skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The US population is about 300 million and is not growing that fast. In fact, it might even be declining if immigration were not a factor. China's and Europe's populations will start decling in our lifetimes. Only India and Africa are set to keep increasing their populations.

"Resources" is a conveniently vague word which could mean almost anything that people happen to think they need at any given point. Are horses and buggies a resource? Because if so, we're running pretty low. If not, though, we're probably good. If software is the "resource," I could probably make 300 million copies in my apartment.

Most of the "resource" problems in the world are actually governance problems. For example, if the government is too corrupt and/or unstable to set up desalination plants, then there is a critical water shortage. On a pure physics basis, we have enough energy for hundreds of thousands of years. There's a reason why the northeast US is sometimes called the "Saudi Arabia of coal."

The whole Limits to Growth thing from the 1970s should be thoroughly discredited by now. They picked a particularly bad time to come up with it, too, right before the Green Revolution and a prolonged slump in commodity and energy prices...
PHP Interview With Manuel Lemos Founder Of PHPClasses.org
I don't believe this argument of impotence. If they wanted to throw him out, they would have. Tenure is not written down in the constitution.

These 'we want to but we can't' arguments bother me more and more as i grow older. It's usually a pretty transparent excuse for not doing the right thing, by scared old men or ambitious young men.
> Block-level access accounts for basically all bulk storage in /dev

Unless your home and binary directories are stored on an NFS share.
Move them to another facility on U.S. soil. And presumably hope the Supreme Court would then "force" his hand on moving them into the domestic judicial system. I will be snarky because it's late, and I'm annoyed this topic is on hn: President Obama loves nothing more than to vote "present".
a) It doesn't make a lot of sense for Random Google Engineer #62 to give a presentation about a small project.

b) Go, like every other programming language, will take time to get up to speed. Programmers need to be familiar with it. Managers need to be OK approving new projects to use it. Old projects will need a really good reason to get a rewrite in it. There is no edict at Google to use any given language, it just has to be one of the four blessed languages: Java, C++, Python or Go. Go has to prove its value against languages that are decades old with full library support.

So no, I wouldn't say that it is clear Go has made inroads at El Goog, because I don't think anyone reasonable would expect it to. Is it fair to say "Google is heavily invested in Go"? I don't know. I think it's fair to say Rob Pike and his team are very clever, and they're spending their time on Go, so that bodes well.
Articles like this make me realize just how much I still have to learn about javascript - or perhaps programming in general. :P
dublinben:

Can you substantiate your claim that Congress is responsible for this?

Seems like Obama is the Commander in Chief and is the head of the Executive branch...
Glad you liked it. As far as the "illusions" go, as a rule of thumb I'd say anything smaller than my fist looks pretty much real, anything too big or too complex looks like a transparent layer in photoshop :) It gets better the more you do it, but I also find I need to concentrate considerably harder.
Unfortunately if people can go to jail for increnting a variable in a public URL, any effort of this nature is sure to draw the fire of United States law.

I don't even live in the place, and it still scares the crap out of me.
To expand a bit on with tikhonj is saying, consider the type signature of map:

map :: [a] -> (a -> b) -> [b]

In an implementation of map with this signature, the only way to get a list of b's is to use the function passed in. So, there's no way to do the array unwrapping shenanigans from the js example.
If you're in the US, pixelcort, may I invite you to consider the Downsize DC effort? (http://www.downsizedc.org/)

Here is a quick summary of what DownsizeDC.org is about:

We believe the federal government has grown too centralized, too intrusive, and too expensive. We believe in constitutional limits, smaller government, civil liberties, federalism, and low taxes. We want to end laws and programs that don't work, cause harm, and violate the Constitution. We want to restore the full force of the 9th and 10th amendments, which reserve most social functions to the people and the states.

The strategy of Downsize DC is to leverage technology to make it easier for people to make their voices heard to the State. They make it easier to contact your Senate and House representatives regularly.

The primary bill DownsizeDC is advocating is the Read the Bills Act -- make it law to read aloud each bill before signing it into law. That action alone would slow down the legislating machine.

The other one is the One Subject at a Time act -- make each bill deal with one subject at a time, instead of bundling subjects, which would make it very clear about politician's positions on various issues, and let each issue stand on its own merit.
Number 4 with additional variant…

it's possible that Bitcoin is simply a relatively cheap Straw-man to initiate a real world trial of a global, all digital currency. experiment with the security, anonymity, market, boom/bust, acceptance.

under this scenario, there will be others until the system is "perfected" for a unified single global currency.
It's pretty overwhelming at times because it seems so big, far away, impenetrable. But there are some contributions you can make pretty easily:

1. Financial support to the organizations fighting for whatever your believe in. (See: Human Rights Watch, Amnesty International)

2. Talking about it. If our politicians think we don't care, there's no pressure to do anything.
Except inflation takes more than just increased money supply.. You need to pair the money supply with velocity to get an indication of inflationary pressure.

As seen here: http://research.stlouisfed.org/fredgraph.png?g=hxg

There is no conspiracy.. MIT's billion prices index matches CPI almost verbatim. (http://bpp.mit.edu/usa/)
> Again, this approach today requires a vendor that can assert broad control over the whole system—from the file system to the interface, controller, and flash media.

Apple would be well-positioned here if they still cared about their Macs. HFS is due for a replacement anyway after 30 years. (it could be done on iOS devices too, but flash I/O performance doesn't seem to be a the major bottleneck for those uses)
Leonhard Euler honoured by Google doodle on 306th birthday
It's actually possible to implement the stack inspection in a tail-call-friendly way (along the lines of Racket's continuation marks IIRC), though AFAIK nobody does it.
Customer Seating and Standing Behaviors Onboard Subway Cars in New York City
No state will have them. Literally.
This back and forth has happened many times. The Defense Appropriations bills that have passed Congress have forbid the President from using fund for any of these activities.

There is no nuclear option. Veto is not an option.

What people don't seem to understand is that this isn't a failure of democracy to act: this is what the American people want. We don't care that Guantanamo is open and we'd rather see it stay open than give these people a chance at a fair trial.

We are a government by the people, of the people, and the people have spoken.
> Nationally housing values are now climbing at a 10%+ annual clip again (20% in Phoenix, with markets like DC at all time highs), driven by the Fed's inflationary posture of QE + hyper low interest rates....It's not the economy rebounding causing it. How do I know? Well beyond the obvious QE + low mortgage rates + lack of job creation, we're creating almost zero construction jobs right now (compare that to the last two times housing prices soared).

Or it's a combination of the following:

* We just had a housing bubble in the mid-2000's that entailed building lots and lots of houses. Since the population hasn't appreciably increased since then, there are actually enough houses to go around.

* The foreclosures and short-sales caused by the housing bubble popping have shook out, and this is just a reversion to the mean.

> College costs? Massive inflation.

Yeah, who guessed that federally incentivized lending would make the cost of something go up?

> Healthcare costs? Massive inflation.

Mostly trackable to US health care policy.

> Food prices? Near all time highs.

> Energy costs? $90 oil, $3.60 gasoline.

Well yeah, that's what's making the food costs go up.

> Meanwhile the US is producing more oil than at any time in the last 30 years, so it's not a supply problem

The US might be, but oil is a global market. Plus, the world is increasingly forced to use more and more expensive sources of petroleum, like oil sands and shale, which were not cost-effective just 10 or 12 years ago.

Nonetheless, it's not (purely) a supply problem. 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? 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? http://www.indexmundi.com/commodities/?commodity=crude-oil&#...

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. But yes, if you cherry pick parts of the economy where prices are going up and ignore parts where they aren't, you're going to see an inflation wave.
I saw a blank page and immediately thought "how poetic".
Guantanamo has nothing to do with congress. It was effectively authorized in this 2001 executive order:

http://www.fas.org/irp/offdocs/eo/mo-111301.htm
Likewise, this makes no sense to me as written.
It costs money to run Gitmo, not to stop running it. How would closing it require more money?
It's strange that the result of the petition is apparently not public. I would expect this kind of petition to largely meet the signature threshold.
I remember those times as well. I remember how they convinced so many people that the biggest issue facing the United States was Saddam Hussein ... Even liberals were buying it, or prefacing their statements with "I know he's a bad guy who has to go right away, but..." It was pretty crazy.

Or, how about that they successfully convinced the American voter to elect more Republicans in 2002 because ... Saddam. Makes no sense right? But it worked. It was successful enough to convince the opposition party to also support the war.

Let's not forget that Dick Cheney's office leaked a fake story to the New York Times, then cited that story as a reason for going to war... People forget that now, and just how fucked up it is.
Also food price increases look to me like they're basically within historical norms? The posted graph makes it look like there's a big spike because it starts with the 2008-2009 time period when inflation was actually negative.
http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/graph/?g=hxh
I agree it's definitional, so ultimately there isn't much to argue about.

What I wonder is what you think the upper class (as you define it) have that's so great or special that you don't. Sure you could cabin it so narrowly as to be people that e.g. get personal access to the President, or can get there kids into Harvard with a single phone call or something, but that definition is so narrow as to be useless (which gets back to the whole all Americans are middle class thing).

Having known several people with net worths in the 7-9 figure range, from brand new money through came over on the Mayflower, it really is a continuum. There's no secret handshake.

But that doesn't mean that somewhere along the continuum you really are living a different lifestyle than a family of four living in Northern California with both one parent working as a teacher and the other as a hygienist, each making $40,000 a year. They've got credit card balances, student loans, a long commute because that's where the affordable houses are, stress over how they are ever going to pay for college, and so on. You may shop at the same stores, but is that really a good indicator? Call what you have upper middle class if you feel like it, but that family is solidly middle class by any reasonable definition. So if there's a difference in kind, and someone has to give up the label, it shouldn't be them.

Finally, I should note that I find this little quirk of American culture fairly harmless. The one area where it can be pernicious is when it effects certain policy areas. For example, many people agree that the "rich" should be paying higher taxes, but since hardly anyone sees himself as rich, it is always a little farther out that the tax burden needs to fall. A good litmus test is the home mortgage income deduction, which is massively tilted to the high end of the income scale. If in justifying a high phase out you start to hear yourself say things like $1.5 million doesn't really buy you that much -- then you may be in the problematic zone.
and HN?
This one is more interesting than the link posted earlier today. The comments are interesting too.

So, what of the thought that the only value in bitcoin is its lack of serious competitors? It seems that as soon as another decentralized currency comes along that clearly improves on bitcoin in some way, you could see an ever quickening flight away from bitcoin. There's nothing intrinsic about bitcoin that keeps the value sticky. The value is the idea more than the implementation. What if something like Freicoin or Litecoin or something clearly better starts to get serious traction?
It is "incredibly secure" in the same sense as the banks that use TLS are using "military grade" encryption.
It's in his comments on every appropriations bill. You just don't care.

Let's all be honest: we don't think about Guantanamo. When people bring it up we'll hem and haw and say, "gee, that's just terrible," but we don't give a shit. Take it out of the spotlight and it may as well not exist.
true, agreed.

though processing power would seem to be the best proof of stake, as say compared to network connectivity.
So, I'm curious. In response to Linus' comment that "... .gitmodules was always a bit of a hack, but
it's a working hack ...", does anyone who's actually used them really feel that they are indeed a 'working' hack? I find that whenever I interact with a git repo with submodules I spend an inordinate amount of time wrangling them to do things they clearly weren't meant to do. I find that most people I talk to about them have experienced the same. And then I go and do something like try to use bisect in concert with them and I basically want to shoot my computer.

Am I missing something?
Transactions are free under $10.
Hi, future generations!

Political prisoners are being raped with food intubators to prevent themselves from committing suicide in America's secret torture prison, with the express consent and approval of President Obama, the American Congress, and the numerical majority of the American people.

Love,
2013
We have a real problem if the masochistic few who have historically embraced hard questions by parsing original sources either choose not to or never discover their interest when regularly presented with an easy way out. Can the self-interested pursuit of real knowledge & understanding exist in a world of algorithmically generated bite-sized morsels?

I believe it can. People have bemoaned society's advancements negatively impacting the dissemination of information to a thoughtful populace since before paper boys shouted headlines from corners. It happened with radio, it happened with television, it happened with dotcom portals.

Smart people aren't so easily distracted from learning.

The pain of manual research means most people don't bother to do it. Improved indexers, aggregators, and summarizers improve access to those with attention which only affords the surface.
Was re: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5549461 -- the interface I was using displayed it as a thread that disallowed comments (like the Y.combinator hiring threads) -- see: http://hckrnews.com/ and the 'whitehouse' related link there.

Mea culpa! Downvote this :)
I'd say the best names just come to you. I sat down with my team weighing different names and we ended up mustering out a name that we've used for all applications and VC stuff. None of us loved the name but we gave it time and ended up finding something that just clicks. Don't rush the process. Let it happen.
> If Rob Pike wasn't involved in this language, it would be completely invisible.

Being the last item on Ken Thompson's resume prior to his retirement makes it kind of visible, too.

> So, there's not a lot of concrete evidence that Go has made any inroads inside Google against Java and C++ and from what I can see, the language is hardly every used outside Google as well.

Do you work at Google?
This is absolute nonsense. The US president, wrapping himself in the role of commander in chief, does just about anything he wants if it's even loosely connected to war or security, with or without congressional approval. Surveillance. Torture. Black sites. Assassination. Drone murders. Infinite detention. If he wanted Gitmo closed, he could close it. Congress won't give him the budget? Fine, he could order the closing as a military operation. He doesn't want to take the political heat. I voted for him (2008), but he is without testicular fortitude on this issue.
Which is also completely accurate. That is the exact and often lauded benefit of BitCoin. It's as anonymous as that act, but digital and cross-border.

That the technical details differ is functionally irrelevant since this is what BitCoin people are claiming you can do!
Thanks! The main page (http://readscheme.org/) has a contact address for the maintainer; maybe they'll add those links to the site if you let them know.
I'm not defending gitmo, but why wouldn't we remember its defenders the same way we remember those who have suspended habeas corpus in previous eras [1]?

[1] Abraham Lincoln : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Habeas_corpus_in_the_United_Sta...
Sure, let's talk facts.

1) Fixed the link to include the four year gas chart. Up from $2.03 to $3.57 in four years. Doesn't bode well for your case. Short link due to ampersands:

http://goo.gl/R4r0f

2) You seem to grant that inflation contributed to the rise in food prices. A one off drought can't explain the persistence of the rise since 2008, or the fact that food inflation caused the riots which led to the Arab Spring in 2011.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/economics/8492078/How-the...

The first graph illustrates the correlation between the
prices of food and the Fed’s purchase of US Treasuries
(i.e. its quantitative easing programmes). (A widely-
discussed graph illustrating correlation between QE and
broader commodities indices can be seen here.) We see how
the food price index broadly stabilised through late 2009
and early 2010, then rose again from mid-2010 as
quantitative easing was re-started (QE2) following Ben
Bernanke’s Jackson Hole speech of August 27 – with prices
rising of about 40% over an eight month period. Similar
correlations can be observed between Fed purchases and
wider commodities indices, but let’s focus on food for now.

... But the reality is that a rise in commodity prices is
precisely what theory predicts would be a consequence of
QE2, and the data give the same picture – we aren’t
investigating a contentious mystery in the data; we are
seeing precisely what we ought to have expected.

Indeed. The amazing thing is how vehemently people insist that tripling the monetary base in a few years won't cause inflation. This is a simple matter of ratios. Bernanke, Obama, Bush, Greenspan, and Krugman have pursued a policy that enriches banks and shields them from risk by diluting dollar holders. If you understand the concept of dilution in a cap table, you should understand this much: the printed dollars are deposited in the accounts of large banks, enriching the very richest and making everyone else worse off.

Krugman himself is a knowing accomplice, one who always pulls his punches with respect to the banks:

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/failure-is-a-fai...

One thing that keeps coming up in comments, both here and
on my column, is the widespread belief that all we need to
do on the banking front is (a) break up the big banks, so
that none of them are too big to fail (b) promise not to
bail out any banks in the future. That way, the claim goes,
bankers will know that they will face dire consequences if
they misbehave, and market discipline will do the rest.

Dream on.

...

But just letting banks fail isn’t going to happen — nor
should it. In practice, talking about doing so is just an
excuse to avoid real reform.

At the end of the day Krugman is for the bailouts, for the banks, and against bank bankruptcy. No wonder he's against Bitcoin.
Predicting the weather is easier than that... weather is cyclical.
> "Let’s focus on the two huge misconceptions — one practical, one philosophical — that underlie both goldbugism and bitbugism. The practical misconception here — and it’s a big one — is the notion that we live in an era of wildly irresponsible money printing, with runaway inflation just around the corner. It’s true that the Federal Reserve and other central banks have greatly expanded their balance sheets — but they’ve done that explicitly as a temporary measure in response to economic crisis."

If Krugman can't even get the basics of Bitcoin right, I'm certainly not going to buy into his view that the ongoing printing/digitising of funny money - $85 billion/month (US) and $76 billion/month (Japan) - is nothing to worry about. When trillions of dollars have effectively appeared out of thin air, the question needs to be addressed, is this responsible monetary policy or is this Mugabenomics?!
ThoughtSTEM Laser Tag Kickstarter
Firefox Bug 857820 – Remove &lt;blink&gt; element
Alas, naïveté in the political system. How I knew you.
Ask HN: Bitcoin processing limits
How much processing power would be required if every transaction in the world used bitcoin?
I wouldn't. Due process for people who are perceived to be terrorists is not actually an especially popular viewpoint with the majority of the American public[0].

The rest of the world wants due process for these detainees. Most people in hacker communities tend to lean far more libertarian or liberal than the average American and want due process for these detainees. These are not the people who determine the outcome of elections.

[0] http://www.gallup.com/poll/124727/americans-oppose-closing-g...
Thesaurus might help.
Cash for Carbon?
So one of the problems that advocates for solar panel driven futures have is that they don't add in the significant cost in terms of energy and resources of producing them, nor the fact that a lot of solar solutions start with petrochemical inputs. Once we lose the 100:1 EROEI that we get from drilled oil a lot of other assumed energy solutions become very challenging. A lot of these things are energy intenstve to produce in the first place and have finite lifetimes.
A lot of people ask this question, but forget to look at a very apparent and distinct characteristic of Bitcoin: it's opensource. If another awesome and very useful feature appears in Litecoin nothing can prevent Bitcoin maintainers from implementing it too. In fact, there's every incentive for them to do so, because their own reputation and assets in bitcoins are at stake.

Thus, while a competitive currency is possible, it may not be needed for Bitcoin to remain a great product. It may well be this mystical natural monopoly in a field economists would hardly predict one to appear.