skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but in normal economic times, one can usually earn interest that outpaces inflation. Right now we have the federal reserve purposely punishing savers, just as freicoin would do.

I think the issue with bitcoin is that it's very very new. My guess is that it will eventually stabilize. On top of that, I hold the Rothbardian view that competing currencies are a good thing. Freicoin would only work if it had a monopoly on currency adoption.
Salient quote from the "Closing Thoughts" section:

> Your free social service puts you on the store shelf, and sells you to each advertiser who comes bidding. You have no right to complain, as long as your legal rights haven’t been violated. Because it didn’t cost you anything. And similarly, the service provider has little reason to care about your feelings, because you’re not a revenue source.
I was also surprised to see these huge functions with multiple nested layers. Is it common for game development? Or it was just a quick hack on top of Quake engine?
Unless there's a "How I Explained X to My Wife" meme going around, I'm not sure I understand the point of this. It clearly was never intended in such an offensive direction (not even lightheartedly) and it's descriptive usefulness seems to far outweigh such concerns!

Of course, if Tomayko did not actually have this conversation with his partner, then that could explain much and make the decision to remove the content more understandable.
Quick, sure-fire "unfriend" test:

My friends who like Nickelback

https://www.facebook.com/search/6248267085/likers/me/friends...
Yes, tons and tons of confused people popped in on all python IRC channels. Arch devs seem to think their users know everything, but there is enough evidence that not every single arch user reads all the details.
How would you prove your identity?
Skimming through the academy source, some are fine, some are not.

For example, codemp/game/g_saga.c uses goto just fine. Three "goto failure" jump to the end of the function to handle the error case differently than a normal return. Not a very good example for proper goto use, but ok.

In contrast, codemp/cgame/cg_players.c should be refactored. It seems to be model loading code. If the loading fails, some gotos jump to the start of the function and using a flag variable a default model "kyle" is used instead of the arguments. If the default model is broken, this becomes an infinite loop. My style suggestion:

if (loadModel(foo)) return;
if (loadModel(default)) return;
assert (false && "fallback/default model broken");
Maybe no one noticed because browsers have spell checking built in now?
In Germany there are plenty research-jobs, but most of them in civil service, so no CS-PhD want it. The industry just pays much better.

Last year there was something in the news about the payment of professors, which was about $5000 a month. This is an entry level pay of a software developer (without Master or PhD) in Germany.
Not in a form that you would use for production, no.
Not saying python 3 should have been compatible with 2. Just that this was not an apt comparison.
Sure, but you get the other advantages of bitcoin. I interpreted the question as coming from a bitcoin user: "why use bitcoin+demurrage if I can just use bitcoin?"

If you have already decided that a savings account with interest is an even better way to store value, then my argument indeed doesn't work.
yes. using "python3" to run Python 3 would have been possible without breaking existing scripts. Also you can switch your entire infrastrucutre to use "python3" without breaking anything. I don't say switching to Python 3 was to early or the worst thing in the world. I'm just not sure if changing the "python" symlink to "python3" was great.
Yes. Well, qualified yes: I don't believe that the new cryptocurrencies are more of a pump-and-dump than Bitcoin is. The pump-and-dump model is intrinsic to why Bitcoin is popular: creating lots of widely distributed coins early, then making them increasingly dear, creates a built-in base of... let me be charitable and call them "cryptocurrency evangelists", who have high incentive to go to their local online watering holes and claim that Bitcoin is the next big thing.

The equilibrium is predictable:

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2608891

[Y]ou can create an arbitrarily high number of bitcoin-like electronic currency units. [These new varieties will have] guaranteed scarcity, anonymity, and a new goldrush phase -- so if you got dumped rather than pumped, you have a new opportunity to start at the top of the pyramid scheme this time.

The equilibrium is that sooner or later expected returns on starting a new distributed pump-and-dump dwarf expected returns of getting in late on bitcoins. And then poof.

Bitcoin is a wonderful engineering achievement: a spontaneously organized, decentralized, peer-to-peer boiler room from which arises a mediocre transaction processing network.
This is something I have dreamed about doing...but how does one financially do this? I'm still in college so sorry my naivety. It just seems that it would be incredibly expensive to embark on such a trip. And I completely believe it's worth the cost but still, how do you determine when you have enough to embark?

And beyond just visiting all the countries, I would like to incorporate service into my travels. So for every country that I go to, I would like to do community service there--anything to help the underprivileged but specifically help in making sure people are properly nourished if that is a problem. I know I can't save everyone, but I do want to do some good while having fun.
Going full academic can indeed ruin a person, but there's a way to prevent that: a social circle that includes at least some people who are not academics. They can provide emotional support while you're earning your degree, drag you out of the ivory tower every once in a while (kicking and screaming, if they must) both before and after the degree, and generally keep you grounded enough to remember that you are not, in fact, on a higher plane of existence. That's valuable.
Experience of finance is required, or you had better be cheap. Experience of a product or a platform is better, but you can't understand those with out the financial knowledge . They will teach you both if you go permanent.

Typically, you need a specific skill, and they hire for that. The more exotic the better. Java? no. C++ on unix? more so. Front Arena or Murex? Easy.

Back office jobs most likely won't give you the financial market/product exposure, but closer you get to front office the less coding happens (and you won't get close without experience.)

My "in" to the industry was having perl as well as their other requirements, which made me unique amongst the other applicants (perm role). I gradually transitioned to being a c++ guy as that paid more and I was optimizing for cash.

How to get there from where you are? We'd need to know "where you are". as cjbenedikt says, what do you do, know etc?
If Motorola and Cisco and other big tech firms have no trouble producing ASICs, why would the NSA? You don't need to fab them yourself, you just need designers and a fab partner.
Honestly it seems like he could just change "wife" to any random name or even person #2 and it would be ok.
>A basic spellchecker is extremely simple to implement

That reminds me of this article: http://prog21.dadgum.com/29.html "A Spellchecker Used to Be a Major Feat of Software Engineering"
I'm glad to hear job prospects for EE's have improved. I remember a time about 12 years ago when a graduate degree in EE and a buck would get you a newspaper and a shitty cup of coffee. Nothing like getting introduced to the new-hire at our shitty 2nd shift call center only to find out they've got a doctorate and 10 years of job experience and ended up having to take a gig in tech support just to feed their family.
Spell-checking these days is and should be a function of the browser.
This is my own essay on grad school in English lit: http://jseliger.wordpress.com/2012/05/22/what-you-should-kno... , the short version of which is "Don't go, and friends don't let friends go."
I think I can see the next product headed for the graveyard?
Coming from WAMP background, I had the same question when I first tried MongoDb databases with Node.JS and the consensus I read online back then (so, 3 years ago) was "Just connect once and don't bother anymore".

Though the overhead can be rather minimal, it still exists:

- Connect to the database

- Query the Collection

- Make a request

- Close the connection

Also, these four separate request are asynchronous, which means you could end up with X web requests having connected to the DB but not having a collection, Y requests having a collection and N requests waiting to be closed.

This is not a real problem (as long as you don't have 4 servers connecting to the same Db with 65 thousand connections each :-) ) but having multiple CONCURRENT connections to the same server is pretty useless in a SINGLE-THREADED context like a Node.js app.

Now, if you were to use PHP, that's a different matter...
Agile has been around for many, many years. I think the Agile Manifesto is a teenager by now. There are a lot of people well into their careers who have "always worked" the so-called Agile way.
You seem like you are interested in a reasonable conversation. I'll do my best to tamp down the rhetoric and go a few rounds if you're game. Let's start with this:

Everybody who today can't buy a house without a mortgage
will have NO WAY to buy a house

This is the root of our disagreement. Our fundamental premise is that housing is artificially expensive because Bernanke is printing 85 billion dollars per month to buy mortgage backed securities, diluting you down in real terms and simultaneously bidding up the prices of houses and enriching the banks. QE makes the banks richer and you poorer.

In the absence of this artificial demand, house prices come back down to much more reasonable levels. And you won't need to go in debt to buy a house (people had houses before mortgages existed, just like college used to be less expensive!). A sharp drop in housing prices is where the market was headed after 2008 until Bernanke started propping up prices with endless rounds of QE (literally endless, QE4 is to continue indefinitely.)

So: do you agree with the premise that housing prices will decline if Bernanke was not printing $1T/year ($85B/month) to buy mortgage backed securities? And if not, why not?
Title was too long; I already had to cut essential words. Sorry! Wasn't trying to mislead.
Collateral damage of Shitstorm-Net-"feminists"-Hysteria.

This is just sad.
Is your wrapper open-source and available in NPM? If not, it should be! :)
It was confusing for a while and broke some stuff. I haven't personally experienced problems in a while though. Mistake? No. It fits in with Arch's personality and made sense. It'd have been a mistake for Ubuntu to do it at the same time ofc!

I started to specify my python preference in my #! (ie #!/usr/bin/python3) in my own programs. If everyone did this the move would be much easier.
Yes, my bad. :-(
As a full time Arch user the change was a little annoying at first but now I am perfectly happy using Python3 as the default because all my Python shell scripts and system installed packages work under Python3. I can simply work in a Python2 virtualenv when I need python2.
Great post Kevin! It's good to understand why one is building something and not confuse that with how to build it.
Too much choice leads to risky behaviour
Looking for Testers for a New Bookmarking Service Idea
EDIT: As bellwether pointed out, in MongoDb, loading a collection only means something roughly similar to "pre-allocating the connection and meta-information": when querying a collection, no "actual" data is transmitted from server to client.

As strange as it may sound...there's no need to update them (or my apps have been lucking it out for the last six months?).

When you use less than 20 collections, this is not the kind of thing that'll become a "waste of ram". You could try a LRU to remove unused collections and get them later...but you would still lose more RAM because of the LRU manager...
This is shamefully bad. There is no excuse for this.
I still think learning shouldn't slowed down by stuff like this.

If someone writes about quantum mechanics and is a sexist, but he's the only one who can write it in a manner that I understand it, I'm SO gonna read it...
As soon as Google realizes they still have it online, probably. I'd be willing to bet the reason it's still alive is that they plain and simply forgot about it.
Don't most community colleges accept a Master's for adjunct positions?

Not that love of subject is a bad reason to get a PhD, but if the end goal is teaching a local course every now and then, you could presumably do that after you have the MS and (potentially) while pursuing the PhD, right?
I doubt it would prompt you for the permissions in a similar way to the play store, I imagine that everything they need legally is probably covered by the facebook ToS, or will be in an extra ToS clicked through on first use.
Days since GitHub hired not-me
I wonder if anyone would have been upset if it was called "How I explained it to my partner"
Value is subjective. Water is very valuable in the desert, but not so valuable in the middle of the Pacific. Diamonds are valuable in downtown Chicago, not so much to someone surviving in a lifeboat. During the hyperinflation of Germany in the 20's, people were trading furs and antiques for food. It's all subjective.
Was thinking about it but never imagined people would actually be interested in it ^^;

I'll clean it up a bit before. It should appear in https://github.com/joshleaves and https://npmjs.org/~joshleaves by the end of the day :)
Are Marketing and Sales the Same Thing for Startups?
I wonder why he didn't just replace "Wife" with "Non-technical acquaintance of indeterminate gender" for a maximum of PC.
* To pull it off, you have to focus on it so hard that it just becomes work, and you miss out on a lot of the reasons you travel in the first place.*

I think the thing is to relax - you've got 60+ years to go see them all, so there's no time pressure, really. Sure, countries come and go, so you might miss some. But the cultures typically last beyond the containing country anyway.
Ask HN: Which skills best enhance career prospects?
My startup has failed miserably and I've lost all my (and my wife's) money - I need to get a job, fast. The problem is my CV/Resume is unconventional. I have a degree from a top-tier university but in Physics rather than CS. My first job was unconnected to the tech scene (7 years in military intelligence) and although I've been coding since I was a kid, my only "commercial" coding experience is 3 years in my own 1-man (failed) startup so I don't even have someone to approach for a reference. Therefore, as well as searching for jobs, I need to learn some new skills to become a more tempting prospect for employers. Which skills offer the best employment prospects? Should I learn new languages and frameworks or instead deepen my language-agnostic knowledge (e.g. algorithms, Big O, etc)? My current primary skills are javascript, AJAX, OO PHP, MySQL, MVC frameworks (I've written my own as well as playing with others) and HTML/CSS (incl canvas, etc). My best skill is that I learn quickly, but clearly I don't have time to replicate an entire CS degree and so need to focus on the skills that will help most.
Alternatively, given that I have leadership training and experience managing teams (approx 25 strong), would I be better off focusing on non-coding skills/methodologies and trying for a product manager role?
(If it matters, I'm in the UK but presumably the same skills are in demand everywhere.)
Google what now?
฿0.10 is currently USD$13.47, that's almost double minimum-wage. I'm having a _really_ hard time believing your computer uses USD$13.47 of electricity an hour.
your approach makes sense and is similar to what the author is doing here. but it is easier to maintain and extend as one object with properties for each collection (as joshguthrie suggested).
I was going to add on to this, but I think that's all that needs to be said.

This is bad.
> Turing-completeness, of course.

Lots of useful programs can be written without turing completeness. It can be useful, but only for a limited problem domain.
Why are the checkout pages even public?
No robots.txt, a lot of private information listed and public.

Shameful. I know little about web development but this seems rather obvious, even to me.
Single people.
Or if PETA would've shown up if he'd "explained it to his dog".
Could you just change the word 'wife' to 'spouse' and put it back up? It was an awesome article.
Facebook doesn't publish that information for me.

It's PAINFULLY EASY to mark that information private, and to go into the Platform settings and make sure your friends "cannot bring your information with them into apps and websites".

It's two screens and takes about thirty seconds for you to control your Facebook and how much data leaves it.

Seriously guys, don't blame Facebook for your incompetence with their privacy settings.
After I got back from my last visit to the states I kept handing my card to the staff when I was paying. They usually looked funny at me and put it in the machine rather awkwardly.
I've sit back and seen so many posts lately about gender-issues. Is it really necessary?

I understand that woman feel discriminated and I see some pretty aweful examples where guys are doing all the wrong things. In the case of the woman who got fired, I felt it was unjust from sendgrid. It shows how badly some guys copy with the issue. So that doesn't help.

The baseline should be that we're all equal. What are the arguments against that?

I feel it's kind of sexist to assume that an article might be offensive to woman, because well, they might just take offense. That implies that woman are very sensitive to these articles, which reinforces the stereotype... Doesn't that belittle woman infinitely more? It just reaches the opposite effect.

The original author didn't think: "Let's belittle woman as much as possible just for the fun of it", that thought (I am pretty sure) never crossed his mind. The article could also have referred to, my father or my cousin.
If you don't know enough to maintain your system, you shouldn't use Arch...
...unless you want to implement some sort of server-side automated correcting that improves bad quality comments for instance. Rare, and possibly not very practical, but I've seen attempts at it here and there.
Would this even apply to something like TinyMCE? I thought (read:assumed) the in-browser spell checking only worked against textarea's and text inputs.
I'm tempted to ask my wife to write a blog post on "How I explained different kinds of Alternative Dispute Resolution mechanisms in the construction industry to my husband".

I'm lucky enough to be married to an expert in her field so I get to learn lots of cool stuff just by asking!
There are lifestyle considerations too. Academic work year, no crazy work hours, etc.
Women are allowed to not understand things, just as much as men.
It makes it harder to accumulate wealth. This may or may not be a good thing depending on your point of view.

Taken to an extreme, it's move back to hunter-gather societies when you had to work every day - no stored capital.
Irony aneurysm!
Saying that value is subjective is tautological, it's like saying pretty girls are pretty. What's the base case of the recursion? With stock certificates, you have expectations of future dividends. With stamps, they're nice to look at. What do you have with Bitcoin?
My gut feeling, based on years of experience in making unsubstantiated claims, is that the best developers are e^(i*pi) more productive than the worse ones. The measure I have chosen is the number of bugs per square centimetre of screen code in 12pt Comic Sans font.
Algorithmic hedge funds trade on statistical models successfully. I work for one at the moment, and over the long term they expect to make 15-20% per year. We have no traders and there's no intervention - it's purely the statistical model that determines how and when to trade.

So it can be done, but you need a brain the size of a planet. (I don't have a brain the size of a planet, so I don't build the models)
i think anton assumed the data for the collections was being read into memory. this aoproach would just be pre-allocating the connection and meta information. the collections would still be queried for data.
Toeing the line: Applying for coding jobs
Product Software Development is a Marathon
Well, just tried Wordpress VIP spell-checker and it works just fine.

If they were relying on this feature they've fixed it on their side.
It actually can have some benefits -- a language without any unbounded loops or recursion isn't Turing-complete, but you do get a static guarantee of termination. NASA, for example, writes much of their C code only with bounded recursion. So they can't compute some things, but they can be sure that the Mars lander never gets stuck in an infinite loop.
In TinyMCE you get both the browser-based spell checkers (via the right click context menu), and the spelling suggestions in TinyMCE (depending which spelling backend you're using: aspell, enchant, google spell, etc. http://www.tinymce.com/wiki.php/plugin:spellchecker)
%s/wife/friend/g

Fixed it for you. I really liked the post. I even read it sometimes just to keep my mind fresh on the REST idea. I dont understand why people would be offended that you used your wife as the other person. Its perfectly normal to explane your wife what you do.
What exactly is wrong about that?

The nesting is too deep imho, but apart from that it looks ok. This looks more like a design problem, because there are lots of special cases, but the code style is ok.
It doesn't, which is why I didn't claim it. I said 0.0001 BTC. Maybe it was 0.00001, though.

Actual math: 0.00000336030223163 BTC per share, I generated 21 shares, so my balance is 0.00007057 BTC. Roughly the amount I quoted, yeah.
Sounds pretty interesting, if you do, please post it on HN :)
I read this, the whole time thinking "please don't make a cooking or cleaning analogy", no such luck.

The conversation wasn't nearly what I expected, it goes into more detail than I expected but there are a few points, like the sweeper thing, that were probably big triggers.
It is simple in case of English. For highly inflectional languages [1] it is quite challenging.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Inflection
Agreed, I use virtualenv if I'm hacking up a website at home.
Web MIDI API
I found the spell-checking in VIM to be quite awesome as well. I'm not sure the algo behind it, but it seems to give good results even when I totally butcher a word.
They aren't producing anything, but they are providing a service. Algorithmic futures traders are typically uncorrelated with for example the S&P so pensions funds use their services to smooth out volatility and generate better returns.
Using a robots.txt-file to hide data that shouldn't be public in the first place is a rather bad idea. Because the robots.txt itself is public, it actually highlights the location of the "private" data.
Investors are demanding more rights: "Seed Financings in Startup Land"
Liquid Scaffolds From A 3-D Printer
All you need is S and K - all the rest is syntactic sugar, even Y.

:-)
People still don't understand that node.js is single threaded in 2013? Wow.
Use of "structured gotos" for error handling is perfectly reasonable. Internal returns are far, far worse sources of error (mostly resource leaks, in my experience). Having functions with single exit points and avoiding contortions that involve extra control variables is better than the mindless avoidance of 'goto'.

Goto is just fine if it is used responsibly.
Curata Looking to Replace Google Reader with New Product