skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not necessarily a bad thing! People move to cities to find a better life, and they usually find it. That's great unless you think a life of rural poverty is some kind of noble virtue.

The global population is 7.1 billion and rising fast. We should all cheer when we hear these statistics.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Urbanization#Environmental_eff...
Poll: Are polls on HN just a social hack to gain karma?
I've seen a lot of polls lately. These polls mostly come with predefined choices (as comments) that can be upvoted. Are these polls really used or are the authors just hacking their way to a high karma rank?
Test Driven Search Relevancy
Your next network OS is Linux
I guess typical solution is to come up with a new word with desired meaning. This way 'programmers' became 'developers' and 'system administrators' are becoming 'dev ops'.
Ubuntu Juju: Automate your cloud infrastructure
Agreed about the poor name - very unfortunate
I think the phenomenon he mentions will have an important political ramification. The current Democratic Party, with its awkward alliance of socially liberal young people with teachers and union workers is going to fragment. Right now, young people are getting a bad shake, between skyrocketing tuition and bad job prospects. Yet, in a few years when they finally have jobs, their taxes will skyrocket to support rising healthcare costs and underfunded pensions. I bet you will see a resurgence of republicanism among young people, though it'll look very different from what the party looks like today.
Capital gains are income, pure and simple; insofar as there is a justification for taxing long-term capital gains less than other income, its because it is income earned over period of greater than one year, which would thus be over-taxed in a progressive tax system if it were simply taxed as income in the year it is realized.

Of course, a flat lower rate for long-term capital gains results in them being under taxed compared to other income; a simpler and fairer solution is to tax capital gains as normal income in the year realized, but to allow taxpayers to optionally recognize gains (or, really, any income) for tax purposes in advance of realizing it.
The article in no way says this is illegitimate, it is listed as an extra barrier that a competitor would have to cross.
The lines are also pretty crammed, they could need some more padding. I easily find myself slipping a line while reading.

And if gwern feels adventurous (and I guess he'd like testing such kind of things), he may try something like [1] to color the text with a gradient, to allow faster reading speeds.

[1] http://www.beelinereader.com/
A subtle distinction

Hence my reference to nit-picking.
well i am using my arm chromebook recently
its perfect to me

first , its cheap, only 245USD, or about 2k chinese yuan
secondary, its battary life time is longer than my roommate's mba(used for 1 year)
third, with the help of crouton, i can now developing on this machine even without network.

you need to know there're many people live in low profit environment
Literally 1 month ago, I bought a car and did exactly this. What's impractical about spending a little time to read?
Notice the performance in the following description of Pollock at work:

>A dripping wet canvas covered the entire floor … There was complete silence … Pollock looked at the painting. Then, unexpectedly, he picked up can and paint brush and started to move around the canvas. It was as if he suddenly realized the painting was not finished. His movements, slow at first, gradually became faster and more dance like as he flung black, white, and rust colored paint onto the canvas. He completely forgot that Lee and I were there; he did not seem to hear the click of the camera shutter … My photography session lasted as long as he kept painting, perhaps half an hour. In all that time, Pollock did not stop. How could one keep up this level of activity? Finally, he said 'This is it.'

In many ways it mirrors the accounts of psychics or other frauds, many of whom are self-deluded and thus not frauds in the common sense. The lone genius, the strange process, the way the world falls away while he's at work, a flaw no one but the guru can keen - these are the type of things we seem to be wired adore. So we should be suspicious of any new tastes we acquire while exposed to them.

Once his work became popular, they became positional goods, like yachts or a diamonds, so we should be doubly suspicious of the tastes of those who paid for it.

Take a random person, get him or her to drip paint onto a canvas however they see fit. Create many paintings every day, save the ones that seem, by hap, to be the most pretty. I contend critics and buyers alike would not be able to reliably distinguish between the works of Pollack and the works of the random person. He created a new style of painting - one that happens to require no skill. I have no idea if he bought his own shtick, but I like the idea that he didn't.
> sometimes entrepreneurs work on their businesses after hours out of love, rather than straining toward an overly-optimistic deadline out of fear. I’ve been there, I’ve put in the hours and I’ll do it again. But not unless I’m motivated by love.

This article is the best thing I've read in a while, and I needed to read it. Thanks.
Well put.

The consequences of that are where things get interesting:

When violence is systemized we consider it OK. When something stands out we consider it wrong. Authority is presumed to be benevolent (or, at least, extra-moral).
Scientists discover DNA body clock
Highly unlikely since the polls have to be thought of and successful. It's much easier to just add the dozen most popular, mainstream, generic tech news sites to your preferred RSS reader and then submit whatever they spew out.
You believe this nonsense, do you?
They adapted it because it was cheaper, not because it was open. Now, open frequently tends to be cheaper, but not always, it isn't an inherent quality of openness.
Ask HN: What to visit in San Francisco?
I'm going to San Francisco and will be staying there for 2 weeks (Oct. 24 - Nov. 8). What are some places that is a must to visit? I'm excited to visit the Golden Gate Bridge.

Also, what are some tech / startup events that will happen during that time? Or are there any startup offices that I can visit? I'm excited!
That depends on how the market share of revenue looks as well, and to my knowledge the percentage of revenue Apple receives is not dropping nearly as fast (and Google's not the main competitor there, Samsung is, even if it's using Google software).
I was wondering why this wasn't one of the main options listed ;)
Great stuff! I've been working on an app to help solve this same problem more generally. Here is a blog post I wrote talking about the problem from my perspective https://medium.com/look-what-i-made/4e667ad7a098
Normally it is considered that Venezuela is the northern country of South America, so for me that fragmentation is correct. I just will add Central America to include the Caribbean and countries below Mexico.
Because fuck hostage takers, that's why.
Income = net change in wealth (that's the Haig-Simons definition underlying the theory of the income tax). Capital gains are income as much as any other net change in wealth.
Porto Alegre, Brazil!
It would be neat if HN automatically provided something like this embedded at the top.
Can't a lot of this be solved by purchasing pay-per-day ads?

Paying per click or per thousand views just gives someone the incentive to increase clicks and views fraudulently. When you pay $10 to have your ad on the front page for the whole day the incentive to cheat disappears.

This is why I've been using Blogads.com and smaller networks instead of Google Adwords. The traffic is high quality, I don't have problems with high bounce rates and visitors that spend 0 seconds on my sites. I actually get legitimate traffic. Sometimes I over-pay for the ad space, sometimes I under pay.

Also, I knew a guy (who makes a social network and forums community platform for big companies) whose competitors would purposely pay an Indian company to search for his website in Google and click the sponsored ads using constantly changing IPs so they can cost him money and use up his budget. Something like 70% of his clicks were fraudulent.

Again, this wouldn't matter with pay-per-day/week/month advertising. Too bad it's not compatible with Google's current Pay-per-click auction / maximize profit system.
While this is probably true -- or even worse -- I think this is already baked into the rates advertisers are paying. Sophisticated advertisers have conversion rates they track carefully and what they bid/spend on ads is worked-to backwards from that number. In other words, if a conversion is worth $5 to me, and I see I get a 3% conversion rate, I'm not going to spend more than $0.15 per click.

Obviously this isn't a universal truth, and branding campaigns are more difficult to price, but this story is posted cyclically and it I often read people's take that this is a stat indicating things are unsustainable and headed for a correction, but I think we're past that. Online advertisers have grown more sophisticated over the last decade and CPMs & CPCs have dropped significantly along with that.

Curious what anybody else thinks..
I only mention it because I learned the difference yesterday, but that is a bar graph, not a histogram.
Fair point.

As a counter, I would say it is sometimes important to fully define something before you seek to implement it - particularly if that thing is subtle or complex or difficult to grasp. And often the person who defines something is a different person to the one who finds a way to implement it. I for one, like the rs' of the world.

Plus, I like to think perhaps there was some subtlety to his point about playfulness.. and maybe one who hacks for a living is just a hack.
That's a mischaracterization of his own comments on why he left. It had to do with open sourcing GPU drivers, which is probably an issue with other vendors, not Google.

See: https://plus.google.com/112218872649456413744/posts/9HHRURor...
I'd been meaning to write this for a while, but Node.js's security release on Friday was absolutely the impetus to sit down and finally hammer it out.
Consider the following thought experiment: Person A earns $100 and spends it in year 1, then earns $100 in year 2 and spends it in year 2. Person B earns the same, but invests the $100 earned in year 1 at 10% interest, and spends $210 in year 2. I claim that that $10 interest earned by person B should not be treated as income, and should not be taxed.

The reason is that all person B did, was exchange consumption in year 1 at the market rate, for consumption in year 2. The fact that they got to consume more in year 2 wasn't because they were particularly advantaged in being able to save more than person A, but rather because they preferred to spend more later than earlier.

Economically speaking, interest earned is not income.

Now for other kinds of capital gain, it is generally considered that people earn some compensation for risk (again, not income) plus some small premium (the "equity premium") that might possibly be considered income.
it works for me. I'm on chrome in win32 on this machine, running flashblock, should any of that be relevant.
Previously: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6263173
Plenty of young people here (NY) do. Probably getting some supplementation with their parents' credit cards. I'm not sure how "yuppie" is supposed to be derogatory here considering we are talking about young urban professionals.
Like this? http://hnlike.com/hncharts/chart/?id=6582647
I have a feeling that if an Android fork actually started to gain serious market share, Google would very quickly allow them to use GMail, Youtube and the other apps.
Demand Media's eHow Learns Hard Lessons
i have saw too many new tech this year and last year
none of them has a product

this made me angry
I watched it. I found an article that expressed my feelings by googling the words 'culture consuming itself in an ironic singularity' [1] but this article is an equal part of the singularity. "Exit Through the Gift Shop" plays well as a mockumentary by an art collective. The whole thing feels like a long troll, which is kind of interesting, but I felt Netochka Nezvanova [2] was pretty interesting at the time and now, not so much.

[1] http://jamesonstarship.com/2013/05/15/thats-all-folks-buzzfe...

[2] http://www.salon.com/2002/03/01/netochka/
This is a pretty silly argument. The people whom it affects are not people buying cars, it's more like launching a shuttle mission, at which point I would assume you have read the f*ing manual.
Malaysians represent!
Druckenmiller is lumping Social Security and Medicare together, which is obviously wrong.

Medicare is definitely a problem that needs to be fixed with more health care reform so we're no longer paying double what every other first world country pays for health care per capita. Social Security is fine for current and future generations. Means testing for either of them is idiotic, unless your goal is to kill them slowly by converting benefits for everyone to a welfare program.

He is trying to distract people from worsening income distribution that benefits 1%-ers like himself with sleight of hand to make a class war look like a generational war.

If he really gave a shit about the economic plight of young people he'd be talking about solving the student loan clusterfuck.
To be fair, I really do know people making incomes around that who spend money lavishly: every meal purchased, leased BMW, no retirement savings at all, credit card debt. It's sadly common.
Intelligence: The More Heritable, the More Culture-Dependent
That article was originally about me and was wrong. So there's that.
After Jan 3, subtract 1 from USA and tick an extra one to Australasia. I'm bound for Christchurch.
How I built a small Twitter following quickly
Experian Sold Consumer Data to ID Theft Service
South East Asia is there, isn't it ;)
No matter what definition you have heard of, the claim that the capital gains tax should be zero is basic economic theory that is taught to undergrads (I know cause I taught it as a TA). If you define "income" to mean "what economists think should be taxed" then your equality is incorrect.

I added my own comments on why we do tax capital gains, because I prefer real life to theory.
We were an early customer and love those guys to bits, but even on Stripe things get complicated when you've been around long enough to have changed your pricing plans a few times and have users who need to migrate from one to the other, etc.. Recurring billing is intrinsically hard.
Well, there is a philosophy (or rather, various different philosophies) that go along with the legal structures, and different projects have different levels of adherence to those ideas.

It eventually comes down to perception of value. Part of the original attraction of Android was its openness, if Google is now closing off substantial functionality, to head off competition, then it's not unfair for people to re-evaluate their enthusiasm for the product.
IBM and Oracle both have in-house operating systems (AIX, z/OS, Solaris), and are both big enough that they have, for all practical purposes, unlimited resources.

Yet both use and push Linux, IBM uses SUSE Enterprise, and Oracle forked Red Hat's OS...

I really doubt either cared about whatever marginal cost they may or may not save. Linux's openness is kind of like natural selection - good features live on, bad ones die.

Open source does make better software (everything else being equal of course).
Female comedian deals with aftermath of being stalked
I think the issue with polls isn't the fact they could be used to exploit the community for points, but rather the fact you can vote for more than one option in the survey which kind of subtracts away from its credibility. I don't doubt some people have the intention of getting points in mind, but I am willing to bet that most have the right intentions.

Unlike other communities such as Reddit or the old Digg, the Hacker News community is slightly more mature and make more rational decisions than those of other communities where trolling is rewarded. People on HN if suspicious won't be afraid to call someone out and well, I haven't seen it happen. So either people out there are outsmarting everyone or perhaps nobody sees the point in gaming the site for points. Bad content rarely makes it to the front page.
I was using mechanizer + beautiful soup in python before, but it seems that this one also needs human to read the html source code to pick a css selector instead of automating it...
See also http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/02/17/r... which argues it being due to incumbency and the Democrats "wasting" votes due to being more highly concentrated in urban areas.
I'd love to know what percentage of Australasia respondents are kiwis, as I'm heading that way myself soon.
If the new word had been something better than "cracker" it would've had a better chance of catching on.
its fun but not that easy

the draw api is too weak
I'm from Australia and know for a fact quite a few Australian's frequent HN.
The Go love makes a lot of sense when you consider it's out to replace Python and Ruby, and not other statically typed compiled languages. If you learned programming via Python, and then moved to Go, it would seem revelatory. If you've previously done a lot of statically typed work, it's much more meh.
> the term 'motherboard' originated with the PC and is restricted to the PC

I guess it doesn't make a difference that Macs are now PCs?
My impression of (tenured) academics is a lot like my impression of Microsoft: they're making out like bandits in the short-term, while seriously head-in-sand about fundamental changes necessary to tackle the long-term.
I am not into the Python internals but I would suspect the widely critiqued Python 3 step was just that: a shift that did not bring that much by itself but rearranged the inners enough to allow unlocking a lot of new doors in the future.
Thanks. I used beautiful soup for the parser, and actually have written a crawler framework for my scenario. But I was wondering whether there is any tool that could automate the selection of css selector or xpath.
Five resources to use (together) when learning to read and write Chinese
Are there any other resources I am missing? It feels like a combination of them is important.

We are building an app that will be another tool in that toolbox soon.
Sort of insinuates that ID theft is not meant to be a core focus of Experian.
I think the difference between "old Google" and "current Google" is that old Google would have been honest and said "the closest available equivalents are Paypal and Amazon Payments". Instead the migration partnership (presumably with a rev share) is Braintree, which while capable is not really the same sort of product.

It sucks to have to close things down, but sometimes you do, and they gave everybody 6+ months of notice to migrate back in May, but being disingenuous about the best alternative is mealy-mouthed and "un-Googly".
Wow, a lot of users of dynamic languages change to Go.
If anyone's curious (like I was), a histogram has a continuous variable for it's x-axis, the bars on a histogram correspond to bins of the continuous variable. E.g. 1-10, 11-20, 21-30. In a bar graph, the x-axis is usually a discontinuous variable, typically types, with no specifically meaningful sort order, e.g. in this case, countries. Also, by convention, histograms have no spaces between bars to represent the continuity while bar graphs do to represent the discontinuity. Correct me if I'm wrong.
Moving is a good idea.

I'm from the US, but I spent a substantial amount of time in India when I started by first company. Initially, we were outside of Bangalore (not by much), but enough that the company and I were disconnected from the city.

Around 2004 we moved the company to Bangalore, and I moved with the company.

It was the best move ever.

The cost of living is higher, it's over populated, traffic sucks, and so on in terms of problems. But it's where all of the action is and the people are.

Fast forward to 2012 and I was living 50 minutes outside of San Francisco (over the 80) and Silicon Valley (down the 680). I moved to into the valley to be in the action. Again, best move ever.

In general, go to where the action is. Your thinking on this is sound. There are smart people in Jaipur, but nothing like what you'll find in Mumbai or Bangalore.

Best of luck to you.
By saying that you are giving him permission.
Yeah. Me too. The css selector is quite convenient. The only problem is that I need to pick the selector set for each website I need to scrape, and there are tens of them, which makes the work itself time-consuming...
As a kid in the 90s and earlier 2000s, I had always understood "cracking" to be a specific subset of broader "hacking," be it of the "white hat" or "black hat" or "grey hat" variety. Specifically, developing "cracks" for locked software was how I had always understood the term "cracking." It involved a decent understanding of the Win32 API, assembly, and SoftICE to do effectively. That's what I think of when I hear the term "cracker" or "cracking." Has this activity taken on a new name?
The points the author raised were all opinion and don't require refutation.

The two footnotes, which I assumed might be links to further information, were just more opinions.

Can you (or the author) provide links to hard data that assert the authors opinion as valid, or should the entire article be based as an as attack on Android (note, not just competitors to iOS, specifically Android)?
This is an issue with most CSS pre-processors: they make nesting easy to use in CSS, but the generated CSS usually results in sometimes extremely long selector strings that it makes it a nightmare to override styling in your media queries. I tend to try and not nest where possible and if I do, I keep it to a maximum of two levels, anything more specific and you're creating problems and extra work for yourself.
> Because, in some respects, C-corps would then become more like S-corps, in that a significant amount of untaxed income would flow through as dividends to shareholders where it would now be taxed at the normal income rate.

Some respects yes, but not in one important aspect: With an S-Corp, the income must flow on an annual basis.

If you removed C-Corp taxation, there would be no reason to have an S-Corp. You can just leave the net gains in the C-Corp (tax-free!) and take it out whenever you want.
A closely related problem was the basis of a dissertation I wrote for my honours year. At the time I felt I had discovered a reliable way to track legitimate visits to websites by participating users.

Upon subsequent review it transpired that I was wrong. Given the primitives of HTML, Javascript and HTTP, I don't believe you can produce a robust tracking scheme, whether for advertising or for any other purpose. You need to add additional steps or software over and above the basics.

That latter observation is the basis of a new design which I am currently, in order to start brawls in certain circles, in the process of patenting.

I'm happy to forward my dissertation to interested persons via email, check my profile.
> Google was terrified that Apple would end up ruling the mobile space. So, to help in the fight against the iPhone at a time when Google had no mobile foothold whatsoever, it was decided that Google would buy Android. And Android would be open source.

This is blatantly false. Google bought Android in 2005, two years before the iPhone was announced.
Maybe you misunderstood me. What I meant was that they were still controlled, prescription drugs during that time. They weren't available over the counter.

You article supports that with the quote: "mainly iatrogenic"
Totally agree with you for linux i too preferred Thinkpad.
That statement is entirely incorrect.
http://www.tech-thoughts.net/2012/12/smartphone-market-share...