skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
When people talk about a Silicon Valley "bubble," part of what they're talking about is that a Tesla driver, BMW M5 driver, and Porsche 911 driver can believe that they are "average middleish class people."

When one tiny sliver of society (web engineers) simultaneously wields so much influence (as web companies do) and is so cut off from the reality of America (as you apparently are), it doesn't bode well.
> :// would be better? Wait, that looks like some weird emoticon...

I would like to nominate the name "confused duck" for this emoticon.
Looking At some pictures and diagrams of the Model S battery pack, yes, it does look to be about twice as large as the average fuel tank. HOWEVER, that leaves out some really interesting things to note.

First of all, most automotive gas tanks are made out of ~1/8" HDPE. While it has decent cut and abrasion resistance, it's of virtually no use when trying to combat punctures and is also pretty flimsy, leading to deformation and possible cracking during an accident.

While, yes, a punctured battery pack is guaranteed to ignite while a gas tank is not, that is also the only way for the pack to ignite. An object has to physically pass through the battery pack, while a gas tank could potentially start a fire if it cracks and starts leaking. There's a reason why you're supposed to try to get out your car as quickly as possible in case of a crash: fuel leaks very easily. In comparison, batteries are much more impact resistant due to their more solid state nature.

Also, it seems that whatever struck the car seemed to hit under or very close to where the front passengers sit. Had that armored battery pack not been there, there's a very real possibility that the driver would have been impaled. With that in mind, it should be pretty clear that this was a freak accident and not really representative of the average car crash.
For all skeptics, this can actually make lot sense with the current service-oriented web.

Actually, this is where I tried to go with Punch(http://laktek.github.com/punch) too. Vast majority of the content in web can essentially be static, it's just the minor inconveniences of plugging data sources, updating and managing them is what should be addressed.
If you haven't read Asimov's Election Day, I highly recommend it.
Granted the author was a sad drunk, and perhaps just a second-rate intelligence who could string together some pretty syllables, but I've always found this useful:

"The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposing ideas in mind at the same time and still retain the ability to function." -- F.S. Fitzgerald.
Why HN Should Use Randomized Algorithms
I know "meaning" and I know "life," but I don't know what "meaning of life" is.
Population of earth: 7.1 billion.

Population of San Francisco: 0.8 Million.

Population of Manhattan: 1.6 Million.

Population of London: 8.1 million.

Percentage of the world's population living in either San Francisco, Manhattan or London: ~0.0015%

Exactly what do you think an outlier is? If you live in one of those three urban areas, you're already a member of an elite class.
I hate to pile on, but this just came across my Twitter feed.

"The federal government will take down a critical part of HealthCare.gov, the Obamacare web portal, for a portion of the coming weekend as programmers feverishly work to fix major glitches that are impeding enrollment and marring the debut of the centerpiece of President Barack Obama's health care reform law."

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/10/04/obamacare-website_n...
I'm sure it wasn't 'people that got confused. More like trading algorithms.
After using multiple Nvidia and ATI cards on many machines over the years, my anecdote is that ATI drivers crash far more frequently than Nvidia drivers.
The following statement is wrong at many levels.

"That equates to 1 vehicle fire for every 20 million miles driven, compared to 1 fire in over 100 million miles for Tesla. This means you are 5 times more likely to experience a fire in a conventional gasoline car than a Tesla!"

- All Tesla cars are new and almost all of them have superior drivers.

- They drive their cars only on certain roads where as Gasoline cars are almost everywhere.

- You can not compare 100m sample set with 2 trillion size sample set.
I think people were addicted to being connected, not to the device.
Wow. Awesome thought...
We've all acknowledged that the site isn't working right now. That's not evidence that you could've built a better one, or that it's simple as "querying a database". I think you've lost track of the conversation, and this entire story's been flagged off the front page, so let's leave it at that.
I was skeptical at first and thought nothing of it, that is until I held my hands on one at a local AT&T store and started playing around with it.

The cover flow blew my mind and it quickly became apparent this device was lightyears ahead of anything else on the market.
Mithaldu, just as a reference, I'm the guy working with Clef on enabling Clef on more sites.. We've got a pretty cool system, and it's getting dang close to release. Hopefully I'll have it finished soon!
Our federal republic also happens to be a democracy.
Pretty sure that differs state to state. In my state, the law says three days. Sprint gives me a week.
It amuses me when people create a 'sanitized' image of Bukowski. Let's not forget that this is a guy who cheated on his women and beat them, the latter even on video [1].

He was immature to an extreme degree. One of his popular quotes begins:

> "If you’re going to try, go all the way. Otherwise, don’t even start. This could mean losing girlfriends, wives, relatives and maybe even your mind..."

That's not a recipe for happiness, and certainly not sanity. Or anything good at all. I'm not sure it's best to take advice from someone who woke up every morning by vomiting to get over last night's drinking.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g8KJiay6EI0
A very narrow interpretation. Reading quality literature is primarily about developing a theory of mind. How others think and react ,not about grabbing the women and not about you(which is what you understood from the post).What you imply to be social understanding is basically popularity,but knowing the desires of people in the room,how they react to each other and what they are capable of can be far more valuable than being the most popular person in the room.

For a more female theory of mind dip into Austen,it wont directly help in seduction but it will greatly aid perception.
Currently we make the recorded audio from the chats available to employers for listening. Additionally, we allow you to associate talking points with your chat to help guide you while you record your chat, and to serve as a high level outline to employers listening back to your chat.

We have talked about making transcripts of the chats available in the future, but it's not on our immediate road map.
RCA Internet Music System runs Android
VC Q&A: Josh Elman of Greylock Partners
I ask genuinely: why?
Considering the bit about different European languages, it seems really strange that words would become links to applications. Sending instructions on how to do something from your home in <latin character set country> to your Russian aunt? Better know the Cyrillic version of what you want to launch.

Snark aside, there are some interesting aspects to that; I really like the idea of simple launcher lists, even if it means you have to know the names of everything you want to launch. I teach some kids with dyslexia and I can imagine trying to do this in a classroom environment.
By contrast this system asks voters to become technocrats and carefully predict the set of variable weightings that will allow the investors to pass legislation that reduces their taxes; that is if Big Capital doesn't decide to bet on a policy proposal that uses the freed-up budget to reduce their taxes instead.

No it doesn't. It merely asks voters to decide how many dollars a prevented murder is worth.

in this case if you offered the banking system bailouts they'd probably bet big enough on the bill to allow it to pass even if it had subsidiary clauses mandating the execution of firefighters' firstborn.

Why would Goldman do this? Why wouldn't they just take billions from all the other speculators willing to throw their money away to get bailouts and then use their winnings to bail themselves out?

Further, there is a proposed mechanism to stop policy proponents from sneakily attaching welfare-reducing policies: Goldman Sachs, George Soros, and other speculators. These folks are smart enough to spot sneaky clauses and greedy enough to rob the market manipulators pushing them.
Somalia has been operating in a state of government shutdown for years.
> You can't build a new rocketship if you are on welfare (Elon Musk).

Sure you can, just not it in a single step. Even Elon Musk had to use PayPal as a stepping stone to bankroll his real ambitions.
I believe they'll be streaming it from here:
http://www.twitch.tv/riotgames

Starts at 8pm PDT.
I'm not really seeing the speed on a fairly realistic perf [1] involving communicating with a web worker. Wrote a big blog post looking into this a couple weeks back [2].

[1]: http://jsperf.com/promise-comparisons/55
[2]: http://calvinmetcalf.com/post/61761231881/javascript-schedul...
Gerrymandering is an overblown issue; there's no way of assigning districts for FPTP elections that would substantially change the problem, as is evident from the fact that the places in the US that have moved redistricting into the hands of "nonpartisan" commissions may not have partisan gerrymandering, but still have the same essential problems.

What we really need is a better election system than FPTP in single-member districts for legislative bodies at the State and Federal levels.
He was referring to the Hacker News demographic, where these places are not such an outlier, and whether or not living in a place like San Francisco puts you in an elite class you still could not reasonably afford both a nice place to live and a Tesla there on $100k, which was my original point.

But I don't really understand why living in an expensive urban area automatically puts one in an elite class. The standard of living is not much better than other places for one thing--what you gain in diversity is lost in housing conditions. Also, it's not like $100k wages there are super rare. You don't need to be a 4.0 Ivy League graduate to score a livable wage in San Francisco. That's the starting salary for a lot of professions in cities like that, not just software developers. Police officers in the SFPD can make as much as a Twitter engineer fresh out of Stanford: http://www.sf-police.org/index.aspx?page=1655
What You Should Blog About (Bad Blogging Advice)
But someone else can fund your defense. If he is in fact DPR, which hasn't been proven yet in a court of law, then he could move bitcoins to someone who could convert them to USD and fund his defense.

Alternatively, what stops people from investing in defendants. If Ulrich is in fact DPR and has 80mm in Bitcoins or large portion thereof stashed away somewhere, wouldn't it make sense for some rich person to fund DPR's defense on the condition that a portion of the 80mm is paid to the investor. Everything would be done through a lawyer the investor trusts, and Ulrich would have attorney client privilege and could in fact privately confide through the lawyer how much return he can make on a successful defense.

Spending $1-2 million defending someone, with the chance of getting a 10x return in 1-2 years seems like a pretty good deal if you can build up the rapport
Worked great in some ways and terribly in others. Remember no MMS? No copy-paste?
Mr Market overreacts to bad news, and when a value investor buys.

Agreed, there's insufficient data for meaningful statistics, but his main points were amour-plating, firewalls and that batteries are less fire-prone than "highly flammable liquid".
China employs two million people to monitor online activity
From a security operations perspective... if this is simply causing unique markers to be placed on the end user systems, then looking for these to appear in the clear... it's nothing new, really. Still rather cool, but not new or ground breaking.
Linear Fractions
Is there a good js library for doing this style chart?
The dark web strikes back
How To Price Your Digital Product (Bad Blogging Advice)
I believe the CDMA 4s have an improved antenna design compared to the original GSM 4s (see: http://appleinsider.com/articles/11/02/08/apples_verizon_iph... ).
This is why politicians use "middle class" to describe who they're fighting for; it's a term that nearly everybody thinks of themselves as belonging to.
Thank dvito for compiling. This is a great visualization.
Calling it due process is like calling ROT13 encryption. It is a sham. What's well-established is the fact that asset forfeiture is abused far and wide, and for every type of asset and supposed crime.
Plan 9's UI works in a quite similar way. I'm not up to date on my history of those systems, but I wouldn't be surprised if there is heavy cross pollination between the two.

Additionally, the fact that the writer of this post mentions Oberon's zooming user interface and the Canon Cat means I have to encourage anyone interested in this topic to read this wonderful book:
http://www.amazon.com/The-Humane-Interface-Directions-Intera...

---

The article linked to at the very beginning is not available on the original site. Here is an archive.org link:
http://web.archive.org/web/20090416033922/http://stevenf.tum...
Seems like a good tool. Looking forward to trying it out. There are a bunch of other integrations like shopify that would also be great!
HN Notify
Deliberately exposing yourself to these salespeople is great training. As long as you don't buy anything.

I was twice targeted by timeshare resort companies. It's really high-pressure, but it's endless fun to see them escalating salespeople, from the junior interns to the really experienced mindbenders. From praising you for your success, to criticizing you for not living up to what was expected from you at your point in life.

Great exercise.
Fire happens. Maybe Tesla performs better, maybe not but cars do catch fire. I, however, will not be buying Elon's explanations simply because he seems like a cheesy salesman and a media whore. http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2013-04-02/tesla-to-begin-mode...

(Knowing the Elon is the Sun God among many here, I want to say this: I do not particularly care about karma, I'm saying 100% of what I am thinking.)
Life can't literally have meaning. It's not an expression. But when a lot of the things you're doing have a common purpose, they form a pattern similar to the pattern that indicates signal rather than noise.

So when you have a sense of purpose, it will feel as if your life has meaning.
Exaggeration seems to be a common theme for one of the authors: https://twitter.com/JustineTunney/status/385843326085132289
Brb, about to go list my shelf companies GeetHub, AireBnb and Boox.

Can you imagine how much the shareholders of this company would have been making as the stock was going up? I mean, there's only $1.3M of total shares on issue even now but for a company that was worthless just days ago, that's a great outcome for them.
I wrote a blog post on this last night (Tesla model S and the three laws of robotics).

http://justink.svbtle.com/tesla-model-s-and-the-three-laws-o...
> The Economist is especially bad since its title proclaims it as an expert but if we did we what it proposes there would be no limit to the amount of debt the US could borrow and thus no limit to the amount of poverty we would leave to future generations.

There's no practical limit to the amount of money the US can borrow. All eliminating the debt ceiling would do is reduce the number of different votes that have to happen to operate the government when running deficits. All spending has to be authorized by a law -- this is often a one-time, long-term act establishing a program -- and appropriated by a law (typically, in "normal" operations, by an annual budget, but sometimes we get periodic CRs for shorter periods, and some things are subject to multiyear appropriations.) The combination of what is authorized and appropriate vs. the revenue from taxes (also set by laws passed by Congress) sets the level of borrowing that is going to happen to fund it. The debt ceiling is essentially redundant with other Congressional action, and either is completely irrelevant (under most normal conditions) or, as has been the case recently, is an excuse for stunts which do nothing but harm the country's credit.

> Currently the US accrues 2.5t in tax revenue per annum and spends 3.8t or it overspends 1.3t a year. So it should be clear to anyone with the most basic understanding of math the US needs to cut spending.

Ignoring that that's not really the right two numbers to compare (since even if you look at the right comparison, the ratio between debt payments and GDP, there is a clear need to do something about balance) the suggestion that that has to be cutting spending ignores the revenue side; given that the overall trend over the past 50ish years has been of tax cuts -- particularly on the richest -- its not entirely unreasonable to suggest that to the extent that the tax/spending balance needs to be addressed, no small part of that is on the tax side.

> Raising the debt limit is the exact opposite of that

Raising the debt limit is essential even though long-term tax/revenue balance needs to be addressed (the target shouldn't be naive budget balance, but establishing a stable and reasonable long-term average debt:GDP ratio, and good practices that let it run above that average when government spends countercyclically during economic downturns, and below it when government spending is less necessary during private sector expansions.)
Mind if we add this to the site?
100 million miles worth of driving is not a small number. After four years with a ~100 mile/workday commute, I put somewhat less than 100k miles on my car. Multiplying that out, it would take me over 40 years of driving at the same pace to reach 1 million miles and therefore well over 4,000 years of driving to reach the number of miles driven by Tesla owners.

So if I drove that 100 mile/workday commute for 4,000 years, something like this might happen approximately once.

Incidentally, I have seen, during said commute, the remains of an ordinary car that caught on fire. There was nothing left but a burnt skeleton of a car that appeared to be made of ashes. I'd rather be in the Tesla while it was still on fire than the burnt wreck I saw.
Hilarious! I think Twitter should issue their IPO at $.05, since that seems to be the consensus.
Great suggestion. A system like this would also work well to:

1) increase the variability of information consumed by the community

2) combat group think (which is all too prevalent these days on HN)

3) provide a more level playing field for people who don't make an effort to abuse the voting system and exceed the front page threshold
> Using "natural states of being", however defined, to articulate rights in unnatural states of being (i.e. modern society) is a fallacy.

You're absolutely right, I'm muddling the concept of natural rights by doing that. (John Locke would be very disappointed.) The point I was trying to make was that many people do not realize that anonymity is something that society has to actually construct infrastructure for and support. To justify doing that, anonymity would either have to be deemed a "natural right" (something society considers every citizen is justly due, like in the US Bill of Rights) or the benefits and disadvantages must be weighed in every circumstance. I'm claiming that it is the latter and questioning why techno-libertarians usually assume the former. Then I'm raising that possibility that the calculus may just work out against allowing anonymity on some common communication mediums like the Internet.

As to your second point, yes, I agree that fear-mongering is unfortunately one of the many ways that minority viewpoints can hold sway over the public debate. I can't see much of a solution to it except time and a more robust democratic system, where you hope that eventually reason and the silent majority will prevail.
FINRA halted trading of TWTR Inc. at 12:42 p.m. Friday because of the issue.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/steveschaefer/2013/10/04/the-big...

It might be an interesting failure scenario for algorithmic trading. Almost like misspelled domain names and ad networks.
Cost of living is always a factor. I live in the bay area. The salary of a programmer is usually 6 figures here. Granted it's almost impossible to buy a home but if you are frugal with your rent ( for instance getting roommates or living further from your job or in a less hip neighborhood) you have a pretty large amount of disposable income. Teslas don't cost less in South Dakota than northern California. I think cost if living is sometimes overstated because besides housing I don't find other critical staples like food, insurance, utilities to differ appreciably by state. If you want to own THEN the situation changes dramatically.
Hi Dan

I have a friend inside Capital One who tells me they're very concerned about the future of the industry. In a nutshell, C1 makes money three ways: (1) debit interchange, (2) net interest margin (NIM) and (3) fees.

Dodd-Frank basically killed debit interchange and fees (esp. with the overdraft changes). If you think spread will keep collapsing, I'm not sure what's left revenue-wise.
If we're going to judge people's contributions by personal issues they have, nothing is of use anymore, including your advice.

How can we be sure everyone is "pure" before we consider their creations? Unless we all start living in a magic reality tv show, that is...
This is my problem too, and it normally happens when I am highly strung. I have had success with meditation, but during very stressful periods I still tend to awaken at 4am.
Thank you. I think this every time I read such a comment... "because your peers expressed interest in it."
Could this be used to get rid of "new" altogether?

Instead of blocking them from the homepage, just give them a very very small chance of appearing. Might make the "Knights of New" which are considered self-sacrificing users a thing of the past.
This is great. I'm trying to make http://thetechblock.com a destination for tech articles and news that matter. Would love any feedback.
Good opportunity to short, no?
No one's arguing that disk paging is high-performance. In fact, MongoDB themselves explicitly recommend that you keep your working set size below physical memory size.
When I worked at GS a few years ago, they often talked about the "high tech" and "high touch" parts of banking.

You're right that transactional, lower-value activities like basic commercial banking, credit settlement, mortgage origination, etc. are at their core, technology problems, but a lot of banking, especially on the higher, relationship-driven end (private banking, investment banking) is more about customization and individual client service than technology.

Mentioning it because I find that model (tech vs. touch) useful.