skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Clever. I only figured this one out recently myself.

Here's the core issue: "economics" or "the economy" or basically any ideological, rule-based mode of controlling human conduct is all really just a massively-parallel distributed computation/program running on meatware substrate-nodes. The Unfriendly AI is already here, it's called capitalism, it already rules the world, and it runs on us.

The computer is unfriendly, and we are the computer. This is why it has become a political act to remind people that they actually do value things other than capital accumulation.
Back in the day when RSS was all new and shiny there were quite a few people that saw RSS as the mechanism that would help blogs become conversations (structurally speaking). Somewhat like on USENET, RSS would be the thing that made it possible to have discussions across blogs and for a reader to be able to follow these discussions. I never quite bought this, but I was willing to entertain the idea.

Of course, this never really materialized. What we got was ... well, a mess. I think mainly because a lot of people tried to reinvent the wheel and did so badly.

I never saw RSS as something portals would be interested in. (And any time a site's business idea is to keep someone on their site for as long as possible, what you have is, in my opinion, a traditional, late 90s portal).

(Back in the early 00s I worked on web crawlers and to me RSS was interesting because it could have been used to aid us in finding fresh content. I talked to a few site owners back then about why they were so reluctant to add it and the sentiment was largely "we want people to find our content from our front page")
In fact, the article they reference cites that the vast majority of the professors actually think MOOCs are WORTH THE HYPE!

This article is sensationalist for sure.
I really love this philosophy as well, but if this is in place, you need to be very clear as to why someone makes more money than another. There needs to be standards in place, time limitations etc. Transparency is great, but often times one person makes more money than another because of a combination of skill set, negotiating power, gender and relationship status, not to mention relationships with other people in the company and the word we hate (favoritism).

So while I am 100% on board with transparency, I also believe it can have a backlash. There's no way to predict it, but creating path for someone to increase their salary and letting it be known before they sign the contract is a good idea.
> -My account balance went from 10 to 0 to 10

That could potentially indicate a database infrastructure problem. Eventually consistent databases can issue responses that appear to travel backwards in time. And [1] says this:

Coinbase uses MongoDB for their primary datastore for
their web app, api requests, etc. Coinbase is a
decentralized, digital currency that is changing
the world of payments.

[1] http://www.mongodb.org/about/production-deployments/
I post links to new blog posts on G+ with a nice lede, then gently push e-mail subscription and RSS on the site. That's all G+ will get from me until it's useful for more than SEO.
> A standard should NEVER ever be controlled/represented/defended by a group of companies with monetary interests.

You mean like VP8/WebM by Google?
We're currently at 16,000+ items and 61 GB uploaded. Nice work.

Edit: 25 minutes later and we are at 18,700+ items and 67 GB uploaded. Distributed computing at its finest!
Twitter 7 years ago today
Sure, we're all rooting for them. But a mod just deleted the "YC ('12)" off the headline. What should I think about that?
The intent of this is to help people access web content and applications, but it hasn't worked very well in the past, and it won't work very well now, because "accessibility" is very hard to define in concrete terms that a programmer can work with. Most organizations cheat and limit the definition to "can be read by a screen reader" and perhaps "can be navigated with a keyboard." Few if any address other accessibility problems, because it's just too damn hard to test for them all. (Reading comprehension, for example.)

A much better approach IMHO is to encourage companies to create or open their APIs, and to encourage those who need better accessibility or their advocates to create alternate interfaces to their services. Think of it like a "marketplace of user interfaces".

Perhaps instead of passing a law to force existing UI's to change, the government should work with private industry to encourage open APIs.
If websites want their business they will use the alt and title tag appropriately, I could be in the minority thinking we all ready have too many laws.
My "go to" answer in that situation is to describe the kind of role I'm looking for, and then give some reasons why I think their company matches that. If I'm wrong, and they're a terrible match, then I don't want them to hire me.
Dilbert on dongles [2005]
Take a look at the ownership breakdowns here:

http://www.census.gov/compendia/statab/cats/agriculture/farm...

826, "Farms by Size and Type of Organization" is probably the more interesting report.

There is some room at the top for your cartoon owners there, but the typical farm, by acreage and number, is a medium sized place (still hundreds of acres) that is closely held by a family.
They need to indent their stylesheet, but that's an interesting perspective, and a nice overview for those needing a refresher as to the history of Google's tactic.
Deal With It: the art and science of creating GIFs
The Pirate Bay blog continues to detail their saga, but it's more joking than anything else, as of late (see the NK hosting joke). They claimed that they were hosted on redundant cloud providers, but as it turns out, they still have centralized servers that can be taken down.

I honestly think that it's a combination of being aware of what the servers are doing (security cameras, backups) and being able to split to a new country when bad things happen is how they've accomplished it thus-far. They usually have 12-48 hour downtime periods, then pop back up in a new country with a new blog post.
Wanting to maintain a salary consistent with what you've been earning before you join a company does not make you an asshole. This "asshole" label comes off as a strong-arm negotiation tactic on your part. (I may be wrong, but that's how it appears. If I am wrong, please enlighten me).

And there is at least decent correlation between ability and the compensation you've received over the past several years.
> Ryan Avent, who argues that Google has been providing crucial public infrastructure...

Krugman proceeds assuming that were true, but it's not. There are plenty of free alternatives to Google Reader. All this proves that old saying; never pick a fight with someone who buys ink by the barrel.
Interesting. No L.A. apartments. I wonder if that was on purpose...
Http://www.addthis.com/bookmark.php?v=250&pub=pioc92
Right, but plenty are attempting to sidestep this comfort level and any contextualization, demanding that women enjoy lame dick jokes for the comfort of the men around them.
(YC XX) is generally only used on HN for launch and funding announcements.
A practice that can improve results in intraday program trades is to only trade with the market, or only trade the direction that coincides with your meta analysis. In this case that might translate into only taking positions on days the market futures are up (above a threshold) pre-market and/or only trading tickers that you expect to rise over a 6-12 month timeframe.

While far from a silver bullet these can help you avoid buying positions when the market is hopeless, or trying to play a statistically losing game. It might be worth testing.

Make sure you include all trading fees and software license costs in your models.
There needs to be standards in place, time limitations etc.

Absolutely. You can't have transparency and no way for people to raise their salary.

Transparency is great, but often times one person makes more money than another because of a combination of skill set, negotiating power, gender and relationship status, not to mention relationships with other people in the company and the word we hate (favoritism).

There's a way to sidestep all those. First of all, negotiating power does not enter into the equation at all, since the pay is all public. It's (rightly) illegal to discriminate on gender (and I'll go headbutt a wall quite hard if the thought "we can pay her less because she's a woman" ever dares to enter my head). Skill set is measured by the results you bring to the company, not by some vague abstract measure. As for nepotism or favouritism, that just takes some minimal self-discipline, imho...

So while I am 100% on board with transparency, I also believe it can have a backlash. There's no way to predict it, but creating path for someone to increase their salary and letting it be known before they sign the contract is a good idea.

Too many people, entrepreneurs and others, seem to be afraid of paying more money to employees... I find this whole fear ridiculous. I want to have a good reason to pay someone more, because that means they're bringing a multiple of that extra value to the company. If I pay someone £16k a year, it means they're bringing relatively little value to the company. If I pay someone £50k a year, that means they're bringing several times that value to the company.

In short, being afraid of offering ways for people to earn more seems silly to me.
Wow, I never realized this... So interesting!

I remember tossing my Nokia 3310 to a friend, and I completely overshot him. It hit a cement wall and just blew apart (disassembled) into several parts. After I pieced it back together I couldn't believe that it still worked. Try that with an iPhone...
Mostly because the unemployment system compels you to prove you're looking for work, and volunteering throws up a red flag saying, "I'm not looking for work, I'm dilly-dallying around volunteering for arts groups and children's scouting, ahahaha!"
Someone should hire you just for your ability to name your projects. "How'd a nitwit like you get so tasteful?"
This is a great blog to follow the progress on that project: http://thelaunchbox.blogspot.com/
The only viable alternative you named was Flipboard.

Reddit, HN, Facebook, Twitter and G+ are all user-sponsored aggregators. If I see content there, it must have come from somewhere. Where did I find the articles i share on Facebook? On my RSS feed.

One alternative is to follow your websites you like on a social service like Facebook. That's not as helpful as RSS.

- No read/unread tracking
- Depends on news feed algorithms
- Lots of noise

RSS mean I never miss an update. Your alternatives don't.
For what it's worth, they seem okay on Opera in Windows 7.

http://imageshack.us/a/img195/3558/fontsn.png
Thanks! I've contributed to an interview or two, but I haven't yet been tasked with the responsibility to cut one short if a serious red flag like that came up.
I've had some coins in my Coinbase account since last month. Two days ago I tried to transfer from an external wallet, and its still pending.

So that can't be something with the coins just not being bought yet.
It's a pretty cool idea. Although it's a tad simplistic way to consider the immune system, our bodies mount two types of responses: Th1 and Th2. Th1 favors our immune cells directly killing our own cells and baddies. Th2 favors our immune cells producing lots of antibodies which then tag baddies for destruction.

In Crohn's disease, our bodies, for whatever reason, seem to be skewed towards producing a really unnecessary Th1 response in the gut which causes our bodies to self-destruct the GI tract. By giving hookworms to a patient, the hope is that the needed worm-killing Th2 response (worms are too big for really an effective Th1 response and need to be coated in antibodies and essentially repeatedly nuked with cytotoxic chemicals) will shift the balance in the patient's gut from Th1 towards Th2, thus eliminating their Crohn's manifestations and symptoms. Really cool idea.
I don't think that exchange rates/fees is it. I've had some purchased coins in my coinbase account for over a month. Tried two days ago to transfer to an external wallet. Still pending. That shouldn't have to go through any cost really to transfer it right?
Sl: a steam locomotive in your terminal
The dirty little secret of online learning: Students are bored and dropping out
Show HN: English language movies in Milano
Preface: I live in Milano, a very international city but with only 3 venues showing movies in their original language.

I speak a fairly good English and enjoy watching British and American movies;
I die a bit everytime I check the "official" website of the ONLY film festival (called 'Sound & Motion') that actually shows movies in English - http://goo.gl/t9MGh -

I'm a software developer.
Always been using Java but always willing to fool with the new kids in town.

So, together with a close friend and dev (Ruby/PHP), we started re-thinking the whole thing and set down a few points:
- we were going to use nodeJS;
- we w to use Twitter Bootstrap;
- we needed mongoDB.

We came up with: http://soundmotion.it

What do you think?

@soundmotionit
@mfirry
@dhinus

hello@smallcapitals.it

PS: we named "our thing" smallcapitals and we can't remeber why :)
Soil freezing wasn't new when it was used on the Big Dig, but it was either the first time it was used in the USA, or it was the first time it was used on such a massive scale in the USA (similar to the use of slurry walls, which had been used in the USA, but not at that scale - in fact the Big Dig had to bring over German & French equipment along with German/French workers to run the slurry wall diggers since there was no one in the USA qualified to run the machines).

One issue the Big Dig ran into with soil freezing was complications during the thaw process. The soil was frozen to that the project could horizontally "jack" precast tunnel pieces under existing Amtrak & MBTA railroad road tracks. When the freezing and tunnel jacking process was completed, the project let the soil "thaw", but the thawing takes years. During the thaw, there were settlement problems that caused the tracks to sink a noticeable amount. Nothing is ever as simple as it seems!

(worked on the Big Dig as a consultant from 1998-2001)
Offering a developer the option to go into sales is like telling an author that (s)he should stop wasting all this time writing books and get into the sales department of the publishing company -- regardless of the quality of their writing.

Developers can have very high stress jobs (in critical infrastructure software, which there is a great deal of, software bugs kill people). The hours you put in in as a developer in a start-up shop is mind boggling.

Developers often have to invest months (or years) of time and effort before their work can come out as a product, and their value is exceptionally hard to quantify.

EDIT: sorta, rewrote most of it.
Hmmm.... extremely true. Even when we're not talking about the criminal underclass, I wouldn't hire an unemployed frat-boy type to take care of my apartment (too much nerdery about the place) or cook my meals (what's he going to know about kashrut or how to make curry?).
Are you implying that there's something wrong with the state of work wear?
When did coinbase join YC? Was it S12 or W12?
As a New Yorker, not being able to filter out apartments with broker fees isn't a hugely compelling value proposition.
Must mean that we're trying to hide the fact that we funded them, right? It could only mean that.
> Money is about power and is a zero sum game.
> If someone increases their share of the pie,
> then someone else necessarily loses out.

Except this is plain wrong. I know a Wikipedia link may offend some people, but then again, calling economics a zero-sum game can, too:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zero%E2%80%93sum_game#Economics
Exactly. They tried that in France at a moment where everybody was euphoric: the two germanies had recently been re-unified and GDPs of nearly everybody were growing like crazy.

Instead of France trying to reimburse its own public state debt they decided to move to 35 hours / week.

We can see the results now: Germany's economy is one of the best in the eurozone, they managed to stay at "only" 80% of public debt and are enjoying a modest GDP growth. Meanwhile France reached 100% public debt and is dangerously close to a disaster (youth unemployment is rising, the private sector isn't motivated anymore, austerity will need to kick in or France won't be able to re-finance itself on the markets).

The loss of competitivity of France is directly attributed to moving to 35 hours / week and is going to be the main reason why France is going to lose its status as the world's fifth biggest power. By 2017 Brazil's going to be in front of France. Heck, if Holland and the socialist gets re-elected there's a far from zero probability that France won't be part of the G8 anymore by 2022!

That is very concerning but, sadly, there's nothing else to hope from socialists who are spreading hatred of the entrepreneurial spirit and hatred of those who succeeded, in the name of the nanny state spraying loyal socialist voters with money inflating their sense of entitlement.
"RSS industry"?!

I thought the whole point of RSS is that it's decentralized. Feeds don't have to come from a single source and no one client is needed to view them.

One could argue that the demise of Reader is the best thing to happen to RSS in along time as this supposedly decentralized and decentralizing standard became too reliant on one vendor.

Is it really Google's fault that RSS was overshadowed by the emergence of social networks to the point that it doesn't make economic sense for them to keep maintaining it?! I don't’ think so.
Neither is it a commentary on standards, it’s merely a company that is acting in its own perceived interests, something companies are wont to do.

As for the “Industry” part, last I checked those who are actually building a Reader replacement are delighted with opportunity:

http://blog.feedly.com/2013/03/23/an-awesome-skin-list-view-...

http://blog.newsblur.com/post/45632737156/three-months-to-sc...

http://blog.digg.com/post/45355701332/were-building-a-reader

When a writer this associated with Microsoft starts framing this situation as yet another flimsy accusation of anti-competitive behaviour, I tend to be skeptic.
I'm a developer, and I used to feel this way. But there are 2 problems with this perspective. First, developers' contributions are much harder to quantify. And second, sales and marketing is really hard, as proven by all the well-engineered projects that have gone nowhere.
How can a non-developer be a developer evangelist? I'd prefer to get my share of dev evangelism from someone who actually uses (and is one of the developers of) the tools & technologies s/he's promoting. (a great example of this is Paul Irish)
These things share what is fashionable, not what is important. If I find an interesting, low volume blog, I can subscribe to its feed and I will get an update when content is added. With your scenario, I might get an update if content is added, if I can find it between guff about conference scandals. It's simply not comparable, unless you're forcing worthy content (in my judgement) to have the same value as transitory celebrity gossip.

These services give me a good chance of discovering things, RSS lets me follow them. As a case in point, there are a lot of things in my RSS feed that I have discovered from HN because one single post from them made it to the front page, but no subsequent one has. But I get to see the updates because I subscribed to their feeds. That subsequent ones haven;t made it to the HN front page is absolutely not a value judgement on their worthiness - unless, as I say, you think 5 same-but-different articles on who said what and to whom at a conference is more important than the infrequent technical article by a researcher.

In short, I want to follow the stuff on the right of the bell curve, not in the middle. The stuff that mostly floats to the top of what you're advocating (HN, fb, twitter) is firmly in the middle. A lot of the people posting the content I find interesting don't have twitter feeds announcing their posts - that kind of thing is often the preserve of this week's preferred javascript framework project. My RSS feeds allowed me a much higher SNR than any of these things. So please don't compare them, as if they can serve the same purpose. That's nonsense.
How do you find Durandal? It looks pretty much exactly what we want
I've toyed with this kind of thing before and things can look good in simulation, until I incorporated realistic effects of:

- trading commissions & fees
- capital gains taxes
- currency exchange (for those of us "unamericans")

then all of a sudden blammo, I decided I'm better off putting "investment" cash into my mortgage
Perhaps they were running the client that got rolled back and got screwed on a big double spend. Pure speculation but that did happen recently.
... what about 1/231 of a CEO?

http://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-231-times-greater-ave...
Having being involved in efforts to standardize AI components roughly 10 years ago I can say that, even for somewhat delimited domains, this is not a trivial goal.

I really hope their effort can provide a strong enough push, even if not like the one that go us the Internet. Good luck!
Rising Star: The price of Daring Fireball
Might I ask, what's your next planned game/genre?
Wanting to maintain a salary consistent with what you've been earning before you join a company does not make you an asshole.

Agreed. But we're talking about desires, not actions, then.

This "asshole" label comes off as a strong-arm negotiation tactic on your part. (I may be wrong, but that's how it appears. If I am wrong, please enlighten me).

Not at all... However, if/when on the end of a conversation with someone we're hiring, they say "But I need more money", then I explain the system to them. If they then say "I really like your company, but I'm afraid I won't be able to take the offer because it's too low" that's fine. That's not being an asshole, that's just being realistic about what kind of role is a good fit for you. After all, if you have a massive mortgage and 3 kids, getting a massive pay cut - however short-term it may be - is simply not an option, no matter how much you want the role.

If, on the other hand, having all the stuff in this discussion basically explained to them, including why I can't give them extra pay initially because it will damage the company culture, they then proceed to insist that they want to get some extra money somehow "because they're worth it", and start explaining to me why they're worth the extra money, and so on, then either they just don't get it (and then they're a bit stupid), or they just don't care about the company they're thinking of joining, and in that case I would be happy to declare them an asshole.

And there is at least decent correlation between ability and the compensation you've received over the past several years.

Agreed, but I didn't talk about "earning a higher salary", I talked about demanding a higher starting salary in a context where it has been explained that that's not possible.
It was a logging service at Google back when I was working as a pager monkey. There were some people who really wanted me to get it integrated with one of our tools.

I didn't know anything about the movie at the time and so didn't get the reference.
My mistake. Thanks for the correction. (And my apologies, pg)
bookstores and coffee shops as a means to extort money out of them.
Several just shut down. (http://www.utsandiego.com/uniontrib/20060729/
news_1n29pinnoc...)

Sounds intresting, but the link is broken...
I thought the transactions were migrated over successfully?