skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Hey sergio - I missed the memo saying that's an outdated way of installing stuff. Must be because I keep coming across instructions that have me doing that. :)

Anyway, my point is that the very existence of a package manager is already misguided. Applications should be standalone (even the ones I install from source should just bring the libraries they depend on with them, instead of relying on a third-party program (the pkg manager) to make their application installable).

If programmers would package their applications like Ruby Enterprise Edition packaged itself, there would be no need for a package manager, and everything would install without fail every time.
Really? Have you had extensive, first-hand experience with Rick Simpson oil? Are you prepared to tell me there's zero medicinal benefits to it?

Listen, there's just not going to be scientific proof behind a mostly illegal substance with legions of powerful people incentivized to stop it from growing in popularity. Feel free to evaluate the video testimonials though: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLwBs_ihArc1lCYDym-DH4...

Bitcoin shares many similarities with hemp oil, you can always tell the armchair opinions from the guys who actually use it.
As far as view goes, I actually really like the modern ones offshore. I don't like the older ones, which look like landscape clutter. For example the old Tehachapi wind farm in California (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Tehachapi_wind_farm_3.jpg) reminds me of an old oil field, like http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Oil_wells_just_offshore_at....

But as far as the new ones: I recently moved offices in Copenhagen, to a 5th-story office looking east towards the Øresund. I think the offshore wind farm there adds substantially to the view (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middelgrunden). It's especially nice on overcast, windy, gray days, when you can see the white turbines rotating in the fog. But it's nice on sunny days too, at least in my opinion. Here's a snapshot from my window: http://sphotos-b.xx.fbcdn.net/hphotos-snc7/598966_1010047304...

And if you get closer, e.g. at Amager Beach, it's even nicer (again imo). It's like a modernist kinetic sculpture or something, an aesthetically pleasing series of 20 massive but sleekly styled turbines in a row.
Yup, I've actually read all those papers, and then some. I think OT is often misunderstood and poorly documented, and really needs a solid go-to library. (Along with clear, accessible documentation.)

ShareJS and "Operational-Transformation" (used by Firepad) are decent, but in my opinion aren't general enough and may even have some algorithmic flaws.

And yes, it's time this was solved, and it wasn't necessary to re-implement the basics for every collaborative project.
Yes, but I'm not dealing with clients. I'm dealing with users of fun websites I make, and they aren't using oldIE. So I have a different set of requirements. I don't need jQuery, but you do.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5543465
I believe the article is about _offshore_ wind.

However, in Denmark you can make an interesting experiment in several places. You can place yourself so that you are in 100-500m from a windmill AND have a road with traffic between you and the windmill.

What kind of noise, vibrations and view do you think are significant in that situation?
If it's traceable, how is it anonymous? I.e., you could have a wallet full of BTC that no one knows is yours, but the moment you buy anything with it that's linkable to you then all of your BTC becomes non-anonymous.
I'll bite.

Nuclear as commercially implemented today is uninsurable. Even without insurance, a nuclear power plant is an extremely complex, capital intensive machine. The technology may be perfectly sound, with scientists able to control it perfectly, but the problem to me is the top heavy organisational structure. The management water head.

I do agree more research is needed towards passive security compact scale fission using thorium. After investing a lot of money into harvesting wind, that is.
BBC Horizon - Age of Big Data
Your argument applies equally well to any form of money. Money is a purely social phenomenon. It has value only because other people think it has value.

There's no "inherent" value in any form of money. Whenever you hear someone say "inherent" or "intrinsic" when talking about money, run the other way.

(Yes, even commodity money. It may have direct-use value in addition to exchange value, but both kinds of value are market phenomena, and totally dependent on the surrounding society and capital structure.)
And I could use underscore, a much more general-purpose library than jQuery to help me here, only 4kb. So:

_.each(document.querySelectorAll('thing'), function (elem) { value = somevalue; });

(But then I might as well just use jQuery, I guess)
Note that resistive heating is generally less efficient than a heat pump or gas.
That's a good point that it amounts to a single nuclear reactor.

It would be interesting to compare:

Capital requirement

Insurability

Maximum damage to the environment in case of a disaster

Decommissioning costs

Maintenance costs

Construction schedule
Would the doctor have known what gene sequences to look for if Myriad hadn't done the R&D and published the results?
This is likely technically true, but this is an area where the term of copyright so far exceeds the commercial viability of the work that it makes extinction a near certainty. A little calculated civil disobedience seems like a moral action.

Copyrights are an area of law where "might makes right" and the Archive can take care of itself. No one is going to war to stop people from playing games on an emulated Bandai Wonderswan.
In Ireland we have http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Turlough_Hill which acts as a natural battery.
Denmark's population is smaller than New York City by a couple million. The US would need a massive, massive number of windmills.
Passive Calorie Tracking Will Be A Gold Mine
Denmark is the country within the European union with the highest penetration of wind power in electricity consumption (almost 26%). However, in absolute terms both Spain (22 GW) and Germany (29 GW) vastly exceed Denmark (4 GW) and are two of the largest "wind markets" worldwide (as of end 2011) [1].

In particular, Spain has made a tremendous effort investing in wind energy (tax incentives, subsidies, etc. were granted), and it's amazing to see that in about 15 years, this type of energy went from 0 to about 20% of the total energy produced within the country [2].

Including also the rest of renewables to the mix, it seems obvious that in the coming 15-20 years, it should be possible to generate more than 50% of energy from renewable sources, e.g. solar energy in Spain achieved power grid parity in terms of cost last December [3].

In spite of the current economic downturn, these are pretty amazing times we are living in!

[1]: http://www.ewea.org/fileadmin/ewea_documents/documents/publi...

[2]: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/es/timeline/957d498ae7...

[3]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterdetwiler/2012/12/26/solar-g...
Psy's new single hits 32 million views in one day
One incentive to do research is because they get paid through other means.

A report on the Sources of Cancer Research Funding in the United States (http://www.iom.edu/~/media/Files/Activity%20Files/Disease/NC...) found that only 31% of the funding in cancer research is from industry. The majority is from tax money (federal and state), which stand for about 63% of all funding. The rest is non-profit.

Maybe that 31% would be lower without patents. Some might still do the investing because they earn money on related products (for-profit hospitals to name one). Maybe the costs in medical institutions and research labs would go down because they can spend less to lawyers. Maybe the state would be willing to spend more and have more directed taxed to replace the lost industry funding.

But we are only talking about 31%, a number I would very much like to see updated for 2013. It also a number as reported by the industry itself, so its worth asking how true it is. The only number we can be fully sure on is the billions of state and federal funding.
It's awesome, but only useful on very specific animation-heavy projects. Otherwise it's quite overkill.
2005 was a long time ago, but I think that attitude (@ 17:23 "We would be reluctant to invest in someone making desktop software", "It's ridiculous to think that your data should be on a computer... Your data should be on the network.") is unfortunate. The web is the best and worst part of the modern Internet. It is easy to develop for and in the short-term can be quite liberating, but in the long term it can do very little except make us easier to control and less likely to revolt when the operators do anything "Evil (TM)." I also think the web is a very weak and overrated platform - standards have been slow, because native experimentation has stopped. To do anything interesting, you need a native plugin. The Internet itself is ideal for communication and message passing, but the web is just one facet that excels at typesetting a dynamic book, but I can only look at so many banners.

Further more, the network exists to connect computers, not the other way around. It is not a thing on its own. There's no such thing as data that "lives" on the network. Today's cloud is just someone else's PC, somewhere else on the globe, and much less under my control, so it's not a very compelling alternative to running native software for me when it's available.
Grooveshark is also good
How the CIA Helped Disney Conquer Florida
My O-Chem teacher had told my about how people who would dissolve hash oil into DMSO to get it across the skin quickly. Usually on their heads.
Startup hubs are in cities, because living in a large, dense population allows you to easily meet more people who share your interests/skills/motivations. People in cities (as compared to people living in less densely populated areas) skew towards favouring government-provided services. In the US this is deemed “liberal” and its opposite is deemed “conservative”.

They are correlated, but I don't think either of them causes the other.
Only 210 megawatts until Denmark gets time travel.
In fact, I think a case could be made that vanilla JS would encourage bad code.
My point is that it is possible to get and spend bitcoins anonymously, by trading electricity for coins.

This:

> Bitcoin does not have anonymity; ...

is thus not true.

If you purchase your coins through an exchange, it becomes traceable, off course.
He didn't write that wind power doesn't make sense for the United States. He wrote that it doesn't make sense, period. You just put words in his comment, then used the words you invented to dispute me instead. I loathe when people do that. You might argue that contextually, given the comment he was responding to, I should have inferred some kind of Americentric context but he goes on to write "nuclear power is better," so there you have it.

You might see that as pedantry, but since I'm an American I'm acutely aware of how Americans like to say "that would never work" when what they actually mean "that would never work for Americans." The United States is enormous and the #1 consumer of electric energy, yes, and we need to plan accordingly. That doesn't mean ideas are bad in the general, it just means things won't work for us due to our size, as you astutely observe. Google could never scale PostgreSQL to handle their index; does that make PostgreSQL silly? You're automatically writing off all future development that you could never possibly know when you dismiss a technology because it doesn't work in one case.

I like to use every opportunity I get to point that out, so my fellow Americans will stop doing it and making us look like self-absorbed, spoiled people internationally, an assumption reinforced by our general diplomatic and military behavior on the world stage.
Be careful to dismiss things as 'purely psychological'. Psychological disturbances affect people as much as physical disturbances, and in the end a psychological disturbance is a physical disturbance in the brain.
Ask HN: Is it a good decission to partner with a client?
I have been working for a client on a startup which at the moment is in testing on a development server and it will be released very soon and I really like the site and how everything turned out to work(mostly because it was my call on a lot of features). Even tho it was a regular client work I felt attached to the project and to the startup and I think it could have some potential with maybe some investment and more development hours from my side. The problem is the client has no idea regarding all the development needed for social network application and the constant improvement that I need to do and he doesn't want to invest more money in development that would consist of improving the user experience, improving performance, advance monitoring system and so on. I was thinking to partner with him and take control of the startup as a CTO but I am not sure what to do.
This is the presentation video about the idea http://vimeo.com/60602839 . So what do you guys think? Should I wait and see how it goes and after that make a decision or should I take the wheel and improve and tweak the site to be better and maybe more successful but working for free in exchange of equity and being a CTO.
I couldn't help but worry as I was reading that that it may have been posted here in praise of the way that these "hustlers", "doers" and "advancement hackers" had found a way to out compete those who were stuck in their stody old ways of actually learning things and successfully disrupted the ecosystem.

Then I realized that it was more likely jumping on the "higher education is broken" bandwagon and missing the delicious irony that every personality attribute, except knowing aristocratic privilege, being held up for contempt in this piece is openly admired in this culture when practised in the tech business world.

Maybe there is some alternate universe where this article was posted as a scathing critique of the whole "hustler/growth hacker" meme and a warning about how the same attitudes in elite higher education have completely destroyed their ability to create any value.

I'd like to move there.
I use ubuntu at work and osx at home. Ubuntu used to be amazing, and I still think it's good open source development platform, but the amount of time I've spent fixing drivers or fighting with unity has meant that it has cost me a lot more than osx.

Then there is the abomination that is unity. They really hit the mark there, making a window manager for netbooks. Cause everyone in their target market uses a netbook, right?

I think they should have stuck with gnome 2, polished it, and targeted programmers as their core users.
SBCL is really amazing. Even though it's "bog standard" 1970's and 1980's technology, it still puts up a great showing against state of the art compilers: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/lisp.php.

It's also a great example of the power of macros. If you look at the backend, things like define-vop and the like, it does a lot of things using macros that e.g. LLVM uses an external code generation tool (tblgen) to accomplish.
Those initial coins have mostly not been used. You can verify that for yourself.
Dvorany: Dvorak on any computer
Agree. It was the FBI that was concerned with domestic black militants. The CIA just wanted a way to get cash anonymously to fund weapons-for-Iran and the Contras in Nicaragua.

If the CIA was behind Bitcoin, they would have done a better job with the unlinkability.
How are you going to handle the bandwidth costs of hosting and streaming videos? also the animation is a bit annoying for repeated visitors.
This is important enough to me that I have left money on the table so as to not work at a place that requires my signature on an invention assignment agreement.

What I do for fun or profit on my own time is my own business, and the fact that I have a work structure that allows me to do this keeps me happy enough to come back to work the next morning.
I'm pretty naive on the science of these things, but I have a concern: is there any possibility that increasing use of wind energy could have negative affects on the environment by essentially taking energy out of our atmosphere? Could our winds gradually slow down over time?

Maybe it's just such a small fraction that it doesn't matter. Or maybe wind energy is essentially another form of capturing solar energy, because the winds are created by temperature differences, which are created by the sun hitting the earth, and that energy is constantly renewed?

I don't know, but I'm curious. Any insight about this would be appreciated.
"investing hens own time"

what is 'hens'?
How's the market for Beanie Babies these days?
...otherwise there's no 100% commitment to your project.

If you want employees to be 100% committed, you'll have to stop thinking of it as "your" project.
this. one million times. What I do off the clock is of no import to my employer unless it is materially impacting my work on the clock.

If you can't trust your employees then you need to review your hiring practices, and your leadership ability. That's your failure, not theirs. Own it, and deal with it.
The alternatives in this case are, as you note, either public funding, or alternative means of monetization (e.g. a for-profit hospital). I think on the whole public funding is the way to go for this kind of medical research. The other alternative is precisely the kind of thing the patent system was designed to avoid. Is it really preferable to have private, for-profit hospitals using proprietary techniques that they don't publish in order to keep a competitive edge?
Much better article here:
http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-04/12/super-mario-s...

The video is long but worth all 16 minutes. I like how he isolated such a dead simple heuristic for success in video games. It's not surprising, in retrospect, that "numbers going up" would correlate with winning, but to prove it in practice is pretty neat.
Ask HN: Mental Games (?)
I was going to write everything here but it quickly became too much, so here's the link https://gist.github.com/grownseed/5384323. I would like to know if other people have come up with other personal mental games, just out of sheer curiosity.

Thanks!
It is clear that Bitcoin was engineered deliberately by some entity. Whether that entity is a government, economic bloc, or group of individuals is an interesting question. My two cents are that this group of individuals are related in some way to the IMF-World Bank. An alternative "currency" was established during the height of the financial crisis, in the form of SDRs. Bitcoin could likely be the logical next step from SDRs. The beauty of the currency is that it can be used to solve policy issues, without necessarily revealing the political actor(s).
I'm not sure I could survive on OS X without homebrew. I kind of like customizing my packages with a package manager.
You're much better off finding a way where you can continue development yourself without the hassle of having a major shareholder, partner and ultimately boss who has no interest, knowledge or involvement in developing it further.
Wow that is an incredibly frustrating banner video.... why would you put that?

aside from that, cool
Indeed, or more revealingly, it will be insured implicitly by the government. But governments know this.
Maybe both are just experience, but in the process of learning when I fail at coding, it's just "fuck that, I'll try starting with a simpler task". If you fail at business you may find yourself on the road and bring people with you.
> immigrant households use welfare and related wealth transfer programs at higher rates

The data includes both legal and illegal immigrants along with the minority high skilled immigrants.

http://www.cis.org/immigrant-welfare-use-2011 implies that most of that welfare use is from low skilled immigrants and not high skilled ones that are the topic of interest of most HNers.

He presumably got downvoted because it is irrelevant at best and misdirection at worst (by combining illegal and legal data and claiming immigrants claim more welfare which makes it look like highly skilled immigrants claim more welfare).
Maybe this is a dumb question, but isn't there some industrial use that surplus energy spikes could be used for domestically?

Water desalination perhaps, since it's energy intensive.
Every A Player I've ever worked with has brought full attention, quality and focus regardless of other priorities in their life (barring major, extenuating circumstances like a death). What they do in their non-work time has little impact on their work productivity unless it starts causing too much sleep deprivation.

Most people I've met can handle thinking about more than one thing in a given day or week and to be a productive human you have to. Whether it's reading a bed time story to your child, remembering what groceries to buy on the way home or checking the code a friend committed to your side project, you have to think about other things besides work every day to be a normal, functional human.
In the United States we have Iowa, where >24% of electricity last year came from wind, and where there's more nameplate capacity of wind than the entire demand of the nation of Denmark.

For what it's worth.
Why didn't they just say Gigawatt?

The author couldn't decide on the capitalization of "of" in the title so maybe they just didn't know 1000 Meg is a Gig.
Ask HN: What should I use for javascript view templates?
Ahh, shit. I'll bite, too.

A team of journalists just discovered the barrels of nuclear waste that the UK threw in the ocean. 17,000 tons of nuclear waste just near the British island Alderney.

"It is just as environmentally friendly." Yeah, sure.

source: http://www.dw.de/atommüllfässer-im-ärmelkanal-entdeckt/av-16...

Or read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asse_II_mine
Calm down. No one put words into his mouth. You, however, did put words into my mouth, which I find quite astonishing.

Those windmills currently cover 1 million people. The world has 7 billion people and growing quickly. You really think windmills are feasible for Brazil, China, England, France, Germany, Russia, India, Pakistan, Vietnam, Iran, Japan, Mexico, Indonesia, South Africa, Spain, Argentina, Turkey, Colombia, Ukraine, or South Korea? (I can list several more if you want.)

Get real.
Actually, the US is described as the Saudi Arabia of wind. Most of the potential is on-shore which has better economics than off-shore also.

http://www.pickensplan.com/wind/
I suppose it is cheaper for them to pay another country to take the power and maintain the rates they are charging for energy than to have to pay the people back when it goes negative. They are trying to get their investment back.

That's a good question and they've mentioned one solution being transferring the energy to Sweden or Norway and they'll dial back the hydros and store more water in their dams. Of course I wonder if they could just selectively put a windmill in neutral to solve the same problem.
I passed this link to my dad, who actually spent a good chunk of his professional career working with fluorine compounds. His comment: "The guy is just chicken -- or ill-equipped for fluorine work."
It would be lovely if they could add support functions for:

RFC6901: JSON Pointer

RFC6902: JSON Patch
Visit somewhere in California where a pristine mountain side with trees and red rock was just 10 years ago, and not it is nothing but wall of spinning white blades of bird killers.

Wind is like water. You can't just slow it down with your turbines and expect no environmental impact. Putting them on the windward side of a mountain reduces the rain fall on the opposite side. Birds die in the blades. It isn't all rainbows and butterflies.
I've been using EJS, but its poorly documented, and doesn't seem like it has been updated in a long time. To be honest I only used it because of search engine ranking.
Ahh, that's the HN I know and love... making the trivial a "thing" ;)
Five Things a Personal Trainer Can Do for You