skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Glad to hear you folks are still around and only pivoting to something (hopefully) sustainable.

I've always been a curious follower of Priceonomics for two reasons. One: the sheer research/depth of your posts that hit HN frequently. It's rare to find blogs that deep dive into such a diverse set of topics while writing eminently readable prose. Would love to read a post on how you find experts/how they research topics sometime.

Two: your name - Rohin Dhar - is a deprecation of my name - Rohin Dharmakumar. You've also been quicker than me in signing up with the @rohin usernames on most web services, HN included :) Glad to make the acquaintance!
Just for the reference, I had to upvote :)
And this wasn't a case of the "free market" winning again. This was just America winning again.

Could you propose alternative explanations at to why the Minitel failed despite the fact it had such a head start? Do you think the internet would have prospered as it did if the only way to access it through the present day was through terminals developed, built, and lent to you by the American Gov't?

Today we know we need both the private market and the government to build an economy that is both prosperous and beneficial to the people.

Elaborate? I think it's still hotly debated and certainly not 'known'.

I think the fact that managed to call out the 22 year old French author (me) as a 50s era frenzied McCarthyist betrays a stronger, far more irrational ideology in you than is present in my writing. I'm extremely proud of the Minitel and its amazing run (a sentiment shared by other commenters) and simply shared what I believe to be the most plausible and strongest explanation as to why it didn't make it's way out of France and eventually failed.
> What I explained is how things actually work, why they need solved, and how they are currently solved by intervention.

Except that the people who disagree with your "description" would point out that they are not solved by intervention, the underlying problems are simply exacerbated until they spiral out of control and experience a black swan event and the entire edifice collapses into an orgy of post hoc problem fixing that just messes things up more and more all the time.

At best this is just delaying the inevitable, and at worst drastically increasing the magnitude of how bad it's going to be when it becomes impossible to delay it further.

In theological terms, your claims are equivalent to appeals for plenary indulgences as effective as an effective long term strategy for the mitigation of sin. ;)

> I think you mean that lots and lots of people think like me, and I would ordinarily dispute that too.

Lots and lots of people think like both of you. Bitcoin takes the question out of the political realm and into the technical realm. If you don't buy keynesian economics and want no part of it, then for the first time in modern history it is largely possible for you to circumvent systems based around those assumptions and management strategies.

There might be arguments that the very fact this is now possible eliminates the ability of keynesian systems to act in what they describe as a benevolent fashion, but it's largely irrelevant now. The cat is out of the bag and nothing is going to put it back in.
I think that you're quite correct about GIGO for CBAs, and I think the issue is that it's almost impossible to not get GI.

But certainly such an experiment could be run. The issue there is: what's the best alternative? Randomly assign money? Go with "gut feeling"? Assign it evenly? It looks like trying to outguess the stock market...
Sure, you click reflexively, but you should notice the text was bad either after clicking or within a couple more clicks. Letting the first few errors through is reasonable, but letting a wall of them through without noticing anything wrong, when reading them is your job, is inexcusable.
Why does healthcare.gov use “if ('en' === 'en')“?
In Firefox 24 and following, mark all versions of Java as unsafe
We don't have to listen to their editorializing to address the claims of the source. Just make a simple market-based thought experiment. Fishing vessels will continue to expand their abilities to catch fish because it results in higher revenue. More ships, larger catches, extracting from a finite resource. It's nice to think of the ocean as infinitely bountiful, but it's definitely limited. So are you refuting their claim that ocean stocks are in decline and that the tsunami caused a serious pollution problem?
Why? What is unethical about providing the truthful and correct information about company and products? I would understand that if Wikipedia banned all commercial product information, but it does not. So why it is OK for unknown schoolkid (random example) to edit a page with the list of, say, Cisco products (random example), but it's not OK for a person working for Cisco who actually knows what he's talking about and has access to most accurate, correct and up-to-date information possible? Wikipedia requires reputable sources - which means the said schoolkid would be copypasting some info from somewhere anyway - so what's wrong with the most authoritative sources - people actually making things it describes and knowing everything about them?
"History repeats itself, heaven knows I'll know it in the next world", End of Green, Kerbdog, Cormac Battle.
I reckon one of the strings is server generated. I used to do similar things when I just stared coding.
They roughly explained it. The counters were in a different state because of refactoring moving their updates around, so the Power Peg code had an incorrect view of reality.
But Google is doing that
Wow!!

LCD user interface!
Fly by wire!
Carbon composite wings!
Geared turbofan!

We are talking about more than 20 years old technology here. We (in our company) programmed cockpit LCD like 12 years ago or so...
I think your formatting above has forced a very wide page width....
Then you're over-thinking it.

The 'fees' are differed on the off-chance you don't earn a reasonable salary. You can call it debt, but it isn't. In the US they have real student debt that is debilitating. In the UK, it doesn't even register on your credit score.

Why is it that a school-leaver gets little to no help, and a university student gets a whole tonne of grants and deferred fees? Doesn't that inequality make your blood boil?

Details on UK higher education grants and deferred fee payments here: http://www.slc.co.uk/services/higher-education/grants-for-li...

And don't be melodramatic. It's not a lifetime of debt because there is a time limit and then the deferred fees are written off.
You're correct. Regular grammars are type-3 grammars in the Chomsky hierarchy, and those can be recognized by regular expressions (this is the definition of regexes in the CS sense).

In practice, however, the regex engines of most programming languages have features that makes them capable of recognizing (a subset of?) type-2 grammars, hence the confusion.
I liked the observation about people not 'seeing' the population total on the US Census page. So I tried it myself, since the Census home page has changed and I wouldn't be pre-conditioned where to look.

http://www.census.gov

I had to revert to Ctrl-F for 'population' to find the counter.

The whole page is a mess of widgets and the first thing I started reading was the 'Census News' down in the middle. Everything else was disrgarded as 'noise'

Standard page reading technique:

1. Click link

2. Content loads

3. Hit ESC to stop images loading

4. Quick scan for the search string

5. If not found, Ctrl-F.

6. If still not found, exit page.
> Would you like to call eval, recursion, macros, closures and many such things cheating?

Yes, in the context of "I did this with just a regexp".

> Sorry but doing things without understanding or knowing the true consequences of what you are actually writing, always causes bugs. And that's true with any programming language.

That's a cheap excuse for implementing this in a way that is just plain wrong, or too limited to be useful, when it could have been implemented correctly (at least if enough capable programmers still understood Perl's source code to work on it).

> Perl has many features which are designed to make the language powerful enough

I never disputed that. I used Perl almost exclusively in the past 14 years or so, so I know what I'm talking about. These broken language features are the biggest PITA about the language. They are useful for some very specific tasks, but useless for others where they could be used if they had been implemented correctly. Adding a feature with more gotchas than useful use cases is not the way to making a language more useful and enjoyale.
The End of Files: the biggest revolution since the GUI?
I agree that fructose (when eaten separately without the surrounding real fruit) is bad.

But people should go some steps further: The whole composition of stuff most people eat is wrong (low fat, high carb).

I recommend having a look at paleo-style diets (e.g. http://www.gnolls.org/1141/ ) which mean high fat, mid protein, low carb. They provide more satiety, no after-lunch tiredness and a lot more.

My own way was going from no fructose (thanks to Lustig's video) to now cutting grains too. Feels good.

EDIT: And forget about counting calories or thinking that (eating fat == becoming fat). That's not how digestion works. Calories were afaik defined by burning (with an actual flame) the food. That's not how your organs, enymes, stomach, ..., bacteria work.
Basically if your website is a thin strip in the middle of the page, so you can have room for giant background ads on both sides, you are automatically filtered by me.
Glad you found our bbits/openvpn-utun repo.

We're currently using it in Cloak for Mac. (https://getcloak.com/ -- bbits is our github organization and Cloak's parent company.)

Previously we maintained (and used) the tuntaposx kext, but keeping it up to date was becoming a burden. At WWDC, some of Apple's fine kernel networking engineers shared the proper incantations with us; this patch is the result.
"his own observations mean nothing, or rather, are insufficient to assign any causality other than natural variability."

This would be an accurate statement, but the last hundred years have been particularly relevant as human activities have exponentially soared. You are hiding your head in the dirt if you think that our level of influence is insignificant over the course of a lifetime.
I'm actually saddened by the fact that we consider 8 hours of battery life satisfactory, and 14 hours nothing short of astronomical. Anything less than a full day work for a mobile device should be unacceptable.

Smartphones are particularly bad at it. If anyone remembers Palm devices, they could last for more than a week (!) on one charge. With my Nexus 4, even with light usage, I've come to a habit to plug it in whenever possible, it goes that fast.

We all love feature-rich devices, but I think, currently, the promoted features and hardware are way ahead of the battery capabilities. And it's not OK.
Just curious, how do you implement such a thing? I mean how do you avoid polling the stores zillions of times, which would probably eventually be shut off by the stores?
If you want users to click on ads you basically need to fool the users into clicking or show actually relevant add. Because actually relevant adds are almost non-existant, fooling becomes the main strategy. And the best strategy is to make adds be indistinguishable from content. And I do not refer to short-sighted way of incorporating ad links into the content, so the user thinks it is useful, because after he clicks he knows he is fooled. I refer to ad blogging, or "promotional" blogging, where people write articles that are sometimes quite thickly-veiled adds, puts a bunch of banners around it and make people read it. Then people think that they are avoiding adds by not looking at banners often not even realizing that the "content" is an ad of itself.
Nokia unveils Lumia 1520: Windows Phone with a 6" 1080p display and 20MP camera
Nokia unveils Lumia 2520: 10.1-inch tablet with Windows RT
Go to healthcare.gov/es and the condition is if('es' == 'en'){}
That's all ...
"Another interesting question would be how much US surveillance can foreign democracies withstand?" Plenty, as long as you don't tell them about it.
When I'm reading your website I'm running AdBlock, Ghostery, NoScript and RequestPolicy. I trust you and you alone - and although I have nothing against paying for information that essentially allows me to become a better person (in general, at my job, in life, etc.), I rarely have a chance.

You may be able to convince me to trust your partners, like StackOverflow does - "hey, they are cool guys, we work with them, you should probably check them out", but never to trust an entire ad-serving network, especially because IT'S A FRIGGIN AD-SERVING NETWORK. These guys specialize in tracking people and profile building, it's an Internet Gestapo that sells stuff. This includes Google Ads, of course (maybe even more so, because they are the largest such network and have the greatest tracking power).

Even a paywall is better than ads when executed correctly - if you at least let me read your old articles this will probably be enough. Then you just need a payment form or a Bitcoin address - none of my plug-ins will block those. I'd be happier if you just trust me in return and let me pay without a paywall, though.
Yeoman for Java developers - JHipster
> McDonalds certainly doesn't suggest that you do that

I thought part of the problem was that McDonalds /did/ suggest you /could/ do that, without any ill-effects - that their meals were healthy and you could eat breakfast, lunch and dinner there without a problem.
At the same time it's now $190 on Bitstamp.

What's nice that the volume at MtGox was pretty high lately, ranging from 10-50K BTC per day. That's up to 10M USD traded daily we're talking about.
Random startup idea, just for fun: have mechanical turk (or a game) to tag the items in the photo.

Upload your photos: shed-shelf1.png shed-shelf2.png shed-main.png

After a few hours (or days) they are tagged with hammer, wheelbarrow, drill, gas can, etc.

Now you can grep for things in the real world :).

(This is likely overkill, but I like the idea of photos taking advantage of our massively-parallel object-finding & recognition abilities. With a few textual tags, even at the entire-photo level, you could search dozens of rooms efficiently.)
here you go http://hyperlapse.tllabs.io/
Trust in a government is mostly relevant in situations where they would be breaking the law, like spying. If the law doesn't protect you in the first place, then the trustworthiness of the government doesn't really matter.

If the courts decide that you can't be compelled to give away master keys, then the US is a good choice. If not, no amount of governmental honesty can protect you.
Seems like a big case of NIH syndrome if you ask me.
Big Data now decides who gets admitted in to university
I don't agree with your comparison. NT's security model does not have to be exposed to every single end-user for it to be useful. For e.g. things like taking a process token and stripping its rights to adding a layer of security to the processes is much superior to a chroot type hack. Modern UNIXs have added apparmor, but then again I was comparing NT with the OS landscape in the early 90s. Also file system ACLs is another place where NT was superior. There was nothing comparable elsewhere at the time.

The problem is you're comparing two unequal things and calling it even. Linux clearly has had to deal with several challenges in improving its design due to its UNIX heritage (time-sharing OS, synchronous I/O, blocking syscalls, etc), while NT did not because it was a fresh design.

Frankly this type of discussion is more suited for a comparative analysis type paper than the comments section. Also, FWIW - I don't claim any special expertise or knowledge on OS design, its simply a topic of general interest of mine.
That might not be such a bad thing. Wikipedia isn't exactly trustworthy even without paid editing by PR folks; the Wikipedia pages of journalists who criticise them tend to turn into hatchet jobs for instance.
IsoHunt shuts down
McDonalds never claimed that their food could be consumed to the exclusion of every other possible food. They offer breakfast options, but none of their marketing made the claim that eating at McDonalds every day was recommended.

On the other hand, soylent is making the claim that it's healthy to use soylent as a complete replacement for food. Thus, the standards are much higher in terms of truth in marketing.
Show HN: ChartAngular (My first open source project)
And worse, that particular mess is commented out, yet downloaded to everyone's browser.

But below, in live code, they have the same thing.
By far it's http://morguefile.com

Tons of free high resolution stock photos with no strings attached.
> For the general case I'd argue that Scala's syntax is far easier to sort out for anyone coming from C-based langs.

Before I learned about either, I had most experience with Java. Though I'm biased since I learned Haskell first (and I wouldn't say that I 'know' Scala).
While it's a good thing people realize that banner ads won't work as they might have some years ago, I still wonder why they discuss the "best place" of banner and how it integrates most unobtrusively. I think people will feel even more exploited when they are tricked into clicking a well hidden banner ad.

To me, the question is rather: "Is banner ads still a good form of advertising?". The only way I could answer "yes" to that is if users had a reason to click that banner, for example because they would receive something for it:

- Points for their personal sponsor

- A discount for finding that particular banner.

The reward would have to be something that makes people actively look for those banners.

In any other case, I'd argue we need a different form of online advertisement than banners.
Maybe they aren't as dumb - at least in the area that made them rich - as it seems. I can imagine someone bing smart in the university hall and dumb on the street, or vice versa.
I don't know why the Minitel failed while the Internet didn't. But the internet started out as a government project, too[1]. Maybe it was because the American government-led effort incorporated the private market better, although, according to your description in the article, the French adopted what was to become Apple's model, and Apple is doing alright so far. And maybe it was due to other reasons, like being ahead of its time, or lack of an international marketing effort (why did the Apple Newton fail?) But in your article you give no compelling evidence to suggest that the Minitel's eventual failure was just a result of it being "state run". Both the internet and the Minitel were state run, and both had a strong private market participation.

If anything, the internet had a very long incubation period in the education system, while the Minitel immediately reached out to businesses. Governments usually don't shine in running businesses, but they do know how to build infrastructure; both the internet and the Minitel are infrastructure, so there's no reason to assume it would fail because it's state-run.

Whatever the reasons, they were more complex than this simplistic explanation (actually, it seems like the main reason is that the internet was already pretty big when Minitel launched – just not in homes – and couldn't be stopped at that stage).

> I think it's still hotly debated and certainly not 'known'.

The measure at which government should regulate the market is debated and varies across countries, but history has proven again and again that neither completely government controlled economies, nor completely free market economies work. We do know that.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_the_Internet
For the same reason that we frown on politicians from accepting money for making ethical decisions. The issue is that the Wikipedia community do not know whether the information is slanted towards a positive viewpoint by an interested party. In fact, seemingly neutral information may often gloss over important information or give undue positive weight towards a subject.

I would suggest reading up on Wikipedia's information on this subject at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Conflict_of_interest - it's very informative and should answer most of these questions.
Thought so - thanks. Can you post the links? HNSearch doesn't work on this browser. I get furniture, but no results.
Looking at .NET version - syntax seems out of place. And it still has to compete with RestSharp - http://restsharp.org/
Here's the video for this presentation: http://perltv.org/v/parsing-json-with-a-regex
Amazon Prime is brutal to compete against. I'm averaging around 100 orders from Amazon a year (based on their order stats for my account), and almost whenever I do a search, I tick the Prime search restriction. I know it often means I pay more, but 90% of my purchases are impulsive purchases of the "I want this yesterday" kind where Amazon is competing against brick and mortar stores by me not having to go to a shop, and knowing I'll still have it the following day, and where other online sources don't enter into the picture at all.

The exceptions, where I don't go straight to Amazon, are very specific, and are a handful of vendors that ship as quickly as Amazon and that I go to for specific ranges of products (e.g. my supplements).

The only times I'll comparison shop, and where Prime doesn't come into it at all, is for really big items. E.g. my TV (but the TV before that was from Amazon...). My last laptop (but the two before that were from Amazon).
Any path that is not straight could have been reached sooner by going on the straight line connecting: The shortest distance between two opposite corners on a rectangle is the diagonal line between them. Any curve you draw connecting them is longer. Any curved path you run gets you to the same point later than you could have got to it at if you went directly there. Outside of the circle of safety, it has to be a straight path.

A spiral is also not going to work outside the circle of safety, as the monster has a higher angular velocity; he moves around the shore faster than your projection to the shore.
In a big long-running error like this it is extremely unlikely that a company would have come out on top.

However, it happened fairly regularly that smaller trading errors would cause a couple (or tens of) thousand dollar win or loss for the client. If it was a loss, the client universally complains and gets comped by the company. If it was a win and it is found, the client keeps mum and the company does not raise the issue.
Yes- latency is a big issue for this type of trading system.
Coming from Australia, we've never had much exposure to Amazon, which leaves a ton of opportunity for price comparison websites.

Personally, I'd find it a pain if a price comparison website diverged from their core search offering. Sites like [1]PriceGeek still have price comparison front and centre - much more useful for me as a consumer who can't tap into the benefit that Amazon provides.

There's still room for price comparison, just maybe outside of the US.

[1] http://thepricegeek.com
New Google tech ‘uProxy’ to provide uncensored Internet for global activists