skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Replacing Bitcoin now would be like trying to replace gold with platinum or replace HTTP.

I rather suspect that replacing Bitcoin with something new and improved might first be like replacing Lycos or Excite (used as a search engine) with AltaVista, and then later like replacing AltaVista with Google. We won't know what a currency with true critical mass looks like until we see one. I can't predict what important feature differences the next electronic currency will offer that provide more user value than Bitcoin offers, but it's quite plausible to me, given the history of technology, that Bitcoin hasn't closed the market to other entrants yet.

From a nephew comment:

Reddit has become integral to the culture in a way comparable to Twitter and Facebook

Nope.
When you have electric motors that produce torque at any RPM, then as long as you can manufacture a motor to spin fast enough, you don't need gears.

The Model S is direct drive... so no gears.
A cool tshirt of the original Tesla in New York:
http://teespring.com/tesla
+1 for the Robert McChesney reference. I remember taking the class Money, Media, and Power at UIUC which he instructs, and it was one of the most interesting classes I've taken in my 6 lengthy years in college.
I think you have it backwards: if consumers constantly swap out their batteries, they unload the uncertainty of pricing the battery's degradation onto the experts. Charging stations will retire decrepit batteries and replace them with new tech. If today's batteries last 50% longer than expected or 50% shorter than expected, the consumer doesn't have to worry -- they will always have a battery that works OK and they will never get slapped with a massive unplanned repair charge. They won't have to worry about upgrading their batteries or choosing between high capacity and low capacity batteries since they can just do that at the swap station. They also don't have to worry about recycling since the station will handle it for them.
Those who can't produce signal, produce noise.
Not sure why this is posted to HN. "College Grads" refers to basket weavers and Old English Literature majors, i.e. graduates as a whole, which is like trying to speak to politicians as a whole, or "Women, you should be nicer."
I guess not at all, except that algorithms are probably more powerful in a certain way that controllers/mixers/etc cannot achieve.

Of course, "algorithms" (to be honest I don't really know what is happening in the video) and using "traditional" DJ tools aren't really fair comparison -- they're totally different. With DJing the virtue is in the DJ's manual abilities, his technique (among many other things). In this case it's in the programmer's ability to automate a soundsystem.

I should note that modern DJ software is very advanced in the algorithm department though...perhaps the algorave approach is the quintessential hacker mentality of playing with the technical nitty-gritty, whereas modern mixing software remain rather closed to the DJ (an attempt to emulate DJ hardware, I guess).

Edit: whoops, looks like the "hacker mentality" is the whole point. According to http://algorave.com/about/

"These days just about all electronic music is made using software, but with artificial barriers between the people creating the software algorithms and the people making the music."
Yeah, this Newser business is for the birds.
Soldiers wouldn't be infecting Pacific Islands, far northern mining camps, where scientists first tried to get a copy of its genetic material, people in and around Brevig Mission, Alaska (fatality rate 85%) where the first useful sample came from.

It's been awhile since I've read up on it, but the speed at which it spread, prior to air travel, was frighteningly fast.
> The reasons are pretty clear, its a superior way to build power trains if you can get the performance, range, and refueling issues solved.

Don't want to nitpick, but I think we're still a long way from "refueling issues" being solved world-wide in the near-term (15 to 25 years), only because electric power transmission is a damn-hard problem to solve at a global scale.

I remember reading an article linked from here a couple of months ago about how one big UK power company was handling the almost instantaneous switching on of millions of tea kettles after some BBC show had ended (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5018560). Now imagine the same scenario in a country like Nigeria (population approaching 200 million), or Brazil, or Indonesia, but with cars instead of mundane tea kettles and with a not so top-notch electrical infrastructure instead of the mature UK power grid.

I do hope though that Tesla will end up being a $100+ billion company, if only to demonstrate that true innovation can still bring big financial gains in this day and age.
Welcome to the new (and fast-growing) ecosystem of mobile business apps
How does removing functionality "put [me] in control" or "bring freedom"? It does exactly the opposite; it leaves me with less freedom and control.
You don't save for retirement to do fun things. You save so that you can live when you have no ability to work.
The good, the bad and the employee
How embarrassingly narrow-minded. Yeah, Java's enums are fully fledged classes. Which actually makes them extremely powerful and useful, more useful than enums in any other language. I've seen more than one C programmer unable to cope with such an extreme deviation from their bunch-of-integer-constants expectation.
He wrote a significant portion while a POW.
I have the same experience in an established tech company in the bay area.

Exactly the same has happened - lots of new hires. Bad management. Really silly review process. Features are valued over fixing things.

There's no mentorship process for said new hires. This has obvious flow-on effects.

The old timers don't get promoted into management but end up fixing more and more bugs (because they're the ones that know stuff well enough to fix said bugs.) They get frustrated and leave, or they just give up and take a pay check.

The management values "time to deliver" over any kind of balance with "fix existing issues", "make things better", "fix long standing issues", "do code/architecture review to try and improve things over the long run."

They're going to get spanked if anyone shows up in their marketspace. Oh wait, but they're transitioning to an IP licensing company instead of "make things people buy." So even if they end up delivering crap, their revenue comes from licensing patents and IP rather than making things. Oops.

Thank god there's a startup mentality in the bay area.
So basically, a junior dev came to you for help because he didn't understand how to solve the problem, you spent a lot of time showing off how much you knew about the subject but didn't actually help him solve it, then he went back and struggled on it for months, still couldn't figure it out, and finally got transferred to a different department. This sounds to me like you being unhelpful and condescending towards someone less experienced than yourself.
git repo anywhere?
What Gets Me Hot & Bothered: Crypto Currencies, Drones and 3D Printing
I didn't get that sense at all. What I took away from the post was a) in sad of packing your days with work now so you can do the things you want in 20-40 years, structure your life so you can do those things now and b) freelancing could be an option (but its not easy).
Would this mean that open source communities would work better for modular systems, since each independent module has a relatively small codebase? Unix & NPM come to mind.
Thank you for that. I see the French woman Jeanne Louise Calment (21 February 1875 – 4 August 1997) who long held the title of world's oldest person is an impressive outlier.

I heard a description of the life of Calment by a local researcher who participates in longitudinal studies of extreme old age. She outlived her husband, and all her (few) descendants. She only gave up smoking when she became so blind that she could no longer see the end of a cigarette to light it. The researcher told me this story (taken here from Wikipedia) about how she kept living in her house after she became aged and widowed:

"In 1965, aged 90 years and with no heirs, Calment signed a deal to sell her former apartment to lawyer André-François Raffray, on a contingency contract. Raffray, then aged 47 years, agreed to pay her a monthly sum of 2,500 francs until she died. Raffray ended up paying Calment the equivalent of more than $180,000, which was more than double the apartment's value. After Raffray's death from cancer at the age of 77, in 1995, his widow continued the payments until Calment's death."
Well you can manually request your DPC to target a particular core before you insert it in the queue. So yeah, while its possible to avoid the situation, it requires the driver writer to be aware of this problem.

Also w.r.t to your other point, Threaded DPCs do exist (since vista) which run at PASSIVE_LEVEL.
Zsh won't mess with any of your configs. But even if it did, you'll probably never look back anyway once you make the switch. It does everything you're used to Bash doing, except more, and better.
Problem is, 100% inflation per 2 years is a bit much.
If you liked DFW and Borges, you may like Matt Ruff (especialy "Set this House in Order", "The Mirage" and "Fool on the Hill"). It's not as complex but the style is similar and really enjoyable.
Google+ app on Android; bug or faulty hardware?
Instant transactions are actually safe for nearly all applications. Try buying something for BTC at some point; the confirmation will happen in 5-10 seconds.
Nice. I find that keeping a little ledger on top of your desk and writing down every idea that pops in your head is also a very good habit. And you often realize "some great idea you had wasn't that great at all" (pg).
Sharing HTML5 canvas images to directly to Facebook
The yeoman project encompasses a lot more. It's original design was very monolithic but the community and core team decided it's better broken into modules, so you primarily use much of yeoman through grunt, but much of that workflow is authored by the Yeoman dev team.

There's yo (that scaffolds via generators), 10 officially supported generators that work with common webapps setups (e.g. angular backbone ember chrome-extension mocha karma), and (so far) 74 generators in the community building off this platform: https://npmjs.org/browse/depended/yeoman-generator

Then other supplementary modules: grunt-contrib-compass, grunt-contrib-imagemin, grunt-contrib-htmlmin, grunt-contrib-livereload, grunt-regarde, grunt-svgmin, grunt-contrib-connect, grunt-bower-requirejs, grunt-usemin, node adapters for optipng and jpegtran, configstore. This grunt infrastructure designed and maintained by the project.

In addition, the Yeoman also collaborates very heavily with the Bower and Grunt projects, both of which are accellerating very fast. There is considerable overlap in the core dev teams here, everyone working together amongst this disparate but congealing webapp developing tooling ecosystem.
I'm assuming the said boss would not have approved the update to GNOME without first checking that all the features they require the workforce to have in order to work, are present.

Then yes, they should.

If the boss gives you lemons, you don't go to the lemon tree and ask if it can make lemons that read email, browse NFS shares and change screensaver settings. You go to your boss and say "just-lemons isn't good enough".
Really? It sounds like he explained all of the relevant tools and APIs, and the junior dev decided he didn't actually have to learn any of that and instead could just code monkey his way through.

Basically, the junior dev sounds incredibly incompetent. Some people you just can't teach.
I never considered how LZW doesn't do RLE!

LZW was probably chosen over Deflate for simplicity reasons. Maybe webP's complexity has been hurting its adoption?

How does giflossy work? I don't see an explanation on that page.
Depends entirely on demand. Everyone can play with the supply all they want - demand is still completely unpredictable.
A Y-combinator startup asked me to set up chartio for them. The script generated some random error during setup, so I logged a support ticket with chartio. A month later they still hadn't bothered replying. I'll forgive you having a buggy setup script, but I won't forgive you when you don't even bother replying to my support query about your buggy product.
> It's easy to forget how much modern practices cut down on disease: wash hands, don't drink water people (or animals) poop in, sterilize (or dispose of) medical devices, store your food properly, don't live in a house also occupied by rodents, etc... That is all a great start, and we haven't even talked about antibiotics and other modern medical tech.

With the exception of washing hands (which we don't do nearly enough) and the vague "modern medical tech", none of this would help against a flu pandemic at all...
A shallow nitpicking of language syntax. I would rather read about how a programming language fares at solving difficult problems. Not a minor quibble that has no impact on anything other than this programmer's sensibilities. It's the kind of thing that makes me think people like this are a type, a type that want to abandon semicolons and jump on languages that look better but perform worse.
I could definitely see that as a design challenge. Charged liquid seems like a good idea. Anything to get charge times down to what gasoline is.
Full tank means fewer trips to the gas station. My time is way more valuable than the mpg savings of the half tank approach.
> The auto manufacturers need to look to the future before they become obsolete.

No they don't, the economics of cars is doing exactly what it should. The old dogs don't react fast enough so new tech and ideas like Tesla take over.

It is good to have corporate turnover of businesses before they can concentrate power and influence in their niche sphere to capture markets. In the US, the downsizing of Chrysler brings GM / Ford into a duopoly after having bought dozens of brands over the last half century. They desperately needed some competition.
Just wait, gnome is slowly removing features I think the plan for gnome 4.x is to simply not exist
The problem is that php itself has been undergoing a lot of change in the past 4-5 years, and tbh, even symfony 2 is not the "coolest" PHP tech out there. In php land, laravel 4 is the rad thing these days, and from the looks of it, its gonna stay that for several more years.
And since its new PHP, most of the people using it are not those who are into "new" techs, per se, but those who used to CI, or Kohana, or Cake, and avoided Symfony because of its blatant copy of Java ecosystem. As a pretty decent php-dev, I can surely say that php 5.3+ can be easily used to create better abstractions and tool-kits than Java.

Also, If you haven't yet, take a look at composer and packagist. Their are several cool php libs up there.

I am also pretty interested in knowing what are you doing about this problem, because my forte is php and JS, a bit more better at at php, and i am pretty confused about which tech to make a product I have in mind in.
Since its a distributed system, PHP might offer a better reach (also because of its popularity as "easy" amongst non-devs). But JS over node is a much better lang to work with, though it would hinder getting talent and traction and would require huge amount of marketing etc.
Nobody has listed "Anything by Terry Pratchett" yet?

Of course, it very much depends what you like. Your list contains a lot more nonfiction than I usually read in book form, for instance.
Are you sure about magnitude of the secondary infection role in the 1918 flu (which I'll note doesn't match the previous pandemic's death toll of "only" about a million)? It sounds plausible, except I distinctly remember reading about common mortality paths in the "young" population that were just too fast. Heck, I just read that the first useful genetic sample came from Brevig Mission, Alaska, where "it killed 72 out of 80 residents in a 5 day period." Pneumonic plague is that fast, I Am Not A Doctor but I'm unaware of any bacteria that's similarly fast and lethal.

I'm not sure we can predict when we'll have universal vaccines, as I understand it we've only recently gotten some serious traction on them ... we hope. But it is possible we'll get them fairly soon.
Yes, I was thinking of it when I wrote the comment, there's also an arithmetic with P an M symbols - for plus and minus (but I can't find it on google, it's been a while, sorry)

Thanks for sharing this snipped, one of the several fun things in GEB
just stretch the window and create windows in vim.

but i bet what you want is to use the system clipboard, so that you can copy from one buffer in one window to another.

http://vim.wikia.com/wiki/VimTip21
Weird that he didn't address it, but optimizing for IDEs is not python's style. Although I'm sure the pains they went through with the 2to3 tool might make some of them second guess it.
Come on, we are all developers here I want to think If I see a feature is just for aesthetic reasons with little purpose, then I could be considered as code sanitization, nobody really needs a transparent terminal, in the contrary, it may be contra productive.
How many times does that happen? Genuine question. I never needed a van or a truck out of the blue. Is it something to do with the American culture?
I already use tmux. It doesn't solve the problem in the least.

> why do you insist of having a full screen all the time

Because I'm actively working in my terminal. Why should I waste space moving something somewhere else, especially away from where I'm looking?

> resize your terminal?

Maybe you like limiting the size of your workspace, but I don't.

> If you do insist of having a full screen all the time,

Because I'm not always in the terminal, but when I'm in the terminal, I don't see a reason to limit the space it uses.

Anyways, not you are being willfully ignorant. Rather than try and understand the problem, and how transparency was being used, you are being dismissive. You aren't trying to help in the least.

So, unless you want to take the time to understand the problem, why waste your time, and others, adding a comment that is essentially worthless?
I keep coming here, writing a bunch of stuff, then removing it.

The author isn't far off. He's over the top on some things, but on the whole it's a good take on some of the reasons Microsoft culture is toxic.

My take:

1. The review system needs to be fixed. They have to stop losing good engineers.

2. They have to somehow get rid of a bunch of toxic people. Many of these are in management. It's hard.

3. They have to stop treating Windows as "the thing we put in all the other things".

Windows is a fine OS; it could be better, and the OP points out a lot of reasons why it isn't. But it's not a great fit for embedded systems, nor game consoles, nor anything where you're paying for the hardware.

But I keep coming back to the review system rewarding the wrong people, causing good people to leave. The underlying backstabbing and cutthroat culture needs to go; it's hurting the bottom line, and I'm surprised the board has been willing to let it happen.
I'd love to convince you to beemind projects that you want to force yourself to see to fruition. http://beeminder.com (I'm a co-founder)

If I'm lucky others will chime in to back me up that it's astoundingly effective for exactly the psychology you describe. We can unambiguously say that Beeminder itself wouldn't have survived without beeminding it. :)
That barely scratches the surface of being a renaissance man.

To be a renaissance man just of computers, one has to have a clear understanding of the material, philosophy, money and culture flows; to experience the plight being imposed on miners in developing countries exporting rare metals and other materials that are refined and put together by tireless hands at sweatshops called the assembly line as shiny devices, to commiserate with the people who design it under the ever changing requirements and availability and shipping dates, to argue with those who work with the abstract and absurd fashions and philosophies of programming, to share the responsibility of the managers for hiring and firing the students and the family men and friends, and to sweat with the sales people at every step along the way.

When the renaissance man understands this, not only because of reading about it, or observing it, but having experienced it all, from the mining of the elements to the laying of the cables back to the ground, from the fluffy cloud pictures on the whiteboard to the actual nebulous reality of internet, he seeks to improve his skill, the living conditions of his family and neighbour, and the economy of his current living quarters, city and country, by working more diligently and more wisely.

And whether he succeeds or fails, the renaissance man thanks and reveres his God, and lives jovially with his neighbours and honouring his enemies.

That currently certain type of software happens to work easiest on a specific set of technologies, is but a mere detail, if well understood and fully mastered, to the renaissance man of computers. Reading the article, he would be delighted in his neighbours' interest in learning more, but might also be saddened by their strong self-importance that reinforces their narrow-mindedness.

End of rant.
Have you seen those physical bitcoins? It's possible to create something similar in digital form, a coin that "wraps" a wallet with a known amount of bitcoins. This would allow a new and better currency to offer "backwards compatibility" with bitcoins and a migration path.
Then the terminal would need to be really transparent allow text reading, honestly, I find that improbable.

The fix it argument is valid in any open source project that you don't contribute, and if you want to contribute show first valid arguments.

Open source is about many goals, a simple terminal transparency is not one of them, and why would a user alienated because it doesn't have a transparent terminal?
Since trucks are so popular with small businesses, electric trucks could also be a great type of vehicle for the government to subsidize.
The source appears to be available at https://github.com/kylemcdonald/socialroulette.net