skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> In the first case, is it voluntary if the shop owner fails to point out that the brand I do want is there, but is hidden?

You can either buy it or leave it. The decision to buy any brand is voluntary.

As for the guy selling you a water bottle when you're dying of thirst, it depends. What's he asking for it? $1.00 for a bottle of water when you're dying of thirst? -Seems reasonable. But demanding $1 million for the water would not be. Is the exchange voluntary?

If you've got two options: A) Buy water, or B) Die, it kind of works both ways. Theoretically it's voluntary, because you can just choose to die instead, but in practice, you would do whatever it takes to get that water.

But what does it matter if that particular exchange is voluntary or not? Basically, you just started picking apart my original statement that "voluntary exchanges are the basis of all economic activity ever", but to what end?

>> In pretty much every exchange we make there is an asymmetry of information, and that asymmetry can and is exploited to make 'unnatural' gains. This is most obviously so if you reduce it to the absurd and imagine an entity that controls all information - there is clearly the possibility of coercion, in the sense of convincing you to make exchanges that you wouldn't otherwise. Given the profit-seeking nature of our system, the possibility in the absurd case becomes a near certainty even in the limited case, as people are incentivised to manipulate each other to induce favourable exchanges.

We're all actively pursuing our personal gain through whatever (voluntary) exchanges we decide to participate in, but it's important to note that there's no absolute value to be assigned on each side of some specific trade that's about to occur. The value an exchange offers you is partially subjective, and therefore varies case by case.

It's enough that both parties in an exchange consider it acceptable. In other words, both parties perceive enough benefit in the exchange to actually go through with it. Otherwise they'd just move on to find something else.

This works out beautifully, because a business will always sell its product to you at a price higher than what it cost to produce[1], but at the same time, you value your gain higher than the loss of your money. Both parties benefit.

[1] Otherwise the business would go out of business.

>> Given the profit-seeking nature of our system

It's not the "system's" nature to be profit-seeking - it's human beings'. The pursuit of personal gain applies to each and every one of us, and happens to be the reason why there are any businesses (& jobs!) at all.
Anyone that has to use the words "geek" or "nerd" to describe themselves or what they are doing are neither.

If you are a geek or nerd, you just are. You don't have to convince other people of it.
I always get a bit annoyed with paid versions that give you less things that the free version, the free version gives you 10 servers but if you take the first step of the paid, you only get 3.. (I know there is a difference in retention)
J.A.R.V.I.S : Artificial Intelligence Assistant Operating System for Hackers
Shit is useless, destructive and smelly. Unrefined code by an unrefined developer often works, but not as well as it can and is usually difficult to work with. Big difference. Just like most of the stuff reddit calls "epic" or "mind blowing" is often simply 'neat', most of the code you call "shit" often simply 'could be better'. The tendency to call unrefined code "shit" intimidates new coders and disincentivizes people from contributing to community projects.
The gaming commission doesn't allow them to learn from a player. I think there are game theory styles of poker that do the optimal number of random bluffs. It's very hard to beat this style if there are no behavioral tells.

That said, if there's a mistake in there, a pro can eventually figure it out.

As you allude, the math of poker does break down in no-limit.
The game can't run statistics on the player's style.

>Casino commissions, however, mandate that a gaming machine cannot change its playing style in response to particular opponents.

The algorithm is encoded in a neural net; there is no calculation of raw probabilities involved, at least in the sense programmers are used to.
Personally, I'd rather see resources go into a robot that can cook for me...

I'd settle for a robot that makes me a salad. That's one of the projects I might work on, once my current project, a robot that grows me a salad (automicrofarm.com), is successful.
I agree, this idea is not that novel. University of Michigan has been investing its endowment money in start ups for a long time in the form of MBA student run groups[1]. Though I will point out this program does not specifically invest in Michigan Affiliated Entrepreneurs.

[1]http://www.zli.bus.umich.edu/wvf/

Edit: Comma Removed
It is a fixed funding campaign, they don't get anything if they don't reach the goal.
I like that phrase: "The developers said the phenomenon was caused by "the current elevation of the sun in the sky", and that as Britain heads into autumn the problem should disappear."

There is a WONTFIX implicit in there. Who cares if it becomes a death-ray a few days each year?

This shouldn't even be too expensive to patch. They just need to change the covering of the windows.
Yes, the later chapters are tough. But I'd definitely say you don't need much preliminary discrete math in the first couple chapters. Let's say up to chapter 6 (Special Numbers)
I'm guessing that's so people can trial it, then when they realise 30 minutes is basically nothing, will upgrade.
Yes, it's odd how everyone is piling onto Mailpile for something that PayPal doesn't do with other IndieGoGo campaigns. If crowdfunding is so risky, why is PayPal totally fine with it for every other campaign out there?

Yes they make promises and there's no guarantee they'll deliver. That's the whole point of crowdfunding, it's like that for every other campaign. Why is PayPal singling out Mailpile?
this doesn't surprise me in the least.

reading the comments, this thread is turning into a paypal bashing which it shouldn't. what happened is not paypal's fault or some insider attempt at stopping the project from happening as some laughable comments have suggested.

paypal's top priority is to their customers, not the merchant. if you look at this from their perspective this is the right move as what would happen if the project just took the money and never delivered?

asking them for a detailed list of `itemized budget and your development goal dates for your project` is something that any smart investor would ask for and they should have had this done already so i don't see why this is cause for concern.
It took them fifteen years to make the eTax tax return preparation software available for Macintosh. It still doesn't work on Linux. This despite it being, essentially, a collection of form pages with minimal logic -- I could whip it up in a couple of days using any programming language more expressive than Malbolge.

So I'm not worried that they'll be demanding I install anything on my Ubuntu server.
If the majority of code is shit, then it's not really a very useful observation to make repeatedly. So I think this goes back to the author's point that this is really a cultural or attitude issue.

It's like the friend who complains about everything all the time: constantly complaining about traffic, about the weather, about how the city is losing its charm, about his job, about his classes, about his parents, about his car, about his apartment, about politics, about how stupid people are, etc. etc., with nothing positive to say. Maybe it's all correct from some perspective, but it's not a very useful perspective and it's definitely an annoying one to be around.
I think the problem is an unwillingness(don't want to insult a co worker's code) or inability to form real criticism. If you can't pull the code base apart and say "this worked well" and "this part made too many assumptions to ever work right" or "is overly complicated for the task at hand" then you haven't taken enough time to understand the code in front of you.

This hits at one of my least favorite memes around here. The whole all the code I wrote six month ago is shit, and I will think that about the code I am writing now in six months. Yep, if you haven't developed the skills to determine what is good or bad about the code you wrote six months ago then A) It probably was middling code B) You aren't getting any better because you are unwilling to honestly critique your own work to look for areas that need improvement.
writing a game that cheats and doesn't raise suspiction might be as hard as writing a game that plays fair :-)
Yes, I imagine that, like with Paypal, the sender would be responsible for eating both exchange fees. The delay, on the other hand, would impose price volatility that would likely be equal in both directions--so as long as the transfer-agents formed a network with an agreement that the receiving agent smoothed over both all losses and all gains during transfer, there should be net zero liability (they'd just need some float.)
From the absolutely non telling data point of 1 I can say that caching solutions and their over aggressive use break down at least as frequent as the databases.

First thing - break with the or die(mysql_error()) pattern

Second see if everything is properly and workingly indexed.

Third - take a look if you are doing something that is not needed. There are a lot of parasitic queries left in any big project.

Fourth - a very successful approach that I have used is to create the majority of slow content in static files that are generated from a cron. Disk based io is easier to scale and you leave to the filesystem to do the caching. Rule of thumb for me - if 3 minute delay is not fatal and it will be common for all users - it goes in the static.
This website has made hn like 10 times more addictive for me.
That's what we like to call "the point"
Have coffee with 50 people
love my pebble - wish it wasn't as 'clunky', but it's exactly what a smartwatch should be - an accessory for my powerful smartphone, making my smartphone experience better. However, it recently died and i'm finding that pebble support is almost as bad as google support.
>I've been in this business for over 25 years [...] The difference between shit code written by shit coders and less than optimal code written by good coders dealing with constraints is quite clear. [...] Most code out there is shit code. Denying it is not going to help either.

I'm sorry, I respect your experience but this post is completely uninformative. It's much more specific on how awesome you are than on how to distinguish between "shit code written by shit coders" and "less than optimal code written by good coders"; not to mention dealing with and improving either.

It's possible to spend a long time in an industry and accumulate much unfounded prejudice along with solid knowledge. As long as the appreciation of "shit code" and "shit coders" remains subjective, it's virtually certain you'll also be considered one someday, when the prevailing paradigms and fashions change again.
I think we're in substantial agreement as to Paypal desiring to shift losses due to fraud or non-performance onto the merchants. Since they desire to do this, they will not accede to Mailpile's desired world, where Mailpile gets 100% of the money on day 1 and then Paypal can seek recovery on day 120 or 365 if a chargeback comes in. Many HNers wish we lived in Mailpile's desired world 100% of the time regardless of merchant risk profile, but we don't, which was the general thrust of my comment.

In terms of predicting Paypal's disposition on this particular case, I think it's a little trickier than a 90 day rolling reserve, because the product doesn't exist and shipping is binary rather than mapping to the rolling window of binary events like a physical goods business. If they were selling trendy iPhone cases and had bitten off more orders than they could presently chew, then an X% rolling reserve for Y days would likely be sufficient to insulate against the risk of some orders not shipping. Software businesses can fail on day 91 in an explosive a fashion as they can on day 1, and it appears from the report of Paypal's communication that Paypal is aware of this and is disinclined to do a fractional rolling reserve absent shipping. One would assume that if they ship this business goes to fairly low-risk instantaneously [+] and a reserve is probably unnecessary at that point.

Ultimately that's up to Paypal rather than either of our guesses.

[+ Well, it would be low-risk with respect to new orders instantaneously after shipping. It might not be low-risk with respect to pre-orders for a while yet, as customers could suffer from buyer's remorse, be dissatisfied with the product as shipped, not remember the transaction, or engage in friendly fraud, at rates substantially higher than transactions with lower delay between purchase and delivery.]
PHP can already store session information in the file system, memcache, or redis. There's no reason to reinvent the wheel.

Adding a UUID to every table as a key is a terrible idea. You bloat your primary key and every index from 4 bytes for the usual INT UNSIGNED to 32 bytes for the UUID, and replace a fast integer comparison with a slow string comparison, for every key match. That might explain the JOIN problems you're having.

If you need to expose a database row ID in your URLs but want to make it tamper-proof it's better to use a salted SHA1 or even MD5 hash along with the ID. This is a fairly common practice to protect HTML FORM fields from tampering. Even better is using PHP's session storage so you aren't exposing raw database IDs in the browser.

Throwing out JOIN means not using a relational model (it's called unnormalized data). It may be appealing at first but it will cause duplicate and inconsistent data, and you'll be writing application code to make your app ACID-compliant. You are unlikely to get that right -- RDBMSs have a 30 year head start on you.

Writing that RDBMSs are not scalabale or that SQL queries "were the leading cause of website fatalities" in 2012 (where did you get that from?) just advertises inexperience. Every big enterprise application and almost every big web site runs on top of RDBMSs, leveraging several decades of reliability, redundancy, optimization, and scalability experience. Do you think your bank uses Mongo or some home-rolled UUID-based system without JOINs? No, they use Oracle.

In my considerable experience working with broken web sites and databases (that's what I do for a living) I'd say the leading cause of website fatalities is bad programming. If your database server is slow or crashing you should be looking at your database design and queries, not coming to the conclusion that RDBMSs suck. If I crash on my motorcycle it's alway my own fault, and I don't conclude that I know more about building motorcycles than Kawasaki does.
That argument might of had more weight to it several years ago. The Ultimate Bet scandal does show that companies are willing to risk their entire business for comparitvely meagre rewards.

A default position of mistrust when it comes to gambling is a healthy and safe attitude.
IOS 7 and iOS Games by Tutorials Bundle
It depends on what you mean by shit code.

Is code that was written on time and on budget - but has a few hacks in it shit?

Is code that is beautiful and easily maintainable, but was £1m and six months over budget not shit?
The fact that the vast majority of payors used PayPal rather than Bitcoin certainly has nothing to do with PayPal's buyer protection and everything to do with Bitcoin being obscure and more complex to use.
See also the awesome fire piston, a relatively ancient technology using the same principles:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fire_piston
Cassandra 2.0: The next generation of big data
Venture for America Made This Young Easterner a Detroit Believer
This article was inspired by Mark Suster's article: http://www.bothsidesofthetable.com/2011/08/15/why-you-need-t...
Paypal is just an intermediary between merchants and whatever payment methods customers use to pay Paypal, such as debit/credit cards and bank transfers. And guess what? The modern financial system has no irreversible payment methods. Bank transfers, credit cards, and ACH are all reversible, wherever you go around the world.

If you haven't heard of it before, the May Scale of Monetary Hardness is a great way of thinking about this: http://stakeventures.com/articles/2012/03/07/the-may-scale-o... . If you're a payment intermediary, and you're delivering irreversible assets like gold coins or briefcases full of cash in exchange for very reversible payment methods like credit cards for personal checks, you will get horribly, horribly burnt by fraud, because you can deliver the gold coin and find out weeks later that your credit card was charged back. http://whatilearnedtoday.jameslarisch.com/?action=view&url=b... is a great example of this with Bitcoin and Paypal respectively.

It's not even about educating the user about irreversible transactions -- it's just that there's no way for Paypal to offer them unless customers fund their Paypal purchases by dropping off briefcases of cash and gold bullion at their local Paypal branch.
Development Attack Plan
Dragon Innovation Launches a Crowd-funding Revolution
For example, i.e. you need to know what $scope-like params are "supposed to contain" on every function that uses them.

You should never write code that communicates through $scope objects and expects certain values to be set. The only exception to this is the relationship between views and their respective controllers.

Outside of the controller-view relationship, nothing in AngularJS requires passing data in $scope objects, and you definitely shouldn't.

Why do you think dependency injection doesn't help exactly? I personally don't know of any other pattern to effectively test/mock things like HTTP interactions. It's also a pattern that's used by many, many other languages and frameworks - what's the alternative you're thinking about?
A shortcode for using Category Ajax Chain Selects
Instagram Hasher (parody)
A script(sarcastic one) to help you generate hashtags for your instgram picture.
Agile Programming and Footwear
Sorry, not convinced. All that control and regulation applies to more important parts of society, and it does not work (NSA).

So, according to you, I, Mr. unbeatable hold'em player, can go to this machine, bet a million dollars and be sure that, in that perfect moment when I know I am going to crush it, it will not play tricks against me?

When I lose, how do I know? How can I be sure that it has not dealt itself favorably? It is not a matter of whether they are doing it: it is a matter of whether they can do it. If there is no independent dealer, this is not for me. It does not matter what the law says, which are the incentives, how they are generating profit, ... As long as the machine can theoretically deal itself a good hand, I am not playing it.

And, by the way, as long as the machine can know what cards I am holding, I am not playing it either.

Give me an independent dealer, and then we talk.
That's probably what you should have said in the first post (benefits as a merchant) and not implying he was dumb because it was missing those fabulous gains
Notice it says the agent is open source, not the whole thing.
"makes is that some people believe public-schooling to be a lesser evil than the probability of home-schooling being indoctrination instead of education"

I'd love to see these people back it up with facts. To me it seems like a lot of people make up their mind about homeschooling and then use this as a straw man argument against it. Again, just because the early adopters are motivated by a certain factor doesn't mean that you (or I) need to be motivated by the same factor. We could end up having the same positive conclusion about homeschooling but for very different reasons.
The real reason why women are leaving Wall Street
Many embedded projects these days do command and control via a small web server. So you've likely got a fair amount of JavaScript in your project anyways. The rest is often written in a combination of c and Lua. Lua might be a better language than JavaScript in isolation, but it might be better to avoid the cost of context switching your brain several times a day.
I was in the same boat as you with respect to the Ubuntu Edge, as it turns out each campaign can choose which payment services to use. Ubuntu chose to only enable PayPal.
The SuperChargers are not at gas stations. They are on purpose locating them near malls, restaurants etc.. I certainly would not like to spend all day cooped up in a car without a couple of stops to eat or stretch my legs, and I think you'd find very few people drive all day without taking breaks to eat etc. of that kind of length.
How about a culture of "stop fucking up". (I admit I stole this from Ted Dziuba, but it has stuck with me.) People who are willing to call things "shit" instead of being nicey-nice at least give a shit. But it is important to be intellectually honest, and not be egotistical about one's own code, which could be shit just like anyone else's.
Shoulda taken bitcoins.
"In constrast, our new deep learning model actually builds up a representation of whole sentences based on the sentence structure. It computes the sentiment based on how words compose the meaning of longer phrases. This way, the model is not as easily fooled as previous models."

Wait, that is all that's necessary to invoke the term "deep learning"?? Wow. Wikipedia seems to agree. I had thought there was something more to this buzzword than "slightly less shallow heuristic guesswork than the AI you already know and love".
That's true. It's often the hardest part if your service isn't really anything technically groundbreaking (ie Twitter, Facebook as opposed to Google)
Haha, anything not in the source tree of Rust (or Servo) tends to rust... things change quickly.
Also, the event loop seems work well with these fun hardware projects
All the supercharger points are on their website, with a list of amenities, and yes they are pretty much all next to malls, restaurants etc.
Come on, didn't people learn from the OUYA fiasco?
The NRA just recently sued the NSA for effectively creating a gun registry. There must be numerous similar laws that the NSA must know they are willfully violating, and are relying simply on getting away with it through not getting caught.
On what basis do you make that statement, exactly? Nearly all architects go their entire career without building structures that concentrate the sun into a point hot enough to melt things. This architect has done it twice now. Sounds like he is doing something wrong, not that this is a problem inherent to the field.
Illegal poker bots grind constantly on low level online poker games and take the money from low level players by just value betting them.

Computers can easily calculate probabilities and expected values for every hand. So why they are not beating professionals?

Poker has no optimal strategy that wins against all other strategies. To play poker in higher level you must model the strategies of others, including them trying to model your strategy.

1. In the lowest level it's just maximizing expected value based on hand probabilities.

2. In the second level you try to learn the strategy of your opponents and maximize value against those strategies.

3. In third level you try to figure out how much your opponents have figured out your strategy and you change the strategy so that you maximize value when your opponents play against what they have learned from your strategy so far.

4. ... and so on. It' goes meta.

If you want to create ultimate pokerbot, it has to be able to model the minds of it's opponents. it hast to be able to detect leaks in it's own game and close them down. It must go meta all the time. It must learn how to understand how others think and how they think about it and change it's behaviour constantly.
Bit like advertising half a free car as "free car".