skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm going to blatantly ignore the content of your post and make a suggestion:

Have you tried using font-smoothing?

-webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased;
font-smoothing: antialiased;

I find it helps, though you may want to darken the text a bit afterwards (or increase the weight).
I looked into this and experimented with it a while back. My conclusion was that:

a. If something is actually important to me, I will find out about it whether I read the news or not.

b. Keeping in mind (a), any news that I don't hear about through other channels is not urgent.

c. A quick "news" piece will have almost no depth or context that could actually give the story relevance. And will very often just be outright wrong.

My conclusion from these three observations was that I should read news magazines like the new yorker, forbes, etc instead of reading the nytimes. With a goal of trying to find a reasonable mix of biases so that I don't get too closed off to different points of view.

If the story is actually important, yet I didn't hear about it from friends, it won't matter that they spent a month investigating it and writing it up before publishing it.

And strangely, facebook becomes much more useful when thought of as a news aggregator. It will of course have a tendency to produce a bubble, but I certainly found out about Aaron Swartz on facebook far before I saw it anywhere else.
The best return for whom? For the Americans forking over tax money used for the employment and credentialing of people not from this country?
What you post is true. Not all followers of Keynes are believers are money-printing stimulators.

But the reverse is not the case.

Just about all money-printing 'stimulators' like to throw Keynes around as justification for doing so, no matter how far away it is from the original theme.

The basic tenet of running surpluses to fund deficit spending in years where confidence has dipped isn't all bad. But there are plenty of people who endlessly bang the 'spend spend spend' drum and justify it by pointing at Keynes.
Which is why you should evaluate the risk/reward of a start up carefully.

It's also why, for example, bank robberies aren't worth it.
Lincoln was not the man we make him out to be. The Emancipation Proclamation was purely political. Lincoln wanted to split the country and pick up the bigger half.

I suspect that, if not for the Emancipation Proclamation, we might call Lincoln a bad president.
Semantics don't help us. Easily mined metals are a resource. Petrochemicals are a resource. As stated elsewhere the green revolution was just pouring oil on fields (as pesticides) and natural gas (as fertilizer). When we run out of those we run out of our ability to sustain even current food yields.

Then there's topsoil. That's a resource, and in much of the midwest we're down to barely the amount needed for plants to root.

Potable water is a resource. The state of many of our aquifers is precarious.

Your statement that begins "on a pure physics basis..." bears little resemblance to any known facts about our current energy position. I'm a physicist by training, fwiw.
Like The Economist?

Are the ABC's internal metric's available? What about the audits?

Their selection of journalists on current affairs shows is interesting though. Chris Uhlman's wife is an ALP MP, Barrie Cassidy was a Hawke staffer, Maxine McKew became an ALP member, Kerry O'Brien was a Whitlam staffer. It's almost like there is a pattern....
This would just be funbucks though, no different to Disney. What it would not be would be a separate currency, since that's illegal and for good reason: it would be a return to the days of being paid in company scrip, which can only be spent at the company store.

EDIT: Not to mention that apparently we can't trust the government, but we can definitely trust a giant profit-motivated non-democratic entity to manage our currency?
Sure, but even then, on the server - where the storage medium exists, and the bytes are held - it's stored on the operator's choice of filesystem, made possible by the ubiquitous block IO interface (or the platform-specific equivalent thereof).

Edit: Network block device, iSCSI, AoE, etc... the block interface is the lifeblood of the storage area network.
wanting anonymity does not imply guilt.

it s not the case that if you have not done anything wrong, then you have nothing to hide.
I remember writing about the bubble in my blog back in 2005 ( http://chir.ag/200510301225 ). Though I wrote that 9 months after this article was published, nothing really had changed - prices were still rising, home sales were strong, everyone had equity. I had been monitoring the housing market since early 2004 and saw tons of articles on both sides of the argument.

I bought a house in June 2005, being fully aware that there is a big chance the bubble could pop. As a result, even though I could've gotten a bigger house or taken out a home equity loan, I bought the smallest house I could be comfortable in for 5+ years and did not take out any loans. Meanwhile my coworkers who were also in my salary range bought houses 25-50% more expensive.

From the article:

> That would be unpleasant news for home sellers, but good news for buyers. And what sellers lose when selling one house they often save when buying another. Any risk of loan defaults would be negligible.

When a lot of sellers lose, it brings down the market.

> At the national level, what could possibly kick national home prices downstairs? There is nothing to suggest massive job loss ahead or a huge oversupply of new homes.

When there are a lot of sellers and too few buyers, there is a huge oversupply of homes (new and old).

You're right that nobody can tell the truth about future. E.g. who knows if 1 bitcoin is going to be worth $100, $1, or $1,000,000 some day. However, the author was clearly ignoring the signs that worried a lot of people, including myself.
For me, it autocompletes with "wrong", "right", "always right", and a bunch of ad hominems (not necessarily in that order), so I'm going to say... conflicted.
If that is something that needs to be taken into account, we should all be locked up, just in case we do something wrong in the future. If a prisoner has done something wrong charge and try him, otherwise he is innocent and should be released. If we dismantle that principle, we are in far greater danger from our own than from any external force.
If you don't feel like reading Techcrunch's commentary on the Kickstarter project (which is awesome by the way), here is the Kickstart link here which explains what the project is: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1143143303/laser-tag-for... — one particular interesting aspect of the project is a gun can be anything, you can set traps and even use your 38hz TV remote as a gun.
They actually have all the components under their arm, they bought Anobit which made fabulous SSDs and are snatching engineers around here.

Anobit SSDs were the best I've seen so far in terms of consistent performance.
You're missing the point of an analogy, which is to compare something complex or less understood to something simpler and more known. The idea isn't to correctly capture every detail, it's to highlight some relevant aspect. Krugman is acting as an essayist here, not a technical commentator. His analogy perfectly captures one of the central motivators of Bitcoin: privacy. These added details may increase the resolution, but they certainly aren't relevant to his argument, and neither is his argument unseated simply by adding them back in.
YouTube adds VCR mode to celebrate 57 years of videotape recording
Related: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_True_Believer

The book analyzes and attempts to explain the motives of the various types of personalities that give rise to mass movements; why and how mass movements start, progress and end; and the similarities between them, whether religious, political, radical or reactionary. As examples, the book often refers to Communism, Fascism, National Socialism, Christianity, Protestantism, and Islam. Hoffer believes that mass movements are interchangeable, that adherents will often flip from one movement to another, and that the motivations for mass movements are interchangeable; that religious, nationalist and social movements, whether radical or reactionary, tend to attract the same type of followers, behave in the same way and use the same tactics, even when their stated goals or values differ.
Aren't answers stories too?
>You really think that quantitative easing has a higher impact on energy prices than literally millions of people in China and India buying petroleum-fueled vehicles and driving them around?

Yes. Again, supply of oil has increased, and oil/gold ratios are pretty static. The big leg of the movement is in the USD.

>If rising oil prices are an inflationary USD phenomenon, why do we see the same pattern for Swiss Francs, Emirati Dirhams, Mexican Pesos, Euros, Iceland Kronas, or Pounds Sterling?

Most of those currencies have engaged in competitive devaluation against the USD to prevent exports becoming uncompetitive.

In countries where the currencies have not matched the USD depreciation, energy prices aren't anywhere near as high.

>As for precious metals, the simple fact is that the world's mineral resources are harder and harder to get at over the years, and with the rest of the world rapidly developing, demand for natural resources is going to increase.

Population growth isn't that fast as to force a doubling of commodities in the short timeframe that has happening. What is required is a flooding of the denominator - USD.

Printing any currency leads to inflation across the board. When it is the 'reserve' currency of the world, you get global inflation. There is nothing to argue in this; it is the stated aim of the QE policies.
Yeah, it's this exhaustion from reading news that I think the article is trying to help avoid. It's great to be engaged in the world, but being engaged by consuming news is exhausting, literally causes constant anxiety, and is bad for you!

That's not to say you should ignore the world, you should just try getting your information from in-depth reporting, long essays on topics of interest, from people who have actually been there, and so on. There's no freaking rush!

If it's so important that I can't wait a month to read an in depth article with context and correct details, I will hear about it from friends.
http://julian.togelius.com/mariocompetition2009/

Similar, but more interesting
So much for the Declaration of Independence:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.
Upload files from your server to Dropbox without doing a full sync
> That email is from Hal Finney; I'm confused by your post.

Don't worry, I am also confused by my post. There was a thread earlier today on HN that mentioned Hal, but Lucas isn't Hal.

My post was submitted on this thread:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5545816

But it seems to be attached to this thread instead:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5547313

It's possible that I typoed 5545816 for 5547313.
I think with both the gas prices and food charts (thank @cdtwigg for pointing out longer-term historical food prices) I'm sorry to say but this is an extreme abuse of statistics. If you extend the chart you linked to by exactly one more year-"BOOM!" just as I said about a barrel of oil* being the same price is was exactly 5 years ago. The huge drop in price resulted from a full-blown recession that would have been worst if the Fed sat around and did nothing.

*Price of a barrel of oil is a much more reliable measure because extreme environmental laws really get in the way of building refineries, which are also prone to being shut down, thus consumer gas prices are much more volatile than the price of crude. This reminds me that the price of oil is very strongly influenced by OPEC, so that is actually something I'd avoid looking at when measuring energy prices. Besides, oil is just one component of energy (although, probably the most important and largest one I'll say). Coal is still cheap as ever (discounting environment regulations) and natural gas prices has bottomed out due to fracking.

PS: Link is a little off still (missing ampersand between USA/Average)
The Lambtex Manual
Don't forget the Bank of Japan has also joined the party.

Having held interest rates at 0.5% or less, for 18 years now (since 1995) they are also going to conjure up $76 Billion/month of funny money to buy government bonds, on a mission to double the monetary base by $1.4 Trillion within 2 years.

Nobody really knows what the consequences are going to be, but I think one thing is certain: ordinary people are going to find it hard to accept so-called 'austerity measures' and reduced living standards when they pick up a newspaper and read about central bankers creating money out of thin air.

[1] http://au.news.yahoo.com/thewest/business/a/-/world/16670172...
Maybe unrelated, but as my awareness of what other folks have made musically has increased, my desire to write and create new compositions has decreased... I suspect because I'm aware that a lot of the things I would like to see created have already been created.

However, this hasn't stemmed my desire to get better at making music... quite the opposite... but I have been a lot more systematic in my practicing and a lot more willing to be confident that performing work other people have performed is a legitimate practice.

I have felt similarly in my own programming practice: most every thing that I really need to do has functionally been done in other contexts, and my task is to figure out the best ways to bring those previous works to bear on my own context... so I feel less "creative" but more effective.
> Do you work at Google?

I did for over 5 years. While I left before the Go programming language was released, I seriously doubt they've transitioned much of the codebase to it, for one simple reason:

The Google codebase is fucking massive. I simply cannot describe how unbelievably huge it is, and while I don't doubt for a second that Go will be used for some of the systems-level projects (some of which Rob Pike is directly involved with - how's that for vague), you simply don't transition that big of a codebase to a new language.

It would basically be impossible... unless you're Jeff Dean.
The Constitution is supposed to protect the rights of individuals from the tyranny of "the people".
Isn't this topic -- the question of how to close Guantanamo Bay -- a prime counterexample to the virtues of "mak[ing] it law to read aloud each bill before signing it into law" and "mak[ing] each bill deal with one subject at a time"?

Wouldn't such requirements make politically unpopular things, such as touching Guantanamo Bay in any way, even more difficult to handle?

This article doesn't strike me as fertile, favorable ground for this topic at all.

Not that one would say this, but if the counterargument were to be, "this movement would have prevented Guantanamo in the first place," then (1) but I live in the world we have now, not a hypothetical world that we don't actually have, and (2) maybe so, maybe not.
The droughts are not one off, they are occurring with more regularity due to global warming

And the 2007-2008 world food prices were cause by this, not related to inflation at all:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2007%E2%80%932008_world_food_pr...
Youtube Tape Mode (april 14th, 1956, commemoration)
I actually agree that using the block interface makes sense for storage but would have loved to have a minimal interference from the SSD. If it just exposed the entire flash to address by the user and reported when a block has problems and maybe some stats about the underlying flash chips I'd be very happy. It would then enable building better things at the OS/Application side.

There is quite a bit of a chicken-and-egg problem here though, all the current filesystems basically assume that the underlying media never has any faults and if it does than the media problems are static and do not develop over time. This is obviously incorrect for flash, but even for rotating media it wasn't true. Since every OS requires a fault-free media the SSD vendors are working hard to make sure they provide a semblance of such fault-free media they make it harder to provide the best possible performance or a different trade-off than what they have taken.
One further clarification, you don't need to wait for 6 confirmations (~1hr) if you don't want to.

A typical bitcoin client will receive the transaction within 5-60 seconds, with 0 confirmations. Even 1 confirmation (~10min) is probably safe enough for small or low-risk transactions.

If it's someone you trust not to double-spend, then you can get by with just seeing the transaction on your end with 0 confirmations.
Except when the competitor introduces something that goes against the very fundamentals of Bitcoin yet appeals to "the masses". Such as, slightly inflationary instead of intrinsically deflationary. Would make the competitor more of a currency --something that circulates and lubricates commerce-- so medium-of-exchange rather than store-of-value. Now if that took off as the way to pay for Pizza or guns online, what would happen to deflationary "high-value" speculative BTCs, having lost most of their "currency" potential?
I'd agree with you, as it goes.

* It's sad, but people hire experts and ignore their opinions all the time.*

True, that. I don't really think I'm going to take up this project. I mean, it's all about playing to one's strengths - that is definitely missing here.

Thanks a ton! Appreciate it.
Rescinding that executive order doesn't make magic happen. There is the process of closing down and what to do with the prisoners that matters. It's sounding like Congress is tying the President's hands by restricting his ability to use funds (funds that Congress authorizes) towards those goals. If you're in the US and you want this to happen, I would look towards your representatives in Congress, and research these bills.

This rings similar to the 'legalize marijuana' issue. Making it legal 'tomorrow' would be a massive undertaking because of all of the infrastructure that's in place with the assumption that it's illegal.

Sometimes decisions/actions seem 'easy' on the surface, while the devil is in the details.
>> So what? Why do you believe that merit is not correlated with income and class?

I went to inner city schools. You have no idea how poor they are. Even the smartest kids who really wanted to learn had no chance.

Examples:

-> My Calculus teacher taught use that you can use advanced polynomials to beat craps.

-> My economics teacher didn't teach us anything all year. I'm not exaggerating here. We literally never opened our books in class and I don't think we had more than 4 quizzes the entire time.

-> My Spanish teacher was about the same, except he did give one lesson per month, but we mostly chatted in class. If you were already Hispanic, you got an A. If you weren't, you got a C. No point trying beyond that.

-> Physics was my first class of the day and I slept through it every time and it was generally the same zoo as all the other classes. I had the highest score in the class.

-> The people with the highest grades in our biology class were the people who didn't show up but once a month and refused to touch a knife. Those of us who sat in class, dissected the pigs, and really tried to learn the material generally got D's.

-> "Computer class" was 4 years of learning how to type.

-> Homework was virtually non-existent.

-> I can assure you that merit had nothing at all to do with the grades I received.

I can't possibly enumerate how bad the education was in one post. You had two options: go to a community college or go to the state college. Anything else would have caused the guidance counselors look at you in shame and they would tell you things like "No one in this district went to that kind of college, so it's no point applying."

As you can gather, I was in all of the so-called advanced classes. I can only imagine what the "normal" classes were like.
Los Glúteos - Glúteos de Escándalo
I was vaguely aware that bitcoin was open source but not aware the code base was open for change and potential pull requests? Excuse my naivity but wasn't part if the design that the algorithm and everything was locked in upfront and not open to change? How is a new feature approved and merged into master?
"the printed dollars are deposited in the accounts of large banks, enriching the very richest and making everyone else worse off."

I absolutely agree with you on this one though, but that also shows why the current printing of money isn't manifesting itself as hyper-inflation, it's sitting around in bank-deposits, or at the fed itself, doing nothing.

Using the loose definition of inflation as "too much money chasing too few goods", the extra money that is flying around isn't chasing any goods, so it's not a problem for now, which is not to say it won't be a problem later, say in a year or two.
It's part of git/contrib. Depending on the packaging you still need to enable it manually.
On the subject of Australia and Refugees, a relatively recent book called "The People Smuggler"[1] is a fascinating read. It's the story of an Iraqi man, called Ali Al Jenabi, and how he ended up ferrying people from Indonesia to Australia.

[1] http://www.thepeoplesmuggler.com/
WSJ: Microsoft Reportedly Working On Smartwatch
Please. You keep saying things like this but it's nonsense. Do some homework: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Energy_returned_on_energy_inve...

I have been respectful of your comments in this thread so please don't see me as being overly harsh, but you are saying things that are nonsensical.

We don't love hydrocarbons because of what they are but because the energy we get from them exceeds the energy necessary to produce them so they're a net source of energy, and not by a little - oil is something like 100:1 EROEI positive. Nothing comes close in terms of lifecycle EROEI.
I really like it. Haven't seen one better. Will probably implement it soon.
A lot of people are saying the projecting out to 2020 is a ridiculous idea in fast moving industries like tech. But there's already a cliche that when AWS has an outage half of your favourite sites go down, and there's a reason for that - there is NO serious alternative to the AWS platform. They're years ahead of the little competition they have; no single other system does half of the things that AWS can. The scale of the engineering effort required to compete with AWS is enormous, and no-one's really trying it (except for components, like CDNs or S3 substitutes).

So I don't think it's that ridiculous - I can imagine Amazon one day being "that company that runs the internet, and also sells stuff".
Richard Dawkins has lost: meet the new new atheists
Changing the code, creating pull request, and doing all of that is easy. The hard part is convincing users and miners to upgrade, especially with something that is protocol breaking.