skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
InclinedPlane, your anti-deflationary arguments can be refuted in 4 different ways:

1. A deflationary currency strongly encourages businesses to maximize revenues today instead of tomorrow, because they know they can get more units of the deflationary currency today rather than tomorrow. This incentive does not exist with inflationary currencies.

2. If you had 100% confidence in Bitcoin being deflationary, you would invest in bitcoins. But the fact you do not (I presume) shows a very important point: you, like many, doubt Bitcoin will remain deflationary on the long term (eg. it might crash to zero). This uncertainty is why, despite being in theory deflationary, Bitcoin will continue to see a growing economy. People will continue to invest and spend bitcoins, because the future of Bitcoin, like the future of any currency (inflationary or deflationary), is fundamentally uncertain.

3. There is an often-cited counter-example to the argument that "people will not spend if they know prices will decline in the future" (as prices will in a deflationary currency): the electronics industry. Laptops, smartphones, servers, etc: prices are always decreasing. Yet this industry is very successful. Buyers are not afraid to spend money today, even if they know they can get the product for less tomorrow. This is because prices decreasing over time stimulate spending.

4. The traditional arguments against a deflationary currency only work within a self-contained economy anyway. Bitcoin currently exist as a side currency next to all other (USD, EUR, etc). People will still want to invest these currencies, and the Bitcoin economy being tightly coupled to
others will naturally benefit from these investments. That's why for example we are seeing a bunch of Bitcoin startups popping up: Coinbase, BitPay, BitSpend, BitcoinStore, CoinLab, etc

Edit: downvoting me, seriously? I would like to know why.
Yup, same here. I can sometimes recognise good design when I see it, but I also know that my idea of good is not the same as the majority.

Frankly, I'm best off with the infrastructure/back-end side of things, and letting people who have a good eye do the design.
Exactly, how dare they suggest I'm not a surgeon. I'm off to buy a scalpel and put out a few craigslist ads. In a week we'll see who's got a new job title !
Sure there was hysteria, right down to color-coded threat level alerts and people duct-taping their windows to protect themselves from chemical and biological attacks.

Even prominent or well-known people were afraid to speak out for fear of reprisal (a valid fear: see Dixie Chicks and Bill Maher).
Has your online store had a little "refactoring" since the last promo? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4947146
I always have at home some Essentiale forte N
Essentiale Forte is a liver therapeutic agent that regulates the enzymatic action of the liver.
Essential Forte stimulates the metabolic function of the liver by enhancing the conversion of neutral fats and cholesterol necessary in facilitating its metabolism.
As in most things, moderation is the key. There's a lot of room to move between "avoid all news" and "constantly check the news".

I also find that keeping abreast of the news provides a history that helps things make sense. Why the news has to provide some sort of life-shattering function for you (as the article describes) is beyond me. Why is politician A pushing Article 1? Well, there's been several strings of related articles, and then there was Incident 2 a couple of months ago...
> Haskell, I need to be able to get fluent enough with it that I can be productive munging data with it. This means [...] regexes

It's possible to use combinator parsers (e.g. Parsec) to do everything regexes can do (plus the extras), although regexes are available if desired.
Another point to prove why military-funded research is quite necessary for technological advancement.
I have to take issue with her bit about the follies of "brainstorming."

> But decades of research show that individuals almost always perform better than groups in both quality and quantity, and group performance gets worse as group size increases. The “evidence from science suggests that business people must be insane to use brainstorming groups,” wrote the organizational psychologist Adrian Furnham. “If you have talented and motivated people, they should be encouraged to work alone when creativity or efficiency is the highest priority.”

> The reasons brainstorming fails are instructive for other forms of group work, too. People in groups tend to sit back and let others do the work; they instinctively mimic others’ opinions and lose sight of their own; and, often succumb to peer pressure. The Emory University neuroscientist Gregory Berns found that when we take a stance different from the group’s, we activate the amygdala, a small organ in the brain associated with the fear of rejection. Professor Berns calls this “the pain of independence.”

I feel like productivity and creativity are both absolutely possible in a team setting, just as much as they are in solitude. The determining factor is the competency of the team. My side-project team is outstanding, and we build amazingly with each other, because we're a good team. But at work I dread team-work because my management team members are dolts. But I digress -- I don't think it's the group/alone devide. It's a divide on the quality of the people.
At university we had a contest with programmable tanks. Many wrote elaborate algorithms and tried to find the optimal strategy, but the winner was very crude: It tried to get a little bit more life than its opponent, and if it was ahead it would immediately start spawning threads, until the play server couldn't handle it anymore and crashed -- Winning by default.
I like this, a lot.

This kind of thinking can be applied anywhere, not just to open source. Imagine how much good could be accomplished if the world were a more open, collaborative place.
some of the dsl's might be hard to decode
"While BIND (written in C) can only serve 1000 queries per second on an old 486, the Go rewrite can serve all DNS queries in the world"

Maybe I mis-read it, but that comment comes across as a little sarcastic. Hope I'm wrong.
As a teenager I was always a bit of a cynic about anything that wasn't an exact science, the ideas of introspection of my own mind for things I dismissed as hippy bullshit of the organic food variety.

However later I found that meditation helps my mind and even my asthma a lot. Taking the time for 5-15 minutes every day to just focus on my breathing in the lotus position really does make a difference to my productivity that day.

Also getting and staying of HN / Reddit / SO for a day helps too...
I only support the violent maintenance of a singular kind of ownership, which is of scarce goods and resources which can not be replicated at, or at near, no cost, and whose transferral requires the giver lose while the receiver gains.

It is why I consider myself libertarian and not anarchist. Besides the fact I also think, like how Communism turned out, what we think in theory and what we do in practice are in conflict because people are still human and often do, even in selfish terms, illogical things.
It sounds like your brain enjoys lengthy productive learning sessions and is bored at the idea of jumping between topics at 30minute intervals - "hey brain, just absorb this for me, oh and this, this too" Your brain just shrugs and says "where's the fun in that?"

Make something, create something, build something. Instead of being passive (reading a screen or a book) put your whole brain to task on a project that needs solving, designing and leaves you with an end product.

For me, it took a long time to realise that I absorb information SO fast when I'm immersed in it.

I've written in the past about all the creative strategies I used to get through my exams - whatever you enjoy doing, try to incorporate it alongside the topic you're learning.

People think they tax their brain too much with study but the fact that your brain wanders off into it's own thoughts or sends you to sleep show you it's actually looking for something more challenging to solve. Engage your brain with a more challenging & creative problem.
Do the Chinese govt regularly seize money from their citizens?
It's the equivalent of keeping the neighbor's daughter in your basement because letting her out would get you into so much trouble.

Gitmo is already shockingly illegal or dangerously unethical; I don't see any interest by the US government to end it and take some of the heat for that.
Honestly, no.

Every country has people in it believing that, and songs accordingly. It is called nationalism, which is more common in some countries then others. If you would say those thinks over here, people would suspect you being a nazi.

This "America is the greatest country on earth"-slogan is pretty specific for the USA. It is so typical that it became a klischee, we call it "american pathos". It is the same category like beauty queens wishing world peace in a country leading two wars. It is the movie independence day with a american president being a jet fighter fighting aliens and saving the world, once again, and us thinking that this fits to the image the USA has of itself. It is right-wing nationalism as a political party (republicans) and 24h on tv (Fox News). It is "god bless america".

And there are those american politicians saying things like "we are the greatest country in the world" and "the land of the free". No other country has that, at least no democratic one and not with the same prevalence, to my knowing.

It is hybris, because in many objective ways, america is the worst countries in the world. Poverty, education, leading wars, prison system, death sentences, amount of guns per capita, killing and abduction of foreign civilians, torture of prisoners, broken democratic system, religious fanatism. No other country fails in so many ways so high, not even your beloved rogue states.

PS: Doesn't mean there are only bad parts, there are even great ones.

PPS: Your examples, "mother of all parliaments" and the tyranny-overthrowal in France, relates to historical events and facts. That is something else than a broad generic claim.
this series of articles has been brilliant so far! it takes a relatively obscure concept that people dont always know / understand (even surprisingly many within the hacker world) - and makes it so simple to understand! great job - I wish people with skills like yours taught at university!
In my case, the thing was not about eliminating distractions, but about providing a stimulating enough challenges.

Eliminate distractions all you want - if the task is boring, and the environment not stimulating, you'll sooner become crazy than focus.

I also used to stress a lot about not being able to focus. And stress alone hindered my ability even further. Which caused me to stress even more, and so on.
The revelation came, when my coach asked me "so, does stressing about work help you?" I decided to take it light - if I cannot work, so be it.
Lo and behold, a couple days after letting go, I went into an uberdrive, and built a product which I struggled with for months..

Right now, my recipe is:
- if the work doesn't flow, I let it go. I go for a walk, I do sports, wait for a muse. And have faith that it will come
- I try to keep my environment stimulating - I had to go a couple friendships, and stop doing activities which no longer helped me develop myself
- I try to have a couple kinds of activities lined up - so when I cannot focus on programming, I do marketing, or accounting in my startup.
- A good diet helps a lot as well.

But everybody is different. It's important to discover what works and what doesn't - in your case removing distractions clearly doesn't work. Perhaps you could try changing your learning habits (e.g. use Inkling, or Coursera instad of traditional books, or try group learning?), or try finding a different subject, or a different approach to the subject?
> Secondly, it most certainly "gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

Does it really? It looks to me much more like an article meant to engender outrage at something injust in the world.

Note: I'm not saying I don't agree with the outrage, just that it's very much about something highly political and I feel it does not belong here.
The peak throughput in any region of space in terms of wave density is limited, but one of the reasons your coworkers are probably experiencing such scarcity is due to artificial constraints on the market.

Frequency would be scarce in highly concentrated areas in an open-frequency region, but it would be less so than if you artificially restricted access. What would naturally follow is that the demand would distribute itself (within the realm of possibility, ultra low and high frequencies have either range or bandwidth disadvantages that make them ill suited for, say, digital packet signaling).

I also wonder what kind of innovation you might see in an open band environment in terms of wifi - if you weren't limited to the few bands of 802.11, maybe routers would pop up that dynamically enable multiple transmitters (like how a modern router would have multiple antennas to transmit in parallel, maybe you would see many-hundred low power antenna radios to interface with devices over the largest clear possible frequency range available?)
This is a VERY naive point of view about news.
I used to upgrade for games too, but that was a long time ago. And I assume gamers mostly build their own PCs instead of buying them from HP and Dell.

I'm not sure if the newer versions of Windows are slower, but an iMac I bought in 2009 which now runs the latest version of Mac OS X feels just as fast today as it did back then.

The only hardware upgrade that I think is worth it these days is going from a regular spinning HDD to an SSD. That jump is massive and I can understand why manufacturers might hold back on pushing SSDs for now: it gives them a bit of room in the future to sell better performance (you just can't notice differences in CPU performance doing email, web, audio and video). If that's what they're doing...
And if you are both disrupting, neither of you are making a profit and are losing customers. It is in the best interests of all parties to negotiate usage that maximizes benefit of all parties involved.

It doesn't require the violence of law for people to come to compromise. Profit motive is plenty enough I think.
Dexamphetamine
Create a digital research diary in LaTeX
If it helps at all, I "suffer" from the exact same thing. I once studied procrastination while I was procrastinating at work and here are my 3 tricks that work, at least half the time:

1. Just don't do what you have to do. Just sit there. BUT the catch is you are not allowed to do ANYTHING else. After about 15 minutes of doing nothing, your interest creeps back for your the task you are working on.

2. Make a big 3 list. At the very beginning of the day, write down the 3 most important things to get done that day. Only work on those things.

3. Cut up the elephant. This is the biggest thing helps me. Many times the items on our todo lists are really gargantuan tasks! Your brain unconsciously knows this and will try to avoid these loaded tasks. Break them down into bite sized elephant chunks. Elephant wasn't eaten in a day ; ) You'll feel better as you knock through those smaller todos. I also recommend Tudumo (www.tudumo.com) as a todo tracker. It has a lot of keyboard shortcuts. I have a list called "elephant chunks" and as soon as I tackle an item on the main list, I create the elephant chunks list and start hammering those suckers down.

I still lapse into massive procrastination, but these tricks have helped me a lot. You aren't alone. And I don't think you are lazy. If you are anything like me, this is probably some of the stuff you are most passionate about and it's killing you that you are avoiding it. Make a new big 3 list every day and don't give up!
I don't know of another country that has it quite so bad. I know of nowhere else in the western world where people fly flags or drape themselves in the flag with anything like the regularity of the US.

It really sticks out compared to everywhere else I've been, and I've travelled to/in 30+ countries now.
"A 'designer' and a 'developer' are made of the same stuff, all that separates them is the label they place upon themselves."

I'm also made of the same stuff as heart surgeons. Want to get under my knife? Didn't think so.

I'm all for expanding one's skill set. Please say 'yes' to learning new things. That doesn't mean you get to be good at what you started last week, or even last year.
Are you unable to focus at all times even when you do something you completely enjoy? Or are you unable to focus only on boring tasks? That's two different problems and solutions.
If he is a POW he should be released since the war was over 10 years ago.
I missed out on IntelliJ last time because of the downtime, but not this time!
You shouldn't blog if you have procrastination tendencies. Focus on real work.
It has never been tried in practice. If we take the violent enforcement of artificial limitation on a non-scarce concept (radios can broadcast at frequencies and do so at variable frequencies fairly well) off the table, and the reality that in the absence of such forced regulation a major monopoly is prohibitive because, in the case of the radio industry, because there is no scarce resource here (radio waves can be produced for nigh-nothing after the investment in a radio, which is a markedly low barrier to entry) you can't have a cartel enforce dominance either without expending excessive amounts of resources to deny competitors, and they would bankrupt themselves trying to maintain dominance without actually providing anything useful and unable to extort because the ability to enter the market is too low, and without regulation, they can't create false barriers to entry.

Also, actively attacking someones broadcasts for the sole purpose of disruption is still extortion. I'm not nutty enough to think you can go total anarchy, just that artificially constructed scarcity is bad for everyone.
> It takes me ages to get anything done

... and then people tell me "you probably haven't considered it yet, but you should spend some time working on the design of the site". Argh! I wish I were better at it though.
The bane of legacy code
> what prevents company X from interfering with routers from company Y, so that Y's products are perceived as flaky

That is still sabotage and possibly extortion if they try to bribe the company. If they weren't providing a real good with the bandwidth they use I would imagine no court would find them not guilty of attacking the company they are targeting.
That's great, it seems like a bunch of happy "accidents" happened in connection to your activities as a blogger.
Was it a technical blog? What pushed you to start a blog in the first place?
I hope this islamic monster dies ASAP.
The 'end of the world' sale was pretty heavily discounted if I remember correctly. Maybe they actually believed it...
Tongan Exceptionalism?
When I've written the last one I'll try to put all four together into a simple PDF with illustrations.
Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?

Sting operations have their uses but should have much better safeguards. Officers using sting operations against rules and guidelines should face disciplinary penalties and even jail time in severe cases. Officers should be responsible for their actions before the law, just like citizens.
But I'm asking for a specific example of a natural monopoly that isn't the result of infrastructure (which is best not even done privately and is best a public good) and can't have its prohibitive costs to enter the result of artificial government scarcity (arguing a nuclear plant is prohibitively expensive to build because the designs are all patented, for example, falls into that category).

I just can't think of one. Almost any "natural" monopoly (roads, healthcare, power grid, network cable, etc) I think should be done by local government, not private business, because structural aspects of society aren't effective platforms for competition if they just supply the foundations to build markets upon.

Actually, I just thought of one - maybe agriculture. While it is structural, it isn't an inherent infrastructure because it has specialized purpose. The post green revolution has demonstrated (though I imagine it is the result of regulation this happens) that megafarms are the most efficient way to organize modern farming. This naturally leads to a few big players because the cost of equipment to properly maximize productivity of land has high expenses (though they aren't at a comparable scale to say, a road network, or laying fiber in a city - one tractor, plow, tiller, etc plus the seed, silos, barns, etc, but these are tools to maximize productivity, not infrastructure).

It might be the product of land ownership and zoning, but I'm only familiar with my local zoning code, which has a large Mennonite population, so most of the farmland in the region is restricted from being sold for other purposes. The midwest is a much different story that I'm not familiar with.
The easy trap
And what exactly is the difference you find between those who watch news and those who don't?

Besides being able to talk about latest news themselves, of course.
Not weird at all. For starters, this gives you the tools to think about what could be wrong, when stuff goes wrong. Or at least a vague idea of where to start looking.

The more of these 'entry points' you get the easier it gets for others, whose specialty you know a bit of, to communicate with you.

Bonus points if you have a 'relative difficulty' idea for most of those entry points.
I've been using intellij with the python plugin for a project (basically the same as pycharm).

Have always been a customized emacs user before now (using JEDI etc) but intellij does have some nice features - if not quite so snappy.
>I'm predicting that in the future we will have solutions to bring back some physical stimuli to our digital transactions.

Who will than benefit? Not the store, and not the credit card company.
We do a great disservice to others by not appreciating their craft.

I wonder if the author would feel as accomplished in his primary craft if someone who used a bit of jQuery for the first time went and declared that they were now a JavaScript developer?

After 10,000 hours of practise a master craftsmen knows he still has a lot to learn. The problem with job title inflation like this is that it bloats the already large crowd of people who do not have the humbleness of a master craftsman and claim to be more than they are.

I realise defeating negative thought is important, but the process of becoming something is possibly more important than using a claim to be something (to overcome such negative thought).
Yep. The previous "end of the world" sale was 75% off and lasted 24 hours only.
You just precisely described pumped-storage hydro and why it's used for 99% of bulk electricity storage :)
What does the number in brackets beside my name mean?
In the top right-hand corner of https://news.ycombinator.com/, my name appears in front of a number; i.e., name (1).

What does the number in brackets beside my name mean?
>It's surely making sense for them, so what can we learn from that?

Just because a country does something, it doesn't mean it's the smartest thing to day (you can deduce that logically by realizing that different countries adopt different policies).
Bought IDEA during the Doomsday Sale, first time I tried was the 'big' downtime and failed, and then waited several hours and tried again. One of the best purchases I've done!