skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Awesome. My wife and I have actually taken classes with and grown tomatoes from the folks mentioned in the article. I recommend it if you can and are nearby.
Openweathermap to Google-Weather-API
You say that the modern economic system as it runs has large oscillations and busts, and you are perturbed that Marxists say "I told you so" when a bust happens. But US mainstream economists through the twentieth century did not say that the economy came with large oscillations and busts. How many US economists even in the late 1990s said that the economy would run into big busts in the future? The people who predict correctly are marginalized by a media controlled by capital, and the Jim Cramers of the world are free to continue their panglossian bromides and predictions, no matter how often they turn up false.

Five hundred years ago, the HN class equivalents would be clergy and lower (and some upper) nobles. The majority of people would be praising feudalism, saying that feudalism was common sense etc. Now we are five centuries later, in a different economic system, and the majority of people here praise the economic system they are in as the best one, saying it makes sense etc. In 1935, the intelligentsia in the USSR praised their economic system, said it was common sense etc. - why shouldn't they have? The western world was in a depression while their economy went full steam ahead. Despite the world having seen four economic systems (hunting-gathering, slavery, feudalism, capitalism), and the sparks of a possible fifth one (socialism), it's not surprising that the majority of people under the current economic system see it as being, unlike its three predecessors, as permanent, lasting forever, as being common sense etc. The majority of people felt the same way about serfdom centuries ago. Many felt this way even one century ago, when most of Europe was run by kings.
Oh! I take that back, thank you.
I dont think I'm doing it wrong. I do what you say, a quick note. Maybe two sentences. That's not a cover letter though, like GP is requiring. It's certainly not more information than is on my resume. The thought of a cover letter that exhaustive is a little bit crazy, frankly.

If it sounds like I'm complaining, it's not because I'm frustrated, but because it's slightly offensive to see that being demanded. In my experience, their internal recruiters monitoring inbounds are usually ringing me before my finger is even off the send button. They don't seem to look for or care about a cover letter, and I haven't had trouble getting offers, even from top tier companies. And honestly, I don't even think I'm that impressive. From what I can tell, anyone who has fogged a mirror at a half-respectable tech company already will at least get a phone screen these days.

When I was previously involved in hiring, I don't recall ever seeing cover letters on inbounds either. When asked in person by potential candidates, I always told them not to.
This is an idea Joe and I came up with tonight after almost dying from accidental carbon monoxide poisoning, would love to get the feedback from the Hacker News community.
That was pretty incredible, I've never seen the northern lights from a plane.

Also, thank you for choosing music that was not some airy/indie ambient song.
> we have been basing transportation on burning dead dinosaurs for over 100 years yet, and there has not been a single new car company in the US for that same period (until Tesla).

Where did you get that last claim from? You seem to be missing all the caveats that would be necessary to make it true. Did you perhaps really mean to say something like: there hasn't been a single successful new company (for some definition of "success") in the last X years that survived until today without getting bought by a larger firm? Because the thing you actually did say isn't true.

Unless you can come up with a way to argue that, say, The DeLorean Motor Company wasn't a "new car company" founded in the last "over 100 years". And do the same for a dozen others of less renown (eg, the Muntz Car Company)
Top students will easily command the equivalent of $120k/year in the bay, but many will make much less than this. You may wish to choose an offer that pays way less than this if the experience is more interesting, though.
It's not just about acknowledgement for an application. Perhaps I could understand that. However, like I said, cutting off contact after numerous e-mail exchanges is just bad form. I'd be interested in someone sharing how many replies they get after a "Who's hiring" post.

Also, if you don't plan on responding to applications that you don't like, I don't think you should ask for lengthy cover letters and the like.
This picture shows up sometimes on yc-related websites so I decided to use it on http://ycuniverse.com/see-also . I will give credit to the photographer if anybody knows who took the picture.

Can anybody name everybody in the picture? The only ones I know for sure are PG in blue, David Rusenko of Weebly near-middle, and Garry Tan on the far-right. I'd like to list all the people under the picture, like Beatles' "People We Like And Admire" ( http://www.beatlesagain.com/images/whoswho.jpg ).
You're missing his point, which is a reasonable one. If the human body truly functioned better with modafinil, then evolution would have given us humans that naturally produced modafinil. That isn't the case, so the assumption is there is some downside to the drug, and one that actually outweighs the positives. However, the article makes modafinil seems like an obviously positive thing and that taking the pill fixes some bug in natural human behavior.
A lot of interns are from out of town / out of the country and will have difficulty navigating the commute from Oakland to {SF, Mountain View, Menlo Park} if they're working from a larger organization.

Plus, hanging out on weekends is easier when you're around other (out-of-town) interns, and they will likely be living in {MTV, PA, MP, SJ, SF}.
I need to point this out -- the question of how much sleep I need to function effectively, and how my functioning varies with differing amounts of sleep, is definitely something I can measure.

It is not at all something I can experiment with directly, unless you believe that sleep under the effects of sleep-inducing drugs is equivalent to natural sleep (it isn't, in my experience).
Why is "copyright infringement" even a thing, though? What is sacred about copyrights?

And what value is the owner of a media copyright actually providing to me anymore? They used to add value by distributing media, but now the media is obsolete because technology has given us faster, cheaper, and easier ways to share digital content.

The other thing these companies do is market the content and talent. But "marketing" is not a product, it has no value to the consumer. Their advertising even has negative value because it wastes my time--viewing it is another price that I pay in order to enjoy the content.

So if the copyright-owning companies don't have a value-add, why should I pay them for anything? Because they asked nicely? No, the only conceivable reason to do so is because the law says I have to. And why does the law say I have to? Because those companies wrote the law.

The law certainly isn't there to protect artists. Artists will always make art, regardless of whether others are able to buy exclusive legal rights to sell their art, or not. And the artists get a pitifully small slice of copy sales anyway.
Love Apple Farm's is a great local resource here in the south bay.

I've had mixed results with their tomatoes, mostly for not following their tried and true approach to nurturing your green leafed friends.

This year due to a great pepper plant I bought last year, I've been growing an abundant number of seedlings of assorted types. I plan on following the best practices from Love Apple for tomatoes, but will also look into nurturing the remaining plants.

The one thing I've found in raising your own plants from seeds is how much literature is dedicated to interacting with your seedlings.

I enjoy my time when I can work at home and interact with my seedlings.

If in the south bay and interested in some tomatoes or peppers, feel free to ping me. <username> at gmail.
I'm glad to see that others are having the same experience and I don't have some incredible expectations from employers.

I feel a lot of employers here will get defensive, however my rant wasn't a blanket statement applying to everyone. Employers need to understand that just as poorly prepared job-seekers make the hiring process frustrating, so do poor employers.
Part of the team is Canadian, but visa issues are complex. Once you land an offer with a megacorp, their lawyers should try to help you land the appropriate visas. Avoid smaller organizations if you're international.
not true. I took ritalin in high school, and when I took a whole pill, it made me feel like a zombie. I was able to scale back to 1/5th of a pill and still be able to focus. Those pills were already pretty small, so I'd just smash it and dump approximately 1/5th of the powder in my orange juice.
This falls under "you need an accountant and a lawyer", and probably would be out of scope for a website like this.

If you've had a bad experience, you could write a blog post about it and send it to the maintainers -- maybe they'll include it as a guest post.
I was wondering if that's something common to see, or if the camera might be picking up light in a less visible spectrum.
I have had no trouble compiling from source. Are you trying to use a PPA?
Using PGD to design deafness in child
Preconditions Should be Checked Explicitly
Yes, exactly. That's why claiming the salary has anything to do with productivity is absurd. It's a combined measurement of how badly the company wants your skillset and how well you can negotiate.
A tablet isn't pure active ingredient. "PROVIGIL tablets contain 100 mg or 200 mg of modafinil and the following inactive ingredients: lactose, microcrystalline cellulose, pregelatinized starch, croscarmellose sodium, povidone, and magnesium stearate." [1]

The 100 mg pill is a 13 mm oval. [2]

So it seems entirely plausible to me to use a pill cutter to cut it into 8 or 10 roughly equal parts.

[1] http://dailymed.nlm.nih.gov/dailymed/drugInfo.cfm?id=14770
[2] http://pillbox.nlm.nih.gov/pillimage/search_results.php?geti...
Does that cost of living includes healthcare?
Thanks for bringing the concept of velocity to attention. I'd been looking for a metric just like this to compare Bitcoin to other currencies. It would be interesting now to compare the market cap of Bitcoin to currencies with similar velocity values.
However, I think it would be really important to get a velocity value for Bitcoin only including transactions for goods and services, not including trading transactions with other currencies. Bitcoin's high velocity value could (and I suspect it does) just mean there is a lot of speculative trading going on and still very few real transactions in Bitcoin.
Yes, those couple of hours right after it snows can be quite beautiful in a big city. If you want to cure yourself of your nostalgia you can just imagine the couple of hours after that. When the snow starts melting and everything turns into grey/black mush. I guess this is what it must feel like to stop taking Modafinil.
I like sieve. A lot.
Programmer Productivity – Interruptions, Meetings and Working Remotely
Skip a dose, and there would be hell to pay. “I really would feel it. It was sort of like being thrust into dirty, messy reality, as opposed to a clean, neatly organized place. It was like crashing, and I actually found what would happen is the anxiety that got dialed down on the way in, when you were coming off it, all of a sudden you went through the reverse. So I got incredibly anxious. Eventually that concerned me.”

Wow, this sounds amazing! Sign me up!
Site is down, YT mirror: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8j36Erxd5rc
>I don't see the MPAA/RIAA suing Youtube because people are posting funny videos of their cat on there.

So you've never seen this image before?

http://blog.asmallorange.com/wp-content/uploads/youtube-copy...

If YouTube weren't afraid of being sued by the MPAA, RIAA, or TV producers, why would they remove allegedly infringing content and replace it with these claim notices?
Its all about who you know

Yeah that last part sounded a little bad, like nepotism-bad.
Oh, totally.

Nearly everytime I can get my resume into the paws of a decision maker, I get the job, but to do so I need to wind my way thru HR.
Not only is it a math error to multiply it out like that, but it's also wrong to extend the logic to electric cars. Electric cars are likely to have LESS than the AVERAGE CAR total mileage, because (a) they're less useful in places where people need to drive extra-long distances, (b) the batteries get worse and worse at holding a charge over time, just as cellphone batteries do. (c) it's still a rapidly-advancing technology, meaning older models will get obsolete quickly and need to be retired faster than they do with a more mature technology.
Your problem is you are confusing skepticism for fear.

Evolution has given us a brain that is so complex that we still have very little understanding of how it actually functions. So do I believe that a drug company came up with a way to improve upon evolution and make the brain better? No, I do not. And I think that's a pretty reasonable initial stance to take given the facts at hand.
Why don't raisin consumers have standing to challenge an arrangement that inflates the price of raisins?
As I wrote, I think rich people are a form of concentration of power, and this could be used to create factories that make products that increase our standard of living or it could also easily be used to, e.g., lobby congress to create stricter laws to fund for-profit prisons. So the Henry Ford types can happen, but it's not guaranteed that they will IMO.

EDIT: To be clear; I mean "fund for-profit prisons with prisoners."
Unless this is your first job out of college, I dont think GPA is relevant.
The Holy Grail!
Yeah, apple is obviously so much more valuable than bitcoin because having computers in prettier cases or phones with prettier user interfaces is incalculably more valuable than access to a provably fair and reliable financial system not captive to the global banking cartels or their crony governments.

This place is really starting to depress me.
I don't know why people would experiment with pills like that. I used to pull all nighters when I worked for a big law firm. Sometimes I would pull worse -- I would spend forty hours in a row in the office. I did not take any pills.

Let me tell you its no fun. Even if this pill solves the depression and inevitable mental issues, I doubt it helps the rest of your body handle the lack of sleep.

Your body just tends to fall apart. You start spraining random muscles (even ones you did not know you had), you gain weight very quickly, etc. This is just not worth it. Just do us all a favor and get some sleep.
Ubuntu: sucks. Unity. "Erm, I have root."

Fedora: sucks. Red Hat FTL.

Debian: I like Debian, but I think their code of conduct is too strict. However, it is constrained to the mailing list and contains reasoning. The part about curse words on packet radio is amusing.

Mandrivia [sic]: wtf
The question was, "Why do you believe a society can prosper without allowing people to become rich?"
109 paying subscribers in the first month
Marxists are not the only ones saying "I told you so", is my larger point.

Every Hedgehog casts the events in the world in terms of their unifying theory of everything.
It's not uncommon - I see them occasionally on the SFO to LHR night flights. The photos here are very good, better than I've ever seen with the naked eye, but that might be because you can adjust the exposure with a camera.
"What is certainly true is that Gold is a very good long-term store of value, and the prices of Gold relative to other things, such as a loaf of bread, a barrel of oil, a parcel of land are quite stable over a long period of time."

Wanna take a bet on that?

http://www.macrotrends.org/1340/gold-vs-the-cpi-historical-c...

Gold is out there, sometimes swinging by 1,700% over a decade... while the CPI doesn't change any more than ~100% / decade.

Dollars (and investments measured in dollars: ie Inflation-protected Bonds like TIPS) retain their value better than Gold, while providing a more stable platform. A 10-year note at even 2% offers you 21% growth over 10 years... much better than the long "valleys" that Gold investments suffered across the last century. (And with historic rates sometimes hitting 14.56%, it was possible for 10-year notes to hit 370% growth over 10 years).

Gold doesn't grow in value in the long term. And as shown in Gold Volatility Index, Gold is also a very unstable investment historically.

In fact, Gold's volatility today is the same as the S&P 500 Index.

http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^VIX http://finance.yahoo.com/q?s=^GVZ

So it is just as volatile as stocks... while offering poor gains historically. Neither the conservative nor aggressive investor would want this kind of investment. That makes gold a "piss poor" investment in my books.
Well, sometimes it's because your friends are on the board of directors, and they are doing you a favor (with someone else's money) in the hopes that you will return the favor to them when the time comes.
> And being a high performance language, it actually steps in to the territory of Go here.

+1 Funny, considering Go compilers still have to catch up with .NET and JVM JIT compilers.
>Being a "nerd" means what?

The definition that I like is a nerd is someone who is good at something but lacks social skills. This is in contrast to a geek (excels at something and has social skills), a dork (doesn't excel and has no social skills) and a normie (doesn't excel but has social skills.)
I think there's another part of the equation as well. The market(HS Students) is valuing its peers by what type of value they can provide each other TODAY. It's NOT DISCOUNTING each other for future value, because the students don’t know what will be valuable in the future (ie more resources), or don’t care(they’ll never see each other or too short termed thinking).

It makes sense that football players or cheerleaders would have more perceived value since they can unite the school at events. If theres a football game friday night and the team wins, the student body immediately benefits. Jocks are also more likely to be physically fit which signals a strong potential mate to females. Although being physically fit seems like it is the number 1 indicator for providing resources, we find intelligence takes the cake later in life.

As PG stipulates, nerds focus more attention on being smart because they enjoy it more or look to reap the future returns (more opportunities, more resources). Either way, nerds focus more value on being smart. Nerds are not above social games though. As they tend to become extremely valuable for the short and long term, you see the ones that want to get ahead ‘play the game’. Look no further than Silicon Valley for proof.
Morozov is wrong; you just don't know the history.

Keith Bostic has gone on record as saying that he was inspired by Richard Stallman to try to make a fully free version of BSD. The GNU tools were a crucial tool on every Unix by the mid-1980s, and indeed played a major role in making Unix useful. While you can argue about whether it was a good idea to try to rebrand Stallman's "free software" movement as "open source", it doesn't make sense to argue that Unix was somehow unconnected to the free software movement.

Furthermore, there was already a movement afoot to build software under free-software licenses in commercial companies many years before the Open Source Initiative was founded: Sun, DEC, HP, and so on, were members of the X Consortium, which continued the development of X-Windows as free software many years after its original (academic) maintainers had stopped; Cygnus effectively took over maintenance of GCC and the rest of the GNU toolchain from the GNU project by about 1990; Sun published NFS, Yellow Pages, Sun RPC, and so on under free-software licenses starting in the mid-1980s, and later funded development on Emacs; Lucid forked Emacs to form the basis of its IDE, giving us XEmacs and its high-quality open-source C compiler, lcc. None of this was "regular academic sharing of ideas" — while these were companies with academic roots, they were judged by standards of business, not academia — and it all happened on Unix.

And many of the people who built that open-source software that made Unix what it was were also founding members of the Open Source Initiative.

At the same time, there was perhaps an order of magnitude more programmers using IBM PCs under MS-DOS. The only significant open-source software I can think of from this era on that platform is the various open-source FORTH systems. There was lots of user-group and BBS-scene software, but it was usually distributed without source, or occasionally with source, but under "no commercial use" licenses — you could maybe even put the IBM PC BIOS source code into this category. There were occasional exceptions — the WaZOO source code from Opus, say, or PC-HACK, ported from Unix — but not many.

So I think that it's perfectly fair to describe the "code sharing involved in Unix" as a unique nascent movement, separate from the "regular academic sharing of ideas", which at some point decided to (mostly) call itself the "open source" movement.
Is this for reals? I never knew that was possible.
This sounds like an interesting viewpoint. Could you elaborate on the properties of this pyramid?
I understand that age is all about perspective but:

"Now, twenty-seven and staring at the dark descent into thirty"

I promise you it's not that dark a descent.

That being said I think you're vocalizing what a lot of folks have been observing in different contexts but all directionally congruent, over recent years, and that is that there's an increasing disconnect between the Education industry (and when you have colleges that are little more than hedge funds with schools attached for tax purposes it is definitely an industry) and the value delivered to society and to the individuals buying the product. Increasingly studies show that colleges are capturing all of the increased earnings projected for a graduate in the pricing. It's a frustrating reality.
Have you taken a look at http://www.discogs.com/developers/ ?
It also covers a fair bit of nonfactual ground that purports to be factual :)
A few issues with that approach:

Given that our brains have been under heavy evolution, there's no particular reason to think we're at a local optimum.

The environment we've evolved for is not the one we are currently in. What was adaptive 1,000, 10,000, or 100,000 years ago may not be what we need today.

Your definition of "optimum" and your genes' may differ wildly. For example your genes build disposable bodies for the same reason humans build disposable cars: there's no sense in working ever harder to keep the old model going when making a new one is easier.

On the other hand, I've got a similar sentiment from a different perspective: it is surprisingly easy to to FUBAR an evolved system. We're still trying to figure out what effects electric light has on humans. [1] Anybody who thinks they've figured out all the subtle effects of a drug like this is fooling themselves.

[1] e.g.: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19401186
Ask HN: What's up with BillMonk?
<img src="http://i.imgur.com/QsGaApW.png">

Got this in the mail. What's up with BillMonk?
Thought they were dead. What's up with 'Uptime' coming?
Anyone working at BillMonk? Wasn't it a YC company?