skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The best kind of documentation is that which is checked by the compiler and guaranteed to be correct - the code itself.

Which lends your documentation to being hard to read for a certain percentage of developers, varying depending on your project.

This strategy, while easy for developers experienced in the target language and familiar with the code, can have real negative consequences if the people involved in the project are of a different fluency level with the language or even CS in general, or new to the project.

Q: What I just coded is obviously quicksort, so why should I label it?

A1: Because not everyone is used to seeing quicksort implemented manually in C, assembly, python, etc.

A2: Because without knowing at a high level what you are trying to accomplish, it's much harder to ascertain whether that bug you just found is really a bug or an interesting feature which will come into play a page later.

A3: Because knowing immediately that this chunk of code does NOT pertain to some specialized code to select items after sorting saves time and cognitive load.
Banksy artwork vandalized in New York
> We might similarly observe, “Nobody moves to that state anymore. It offers too much economic opportunity.”

This article rests on the premise that all you need for a higher salary is to live somewhere where salaries are higher. But that is highly questionable -- just because they're higher in general, doesn't mean they'll be higher for you. At no point does the author convincingly explain that American unemployment is a problem of geographical mismatch, instead of the far more likely case of skills mismatch.

> If labor markets were operating efficiently, construction workers, along with electricians, plumbers... would receive enough compensation to live near the places where their work is most needed. But our labor markets are not efficient; rather, they are rigged and skewed, offering too much compensation to people with some skill sets (merging companies and writing derivatives, for example) and not enough to others whose skills are often just as hard to learn (e.g., brick laying and teaching children to read) and often more vital to society.

What? How exactly does the author magically come to the conclusion? As far as I can tell, construction work and plumbing and electrical wiring is all getting done. (Never listen to businessmen complaining about a lack of workers, it's just a masked complaint that they're having to pay higher wages.) What evidence is there that our labor markets are "rigged and skewed"? By whom? It's like the author doesn't understand the basic concepts of supply and demand in a labor market.

It's extremely interesting that Americans are moving less. I'd love to know more of why. But tying it into arguments about career mobility seems highly dubious, at best. It's ridiculous, and almost patronizing, to suppose that people's careers nationwide are being held back by not being able to live in downtown metro areas. It's a big country out there.
>> the American people did not care nearly as much about politics as the reformers thought they ought to

This is something that the politically active simply cannot grasp. Most Americans really do not care at all about politics unless it is currently impacting their life. They can talk all they want about how important it is, but most Americans have jobs, kids, a mortgage, friends, and sports teams to pay attention to, all of which are more urgent concerns than what goes on in politics, especially given that we only get a chance to participate so sparingly.
No, the value proposition does not continue to skyrocket. If you are a well established digital property and know your load profile, AWS is prohibitively expensive "just in case" you may need to scale to thousands of virtual machines.
> Intelligence like defense has been outsourced to the US and Europe shows no signs of resuming their own defense.

Disclaimer: Brazilian here.

This is where you don't get it: there is a growing gap on what "defence" means to the US and the rest of the world. And this is precisely where the problems arise. Gradually the US will have to spend more and more to protect national interests that no one else cares about. Eventually the costs will outweigh the gains. This is part of the story of the British Empire fall.

G.W. Bush also thought that "America can go alone". Then he discovered that military power is too expensive to be the only way to implement hegemony. You also need the "soft power", the ability to persuade people without using guns. This is precisely where US power is eroding.
It's amazing that it's been 20 years already since Myst. Really hope to see this project funded and shipped!
Hi chasb, thanks for the feedback. The two links in the header are 'pricing' and 'privacy', because those are the two questions that come up most often.

What I've found is that if people sign up (a) either their parents start writing stories, in which case the price is not an issue or (b) their parents don't write stories, in which case they can just let the trial expire. Because of this, I'm optimizing for trial sign-ups so people can judge the value for themselves.
If you're right, that makes the prospects of space colonization a little less optimistic.
This stands out to me:

>> "Such bans were foreseen in initial wording two years ago but were dropped under the pressure of intense lobbying from Washington."

The fact that one country can influence a large group of countries in such a way is scary. Hopefully that's starting to change as the US motive for this kind of lobbying becomes public.
People should try the editor out: http://www.framerjs.com/editor/
How about doing a binary search to find the threshold dose and then investigating the effects of that?
Vast oversimplification...really.
I love f.lux, but once I put it on "night mode" I realized I never wanted it to go back to "regular mode". So now I just set it to always be on the minimum, 3400K, at all times. Any time it's over 3400K it just hurts my eyes. Does anyone else do this?
>> Citizens frequently don't know or care who their congressman is, let alone who their state senator is.

I know who my hometown congresswoman is, mainly because he is well known in the community. Same with my hometown state senator, who is a family friend. I have no idea who any of those people are for the 3 other Congressional districts I have lived in, except knowing that Henry Waxman was my representative in college, since he was an alum.
Now sports agents and teams will begin negotiating how much sleep and downtime their athletes must have.

"We need this player to get 8.25 hours of sleep a night"

"My client will only do 7.5. He's shooting a movie next week"

"7.8?"
It's difficult to find things you want. Application paradigm is broken down and it's incompatible with previous model. What was a nested directory is suddenly a flat list, with even all the unessential help text files. The new "apps" are completely worthless and have a very poor performance. It seems to me that Windows Search doesn't work half the time. With Windows 7 it worked all the time. There's so much useless things that I have no use for that only clutter the interface unnecessarily. It's very schizophrenic. Context switching is a very expensive operation for the human mind. Doing it for absolutely no reason what so ever is extremely annoying.
The mix of Metro UI and the old desktop has been the primary reason for people to not like windows 8. But they have made a lot if small tweaks to minimize the transition from Metro to old UI. That is the best part of Windows 8.1 to me.
Nokia's multi-display smartwatch
The extraordinary promise of the new Greenwald-Omidyar venture
How to Interview (for YC)
That's quite a visual nod to Zork, there.
Ask HN: What is your best book or tutorial recommendation to learn typography?
fyi, the hyperlink to mezzanine in your github readme is missing the colon after "http"
I guess it's a combination:
a) Granular commits are an essential basis of good version control. Big, bloated commits (maybe even combining code from multiple, different topics) will sooner or later bite you.
b) Integrating often. I think you can be successful with long-lived branches, but you need to have more discipline and not forget to re-integrate from time to time. Integrating late will naturally raise the risk of conflicts - because, simply, more changes accumulate.
I recommend Gateway and Gateway II, based on Frederik Pohl's science fiction series.

There's graphics and sound, but the interface is classic text adventure.
Unfortunately, the computer systems used for government payments do not have the capability to prioritize payments, so that wasn't an option. We would stop paying at least part of our debt, and that puts us in a state of default.
Several of the things you list are the duty of the platform plugin and the style engine plugin and don't actually require any changes to the core widgets. Yay layering.

Personally I think entirely new widget classes should be accepted into the QWidgets module, but you may be right that there's some resistance to that - but the bar for new widgets has always been fairly high actually, it was a rare occurence even before QML (neither Qt 3 or Qt 4 saw much in the way of new widgets during their respective lifetime). I think the case that a lot of the "new UI challenges" are better met by QML is also somewhat legitimate, in which case there's an incentive for porting to it.
Hi joebo, I like these ideas. In fact, one of my friends uses a service called Presto that prints out the question emails for his grandmother, and she answers on the back and mails them to him!

I still think you get a lot of the personality through the writing, and people can also add pictures when they reply. Another thing I'm thinking about is encouraging people to record voice-versions of the stories they write in text, so you have both (and of course transcription for the other direction)
I upgraded today too and I tried to reproduce your bug: mine didn't freeze but it still raised some errors to be reported to Canonical when I switched back to the initial user. OTOH they fixed some bugs in Rhythmbox (playing music from shared folders over network was very buggy and now just works). Also Unity seems snappier and they seem to have fixed some bugs related to pinning applications on the launcher.
Wrong. This is a common misconception that command-line tools are no longer relevant because they are "old".

In some cases text/keyboard interfaces are better. Like for instance when editing case. In some other cases, graphical/mouse interface is better. Like for instance web browsing.

Command-line tools generally offer a larger language than GUI applications. And if that language is not enough, you can still combine them; something that is impossible with a GUI app.
>> But in the country our founders bequeathed us, it was expected that most people would concern themselves with private things.

Good to see someone acknowledge that what many look at as unique American problems are there by design. If you see them as a problem, that's a totally valid view, but please, acknowledge that things like the ease of obstruction, difficulty of substantial, long-lasting, transformative chance, and the public disinterest in government are all by design. The founders considered them features, not bugs.
You know, I skimmed the article and liked it, and thought "hey, I'll check out GrooveHQ.com, see what their deal is" since I haven't heard of them before.

And I get to a page where the only way to learn more is to watch a video. Instant turnoff. I'm in a quiet place, I don't want to make noise or plug my headphones in just to have any idea what it is you actually do. Please consider that people might want to read something about you on your signup page.
Then why we haven't cured cancer yet or malaria or global warming or psychological disorders ? There are a lot of smart people in the world but we really can't afford to work on silly things.
Welcome, deontologist, to the world of consequentialism.
Why must districts be geographical in nature? I don't identify myself with where I live. I identify myself with the communities of which I am a member, and these span much larger areas.

To me, geographical districts have the effect of filtering out like-minded people. For example: hackers don't get a voice (except perhaps in the Bay area), since they are scattered all over.

Why must this be so?
Windows 98 SE upgrade boxes were sold separately and they looked like this: http://i.imgur.com/RfgHpb3.jpg

Though registered users could apparently get the CD for free (see elsewhere in this thread). This site has an overview of most versions (it omits 2003, 2008 and 8): http://ackadia.com/blog/computers/a-brief-history-of-microso...
we used to call that space "developer branch" or a "feature branch" :)
What Innovation Isn't
And same here. The general git-flow workflow has worked extremely well for us and has cut down on almost all version control issues we previously had.
Never Shop in October and Other Secrets From a Retail Guru
The sub-penny rule (decimalization) was also mentioned by Chris Stucchio (aka yummyfajitas).[1] And it is extensively discussed in the book "Dark Pools".[2] Because order queues only exist at whole-penny prices, the bots are forced to compete on speed. If it weren't for that rule, there would also be competition on price because you could place offers and get price-priority in the sub-penny interval.

The playing field is basically a DDoS arms race, where the main technique is full-throttle quote-stuffing to push anyone without equivalent hardware and connection away from the front of the queue, and out of the game. (Dark Pools also mentions a conspiracy of special undocumented order types on certain exchanges). The ACM article even admits that the algos aren't even particularly intelligent, just very speedy: "In my experience, most high-frequency algorithms are fairly straightforward in concept—but their success is based largely on how quickly they can interact."

A distributed order book like the one in the Ripple protocol[3] is a much fairer system. The network charges a transaction fee in order to prevent quote spam/DoS attacks, price fractions can be as small as 6 decimal places, and offers are processed in an effectively random order (within each discrete ledger).[4]

1. http://www.chrisstucchio.com/blog/2012/hft_whats_broken.html

2. Dark Pools: The Rise of the Machine Traders and the Rigging of the U.S. Stock Market by Scott Patterson

3. https://ripple.com/distributed-fx/

4. https://ripple.com/wiki/Arbitrage#Rapidly_changing_offers
I was able to get GFWL games to work on W8 with this fix: http://www.alialsawaf.com/post/36741943821/how-to-fix-games-...
Obamacare’s impact on our startup and what to do to avoid rate hikes
> Let's define "revision" to be "what the entire codebase looked like at some particular point in time" and "changeset" to be "a list of changes between one specific revision and the next specific revision".

Git tracks revisions then. Commits have a tree object that describes the codebase at the time of the creation of the commit. You don't need to transverse any previous commits to recreate that tree. Commits also have other commits objects listed as their parent commits, but they are not needed to examine the current state.

Git doesn't use deltas in the way that Mercurial does.
How do I get into this field? I'm a 20 year old making a shit ton of money by doing mobile work but I find it so boring. Nothing about it is innovative. I feel like a high level computer construction worker. It's brainless for the most part, it just takes time.

I want to get into some really cool stuff. I've been wanting to get into investment banking from a technical standpoint, HFT, algorithmic trading etc, but honestly don't know where to start.

What are the de facto books/websites/reads for this field?
My microdosing experiments have always left me on the depressed and anxious side of the spectrum, even with ensured quality LSD. Its not something I would repeat. That said, my personal lower threshold is around ~300-400ug, where all of the negative effects disappear, and the positive, well-observed longer-term ones remain.
Ask HN: affordable health-insurance in CA?
Hey folks,

Kaiser recently announced that they are ending their $100/mo super-high deductible plan that I was on, replacing it with the same plan at 3x the original price. As a starving entrepreneur, there is a distinct possibility I will likely not be able afford that anymore.

I'm wondering if anybody out there has run into other super-budget-friendly options for health insurance in the area that I might look into. Is there perhaps a site somewhere that lists them all out and compares prices for a certain area?

Thanks!
I don't trust git stash and prefer to instead commit, leaving some message like "This is the first commit of branch foo", then rebase when I'm done. That way I don't have to worry about forgetting that I stashed changes earlier, or not being able to find the stash that I thought I did. The branch always has the latest code and i'll just rebase when it's ready.
"Novice developers should not be writing drivers in any language."

Well, it might not be such a bad thing to write your stuff in Lua and get the lights blinking as a way to work your way up to C and mainline device driver development. If the device drivers interest the novice programmer, let's encourage that. Its not like there aren't a ton of safeguards between the novice and getting their driver in the mainline.
Excellent service, great way to get to know your folks better.
Raycasting demo in 251 bytes of JavaScript
My Next Adventure in Journalism -- Pierre Omidyar
Because it enables federated, but different, freedoms. How can you move to avoid communities and laws you don't like, if they are not geographically disparate?
A system where candidates were elected in the house not by district but nationwide number of votes would take care of this.
That's the main topic of the site OP linked to. http://rangevoting.org/
I learned a lot from here http://practicaltypography.com/
Oh, right, I was thinking about the Alto, sorry.
I got my aeron for $400 on craigslist in the bay area. If you're not in the bay area, maybe have somebody in the area buy one for you and ship it?
Which HFT firms have access to the orders of other participants before the exchange does?
Red Sea coral reef quick underwater view
Overall, this is a fascinating look at how what originally was intended as breaking down corruption and opening up participation to the masses had some unintended consequences. I found the following paragraph particularly salient:

>> In the 20th century, the boss system selected such presidents as Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Roosevelt, Harry Truman, Dwight Eisenhower and John Kennedy. I was struck at how a self-evidently corrupt and undemocratic system would have selected such impressive candidates (albeit along with Warren Harding and other less impressive ones). The system should not have worked, but on the whole, it worked better than we might have imagined. I leave to others to judge how these compare to post-reform candidates like Jimmy Carter, Ronald Reagan, George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, George W. Bush or Barack Obama.

Kennedy and Roosevelt were the epitome of boss driven politicians, and while many argue over how effective they actually were, no one can argue that were not highly influential. I'm personally a fan of Coolidge as well. In the modern system, only Reagan and Clinton seem likely to be remembered by history as peers of the Presidents on the first list, and both of them are regarded as some of the most historically charismatic politicians of all time. Very interesting.
Space pilots and nuclear plant engineers are hard to hire because you need hardware to train. Hiring software developers just requires willingness to pay more money than market.
"Early on" in HN history, posters would generally respect the "original title" mandate but upon occasion (1) would qualify it -- briefly, concisely -- with a few words in square brackets, e.g. [the "S" in "RSA"].

I don't know whether the mods still generally accept this, but I'd suggest it for such instances. And try not to intermingle bracketed qualifications within the title; appending them is generally better.

I'm not a mod, and I don't know whether this is (still) an accepted practice. So, just my suggestion.

--

(1) when really helpful; not all nor anything approaching a majority of the time
The biter, bit.
> Without such a cap it's an arms race that adds no value.

I have seen nobody ever challenge the value of liquidity in these discussions of HFT. Assuming this, the argument is that at some amount of latency the additional liquidity turns into a negative.

It seems more like the additional value is simply extremely small, but meaningful over an entire market.

What's the exact cutoff point for the value of additional liquidity turning negative, and will anyone agree on that arbitrary number?

Assuming HFT does turn into a negative at some point, wouldn't the same apply to optimizations in other markets like online advertising?

If it does apply elsewhere, we should also legislate away the practice of making online advertising more efficient to prevent tech giants like Google and Facebook from wasting billions of dollars and untold man-hours on these activities that are clearly worthless to society.
Same.

Often I find myself wishing that I could see things as a sequence diagram. I've never worked anywhere where functions were commented with useless English descriptions of the parameters and so on, so I don't really know if this is something that people really do. What I do wish I had was more high-level, visual representations of a system when I'm trying to learn how it functions.
In general, I cannot move to avoid laws I don't like, except by leaving the country (or state). The laws that bother me are not local in nature.
It's been a while since I looked at transition (and 3d transition) support from css -- but this sounds really counter intuitive -- shouldn't the browsers be able to make these changes themselves, in c++/c/hand-tuned machine code at that?

http://www.w3.org/TR/css3-transforms/#transform-property

"A transformation is applied to the coordinate system an element renders in through the ‘transform’ property. This property contains a list of transform functions. The final transformation value for a coordinate system is obtained by converting each function in the list to its corresponding matrix like defined in Mathematical Description of Transform Functions, then multiplying the matrices."

On a side note: this looks like something that should work (transformation/transition) with javascript disabled -- we've (rather) recently gotten drop-down menus that don't require javascript -- seems like a bit of a step backwards to require javascript for (some uses) of basic transformations if that's being used as part of the essential ux for a page...
Startup Founders Must Love To Learn
I was in the same situation but the video had enough screenshots and text to understand what the product is all about. I know what you mean though, I prefer not having a video too
I was also turned off by the lack of content, meaningful product information such as screenshots etc.
I can confirm that more than 1% is from arbitrage, and that we do not engage in quote stuffing/flickering/etc.
By longer I mean having a later retirement age.