday and blocking international transfers is most likely a violation of the EU treaty which guarantees free movement of capital.

http://ec.europa.eu/internal_market/capital/framework/treaty...
Weev's IAmA the day before sentencing on CFAA violations in ATT iPad case
Phil Schiller is Apple's marketing head. It's his job so manipulate Apple (and Android's) public image. IIRC, he regularly mocks Android and has done so for several years (see this link from 2011 [1])

[1] http://www.gottabemobile.com/2011/10/04/apple-mocks-droid-bi...
Thanks for the mention, indeed UK-based :)
Ironic how?

If you're going to accuse an entire industry of trying to undermine the rights of people, you have to provide evidence and facts, not just a bunch of scary words.

My response to said sensationalized accusation is obviously not subject to the same requirements. Or are you just being deliberately dense?
>Fuck you

Feel free to disregard my opinion and express your disagreement in whatever terms best reflect you as a person.
> with newly created money.

No. This is exactly the problem: The echoes of the German hyperinflation of the 1930s are still being heard, so Merkel and crowd have repeatedly stood against printing.

As for the ECB purchases, those were "sterilized" as opposed to "quantitative easing", which is what the Fed does.
http://blogs.wsj.com/eurocrisis/2012/09/06/the-ecb-steriliza...