skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Sullivan is fairly far from anything reasonably described as "libertarian". He's a British conservative and was a huge booster of and apologist for Bush for most of his administration. He's stayed a big deal because he switched to being a booster of and apologist for Obama. He has an embarrassing Great Leader fixation.

But yes, if he stops writing paeans to Obama, he'll stop being nearly as much a Big Deal.
Hacking Hacker Dojo
Flynn Project Guidebook
The argument could be made that this move by Germany is actually a ploy to make Bitcoin look like a paperwork/legal nightmare and time-moneysuck so that merchants will stay away from it.

Bitcoin is too useful to be squashed by mere government regulation. If a few more countries employ these draconian measures, some cash-starved government will welcome Bitcoin in the future.

If regulators ("the body of Leviathan and the head of a social worker", to lift from Joseph Stromberg) were smart, they'd advocate easy exchange rules and impose a small tax on each transaction on the exchange.

Over the course of generations, I tend to have more faith in markets than in governments. That's why I think regulators will fail in their efforts in the long run.
Germany recognizes Bitcoin as a “private money,” subject to capital gains tax
> The current update frequency for IE is a dramatic improvement over older versions.
Obviously an update frequency of 1 year is a dramatic improvement over an update frequency of 5 years, but still is not enough. Basically it means "if a feature is not present in IE11, wait a year, or two".
Yeah, whoever changed the headline accidentally made it misleading click-bait.
Why is the browser history being filled up?
neither, perfectly warranted, read his other comments that are written with great authority, but often substantively wrong.
Terrorism law watchdog calls for explanation of Miranda detention
Bitcoin's ones and zeroes don't originate in a central bank.
I wonder when we will stop speaking in hyperbole about stock price changes.

"In April of this year crackers got hold of the Associated Press Twitter account and wiped an estimated $135Bn off the S&P 500 Index by tweeting that explosions at the White House had injured president Obama."

And the stock market rebounded and then some over the coming weeks, reaching new recent highs in May and June... So the effect lasted... a couple of hours?

When people talk about stock market value being "wiped out", they neglect to say that the market fully recovered later that afternoon, or that the market is higher today than it was back then. If you can't acknowledge that stock prices change every second, and that dips or rises are often temporary moments that affect very few shareholders of that company, then the phrase "billions of dollars was wiped out" is just meaningless hyperbole.
Agreed. One of the things I liked best about Matter was how it took all of Star Trek's hand-wringing about "first contact" and turned it on its head - there were right and wrong ways to initiate contact with a primitive culture, but it wasn't a big deal, all in all.
Medium really needs to trim the fat. I was scraping[0] and I noticed they send their content twice! Once in HTML and once as a Javascript object.

(0) http://mediumsearch.herokuapp.com
Slightly OT:

How addictive is minecraft? It sounds great. But I quit video games a few years back, and don't have good willpower with them.

I work from home as well, so there's no natural limits on my time. But I'd love to try the game in a limited way.
I don't know if it is fair to say SV funded these companies because he put in $100m of his own money into SpaceX and a sizable amount into Tesla. Even with his name on these projects, it still seems like he needed to ante up way more than most successful entrepreneurs could ever hope to invest.
If salespeople are worth their salt and working for a software company, this isn't "newfound understanding".

On the contrary, they've learned the hard way never to count on a deal closing because of a particular feature and never to promise something will be coming in the next cycle if they've got to deal with that customer again. They're well aware prospective customers might have reasons for not buying other than feature requests because their job performance is as dependent on being able to identify what customers actually mean as developers' performance is dependent on ability to write code.

If they're worth their salt they're not skewed by optimism around one deal (unless they're in really high-ticket sales, in which case they've probably got dedicated engineers allocated to that deal anyway) and having talked to far more clients and prospective clients than all the engineers and product managers put together are probably actually in a far better position to prioritise features in terms of potential revenue to be earned/lost by the company. Needless to say, the engineers and PM have far more grasp of the difficulty of implementing the feature. That's why they need to compare notes.
I think that's more of a reading progress bar than a website loading bar. Still pretty slick though.
If your points are strong, they don't need to be covered in barbs. Barbs are a "tell"; they indicate bluster, which is what people deploy when they don't know that they're talking about. You're making it harder to take you seriously and should change your tactics.
Wouldn't an Alcubierre drive just always take you into the past? If you leave Earth using this drive and get to some distant star at FTL using this mechanism, maybe you escape relativistic effects, but you'll still get there before light from our star arrives there. And then when you go back wouldn't you arrive before the light left? It doesn't seem to make sense to me. Maybe someone can explain away my misconception about how that works?
As I've read the proposal, I've felt like witnessing the real life Monty Python's "The Architects Sketch," the one where Cleese demonstrates his project of a residential block of flats:

This is a twelwe-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive in the entrance hall here, and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort and past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives...

The tolerances a trained astronaut can accept and be prepared for one single trip aren't something you can subject normal travelers to, even with the promise of "only 30 minutes."

Riding the high speed train is pleasurable experience. You can walk to the toilet, stroll between the seats. Riding Hyperloop: once you enter the capsule, you can't even stand up from your seat. Stay put there, don't try anything for the next 30 minutes. You feel sick in the first minute? Too bad, just don't move in your seat. You can't anyway, you're in a small capsule in the same position you are while at your dentist. Only 29 minutes to go. What, you don't have your astronaut's diapers? Too bad. You can't move from your seat. Only 29 minutes to go. Enjoy the ride.
Meh: 1. Bg5 f6

Would be nice I guess to show why b5 is a bad pin
Sounds like they need funding for 100 years. That's a lot of money! It's actually basic science like this that I think is a defensible form of public research spending.
I read this mostly as "sales guy, stop being like all the other sales guys, none of you ever get it! You lazy asses! Do your job, which, by the way, includes making our lives in product management and engineering easier".

Sales has (a lot) more than it's fair share of dominant, persistent and driven people. They ask for a lot. Not because they are lazy, but because they've found they often get it. If you can't deal with that, maybe you shouldn't be a product manager.

A good product manager understands sales is pushing a boulder up a mountain. They should be patient and supporting. Good ones will direct a sales guy to an existing road map, the feature request/voting process, the exceptions process (for huge deals) for getting features into the next release (which usually means "bring more money to the table"), pre-recorded sessions with other customers/prospects that explain what the product can do in that area (often the sales guys didn't know). All product managers, good or bad, should be protecting the engineers from the worst offenders, and sharing the successes of all sales with their developers. We like to know when you win with our products.
Half the illegal guns in NYC come from North Carolina
The typed arrays should be available in trunk, haves you checked recent trunk?

I believe the "need all of webkit-gtk" was a pile of sadness in build-jsc + automake that may have been fixed recently. I'm sure Zan, Xan, or Michel would be happy to help if it's still borked. There are _some_ platform requirements that make a generic "linux" not work, as we build on the platform support libraries for threads, unicode, etc so JSC may have random looking dependencies on such
Not being effective sucks. Do you enjoy the feeling of starting somewhere new or starting with a new project and not knowing what you're doing? The trick is to minimize that time so that you can:
a] feel effective
b] not have a long term, negative impact on your team's velocity.
At first I thought he would be a quack, but his technical credential look legit. http://www.icarusinterstellar.org/team/harold-white/

I just wish he would explain a little better why this was an allowable violation of relativity.
As someone who's not familiar with payments, how often do chargebacks generally occur, and why are they so expensive?
It has appeared to me that there are pageloading techniques that interfere with browser spinners. Many times a page is loading and there is a plain arrow where on other sites it shows a spinner.
The light doesn't go back.
I don't deny that I may have missed the point of "How to Make Wealth" when I was younger, but I think it wasn't so hard to get the wrong things out of it:

--

So I think you should make users the test, just as
acquirers do. Treat a startup as an optimization problem
in which performance is measured by number of users.

--

Here, as so often, the best defense is a good offense.
If you can develop technology that's simply too hard for
competitors to duplicate, you don't need to rely on
other defenses. Start by picking a hard problem, and
then at every decision point, take the harder choice.

--

The advantage of creating wealth, as a way to get rich,
is not just that it's more legitimate (many of the other
methods are now illegal) but that it's more straightforward.
You just have to do something people want.

What those passages mean to an experienced entrepreneur and what they mean for a college student living in a dorm around the time facebook was released might be completely different (it was for me). Building something technically difficult to replicate that people wanted didn't scream "find paying customers yesterday", then build it. None of us paid for any of the software we used (either b/c it was free or we had Kazaa), so the "user test" meant something different to me than it does now. I think I was pretty convinced that the "monetize later" model was the way to go until at least 2008.

So you might say my main critique is that I was too naive at 19, and needed things spelled out for me. "How to make Weath" was just too subtle.
> The argument was that various engineering disciples are independent of each other and of physics.

No, actually, they were argued to be different than each other, but no one in this thread argued that they were independent of each other or that any of them was independent of physics.

Inasmuch as that's the position you are arguing against, it is a strawman.
"if 1% of the population controls most of the disposable wealth, what we call “the market” reflects what they think is useful or important, not anybody else."

Are you freak'n kidding me? The 99% is the market not the 1%. Who do you think is buying what the 1% is selling? It's the 99% who determine what is being made by buying what they buy!

I've had a few jobs like this, not many though, and I can tell you that none of them were at companies small enough for an owner to know who I was.

I'd like to propose a different reason for these jobs; middle manager decision makers who have ulterior motives than to optimize ROI. Like what you ask? Like getting a bigger budget next year. Like empire building. Like maximizing the illusion of importance. I could go on, but since I've never had one of these positions, I'm sure I could never do the list justice.

Law (since it was mentioned) and consulting are slightly different since you might end up doing something pointless where your company is maximizing ROI because the market is paying for you to do something pointless. ... and given that situation, I'd venture to guess that either a) it was one of the non-stakeholders mentioned above that brought you in, or b) an owner who bought into your industry/company's marketing BS and hasn't been disillusioned yet. ... yet.

There may be situations I can't think of, but I'd suggest that it's the 99% who has created this situation in most cases.
> No one controls bitcoins.

That really annoys regulatory mindsets.
The porting for Node was entirely done by one person.

The bad news is it will also break all C++ extensions, which frankly I'm not looking forward to (both as a developer of said extensions, and a user).
There are limits though. I don't care how nice the camera is on my iPad, I still want to visit my family for thanksgiving.

I don't think the author deemed wikipedia, google and coursera worthless. Its asking the question of why a pitch like "facebook for horses" is more likely to get funding then a revolutionary mass transit system.
I take issue with video games and film being a waste.

The entire idea of a warp-drive comes from science fiction and people daydreaming/trying to escape their current reality. The Hyperloop is directly out of Heinlein. Subterranean cannons on the moon as a public transport device... Without escapism we lose the essence of human creativity, imagining a future that is different from the present. Do you think we would have bothered to build rockets and go to space/the moon if science fiction hadn't whetted the public's curiosity?

If anything, the problem is that current escapism kind of sucks and we need to do it better.

edit:lose/loose
For clojure, these are good: http://www.clojuresphere.com/, http://www.clojure-toolbox.com/, http://clojure-doc.org/
Well, a lot of people still consider the whole notion of trying to warp space to get around the lightspeed issue as nothing more than an attempt at escaping reality. ;) Also some people really like doing math as much as other people like watching Game of Thrones.
And completely rebounded within 10 minutes.
My wife and I (no kids) enjoy the LEGO Harry Potter games - wands instead of guns, and as far as I remember, when you fight enemy humans, you don't "kill" them, they just teleport away.

Most of the LEGO series of games are similar - LOTR has swords and bows & arrows; Pirates has swords and muskets (and in sword fights, IIRC, enemies fall down and break apart when they "die"); and Star Wars games have blasters and light sabers.
Show HN: homepager - Create a page for anything in seconds
Once upon a time I was a pretty hardcore salesperson. Now I just yell at people until they buy things, but I digress...

The key to being successful as a salesperson is the same as the keys to being successful in life:

* Be Humble

* Be Understanding

* Be Patient but with clear deadlines

I see salespeople brag, I see folks explaining why the client is wrong, and I see plenty of phony patience but what I rarely see is kindness. You know what always worked for me? "How was your weekend?"

Most salespeople want to rattle off a feature list until they're blue in the face, the best ones only ever say what matters. The best ones don't waste your time by making sure they don't waste their time. How do you wrap up a meeting? Is it 'call me when you're ready?' or is it 'This is what I can do for your business and I think it has real benefit. Would a week be alright for you to evaluate this technology?'. Is it rude to put a timelimit? Actually, it's quite the opposite. Open-ended sales cycles are terrible; endless calls and avoidance, it just isn't fun. The polite thing to do is to bring the relationship to a head; it's hard but it's the right thing to do. Even if you don't win the deal, you'll walk away with class, and in a year you just might come back and win (hardly a rare occurrence in sales).

Most people are bad at sales because they dislike confrontation, but sales is hardly a confrontation if you set expectations correctly. The problem arises when people conceal that they're in sales, or that they have timelines, or that they want to do business with you. Get all that crap out in the open immediately and you'll waste a lot less time.

Here are two pieces of advice I've learned over the years that I've found invaluable in technical sales:

* Don't ever talk about engineering timelines with customers. If it's not released it doesn't exist.

* The only features you need to build are the ones your customers are screaming for; never listen to a salesperson, listen to their customers. Make the salespeople bring you customer examples. Sell something people want.

Edit: I should note that setting expectations is also important for Engineers, but I tend to think of software development as being like a large cooperative painting. If you want it to be beautiful it's done when it's done. There's definitely some accountability on the development side and I don't mean to minimize it but it's important to understand mutual respect. If you have one takeaway from any of my posts on HN it's that you should treat everyone with respect whenever possible.
I don't see anywhere in my post where I suggest that it did. I think though you could use this device to at least outrun light and then use a telescope to look into the past.
Good points, and thanks for the other link. I'd disagree that it gives much (any?) actionable advice to real sales people since it's such a caricature-driven piece.

It's anecdotal, but of the dozen sales and product guys I've worked with or managed maybe one (the worst one?) truly fits one of the caricatures. It's picking on easy stereotypes (cocky sales guy, excitable PM).

I also think it offers some wrong advice - e.g. it's not the salesperson job to vet a new potential feature across a whole market segment. But that's a different discussion..

I get it now - their brand is about being aggressively pro-engineer, and they're making tools for disgruntled engineers that have bad sales teams and/or bad product managers.

Perfect articles for that audience - just not for me. :)
Beautiful site. Terrible exercises. On the first exercise when you sign up there is an extra unnecessary check with Queen on h7, then queen on h6. Straight to h6 is all you need to start off the combination. The extra check on h7 actually has the potential to disrupt white's attack if black responds correctly. In the exercise black does not. The rest of the exercises I tried were uninspired.

A couple of suggestions:

a) Have a goal in the exercises explicitly shown to the user (mate in 4, material advantage, winning end game, etc.)

b) Please, please proof-check your exercises. At least have a link to report bad ones.
I've heard this advice, like how they can't be called inside maps, etc, and I politely disagree. I think the power they represent should not be simply tossed out because they are harder to use. At least right now, I'll take the power along with the increased complexity for my side projects until such time as I see they are not worth it. (I'm not writing them into any production code, for what's it's worth)
The New Republic uses something like this in a cool way. As you scroll down the article, a progress bar on top shows how far you are through the article.

Try it: http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114362/odds-clinton-dies-...
For Sale: My iPhone Homescreen
Life, ultimately, requires continuous activity to sustain. So I don't get very bent out of shape about the perpetual nature of property taxes, because it's fairly minor compared to e.g. the perpetual nature of food.

You can come up with ways to replace property taxes, without a doubt. There's nothing necessary about any particular tax. The question is just whether it's the best way to do things.

Water and sewer would work fine without it, I agree. A bigger problem, I think, is roads. Highways are mostly funded from gas taxes but local roads are not. It's not practical to directly charge for use of local roads.

You could compensate with other taxes, but now you're taxing (and thus somewhat discouraging) productive activity.

The scenarios you paint don't necessarily seem bad to me. Unfair to the owners, perhaps, but it doesn't seem to benefit everybody else as you say. You correctly infer that property taxes encourage productive use of land and discourage allowing it to sit fallow, but isn't that a good thing? If we make the strong but at least partially true assumption that money is a proxy for value, land that produces enough money to pay for its taxes is producing more value than land that does not. Someone sitting on prime farmland and not actually farming it is a net negative to society unless they're getting more value out of that land than a farmer would.

I don't mean to go all Ayn Rand here and start acting like nature, parks, and anything that's not economically productive is valueless. But still, I think there is value to be had in encouraging land owners to put their property to some actual economic use.

I'd be more upset if property taxes were higher, perhaps. Here, for example, they're about 1%, which is not much. If you can't afford 1%, then you have an enormous amount of money tied up in your property without much money outside of it. It's hard to fit right into a spot where you could afford to maintain your property, but can't afford the taxes. For the vast majority of property owners, the mortgage is by far the major question when it comes to losing one's house or land because they don't have money. Pay off your mortgage and have some savings and you are nearly safe from losing it due to property taxes.
http://minecraft.net/classic/play

This is a free Java applet early version of the game. Perhaps not addictive or polished enough to represent a major distraction.
Do you live in NYC? The place I'm working at now was looking for some people, not necessarily with production Scala experience. Not sure if they're still looking, but first off you would have to be living the greater New York area :-)
One place to look for that discussion is Switzerland. They collected over 130,000 signatures on a law proposal for basic income. So now there will be a direct vote on it.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Switzerland

After the swiss people voted against an extension of mandatory vacation, from four to six weeks, recently, I highly doubt that this law has a chance to pass. However, it sure will be an interesting and passionate discussion that will force everyone to ask the right questions. In fact its already going on. If you speak German you can e.g. read the comments on all the major newspaper articles, like here
http://www.nzz.ch/aktuell/schweiz/schweizer-koennen-wohl-ueb...
(I suppose the same is true for French and Italian.)

PS: This is the best HN thread in a long time. There are opposing views and intelligent, passionated discussion about what could be boiled down to the question "What is the meaning of life?" for each participant.
Chrome does that spinner on Windows, too, as does Firefox. I'm glad for it but I like the progress bar idea, personally. It gives me a sense of progress. It is kind of like being on hold. It is the difference between "Please hold" and "You are number 4 in line. Please hold."

Sidenote: The Amazon App Store app on Android does something similar. I've seen other apps do this as well but I can't think of them at the moment. Is this a design pattern we will see more of like the Ajax spinners of the Web 2.0 craze?