skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
No. Deflation is even worse for economy than inflation is. That's why gold was abandoned. In fact, ancient China had a long history of struggling in awful situations caused by lacking copper/silver/gold for producing enough coins to feed the booming economy system, while the coins were either smuggled to neighbor countries or remelted by domestic speculators.

I propose a new digital currency be created according to certain eigenvectors[1] and allometry[2] features of trading network flows or simply the internet traffic flows.

The progress of Complex Network[3] theory may tell us more about how to build a solid algorithm for this kind of "evolving coins" to make them decentralized and evolve along with real economic activities.

I've been investigating the theory in part time and I dare say somebody with sufficient knowledge is able to figure out a model eventually.

IMO, bitcoin is the start of inventing a better currency, not the end.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Centrality
[2]http://www.nature.com/scitable/knowledge/library/allometry-t...
[3]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complex_network
Abstracts should have an introductory sentence, and they quite often are a one paragraph summary of the work.
How to Read a Scientific Paper (About a Scientist With a Worm in His Mouth)
[HN]Yapsody, Watch this [video]
They kind of are, the same that is. A reserve currency (such as the one called out here in the article) is a sort of 'place holder' currency. But to be a valid place holder it has to have some structure against which to balance, a connected monetary policy if you will.

Look no further than the Euro to see how challenging it is to manage a currency. And note that the countries in the EU are co-operating. Imagine how hard it would be if Greece or Spain was actively trying to siphon money out of Germany because of treaty obligations. If a recipe can be figured out for managing the Euro, then there will be a call for doing the same thing world wide, but until then its just a free poke at the US for being stupid.
I am genuinely curious: if I carry an iPhone everywhere, why do I need to carry a flashlight, too?
Haitz's law is interesting. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haitz%27s_law

Is it possible to calculate the theoretical maximum number of photons that can be produced from a fixed small electron source?

Just curious how close we are to maximum theoretical efficiency. 50% ? 80% ?
I'm struggling to feel sympathy here:

a) He owns a top-of-the-line phone, yet complains about being poor.

b) He owns a phone that makes it trivially easy maintain backups in the cloud, and yet didn't think that his livelihood was worth backing up.

c) There's no real point to this post, yet it was published and submitted to HN.

d) He attempts to egocentrically link this post to his own humility.

Nobody deserves to have their property stolen, and it sounds like Peacock is in a particularly tight bind, but this is hardly enlightening journalism or something "that good hackers would find interesting".
That area had been stagnant[1] for at least as long as the USA existed.

[1]http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_from_St._Petersburg_to_...
Well, it's nice to able to light up a room when you need to. But to each his own.
The population of the San Francisco-Oakland-San Jose metropolitan Bay Area is 8.3 million [1]. The population of the Baltimore-Washington DC metropolitan area is 9.3 million [2]. That doesn't seem that significant.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Jose-San_Francisco-Oakland...

[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baltimore%E2%80%93Washington_m...
There’s a distinction here between choosing and tinkering.

This is the crux of the argument. That choice is bad, and the people who like Android actually like tinkering, and don't really like customization, and it's just wrong.

I personally use my phone more than any other non-work device, and I love having it personalized to make everything I do often easy to access, and put everything else to the background.

I chose the best phone for me out of the very few real contenders on the market, I chose to replace my OS with Cyanogenmod, chose Nova Launcher, chose my layout and shortcut gestures, and chose my default keyboards as Google's English and Japanese keyboards. I haven't touched any of these for a couple of months, with the exception of replacing a couple of the gestures.

Phone usage differs a ton between individuals, and I'm glad I didn't lock myself into a one-size-fits-all solution.
I would like to discuss my ideas with someone who, like me, is interested in dating apps and who can see the problems of building them in a technical way.
So, why not eschew those categories altogether and reject them outright?

It seems to me they are too, well, mushy to be really useful.
One startup strives to make Iron Man's J.A.R.V.I.S. a reality
I think Linux stood a real chance with the introduction of Ubuntu a long time ago. Graphical package management was enormous, coupled with Gnome and a very simple installation. But stagnation came very quickly. That distribution is 10 years old and all the changes to it only added more fluff, more bulk, annoying notifications, uglier windows, sprites and mini icons all over the place.

It looks the exact same except worse. I'm sure that some improvements have been made behind all the fluff. But they're ones you can't see and I'm having trouble thinking back remembering any problems earlier.

The problem wasn't lack of consistency or choice. It was like going from Windows 7 to Windows 8. Now I can only see myself using Linux as a stepping stone or rescue procedure for failed machines. I think we might be off topic though as hardware and software are very different things.

This article is about hardware, badly titled though it is.
As an Apple user, and former Apple engineer I disagree...

I don't think one perfect solution exists, but I also don't think pushing a lot of decisions to the user is a good idea. The fallacy is thinking the goal is to provide a solution for all users. Stake out a position make choices, be the best product for the users that you work for, and let someone else cater to the other users.

I don't personally like Windows Phone, but I think it is a great platform that has a vision and has made an interesting set of choices. It simply does not hit my specific needs.

On the other hand I think Android is a just a confusing mess to use, and I say this as someone who is fairly familiar with its innards and has been hired to write Android firmware code.
> They do care if it turns into boingboing

Why? Really why? I'm buying a certain number of bits per second. They don't need to know nor should care about the content of those bits.

If they oversubscribe and sell bandwidth "bursting" up to X, but only a small fraction of X for a sustained period then they should have to advertise that clearly and not claim "X bandwidth connection". Rather than burying it in a TOS.
Many people starve to death (among other things) in the ensuing confusion... Either you're very angry at the world, or you're just a troll.
I have no idea what the heck the author is talking about with that point. The question is either too simple, in that you can just itemize all the ways we are different (just so happens that "consciousness" - #5 - would be a pretty big bullet point, though we can just generalize and say our DNA makes us human), or nonsensical. Case in point:

>how/why humans are so much more intelligent than other animals

Because we have three times more neurons than the closest competition. Why do we have so many neurons? Because there was a selective pressure acting upon our ancestors.

Furthermore, WE ARE ANIMALS. We have certain special traits unique to us, but every species has something special about it.
I'd like to know if there's some fundamental limit that makes it impossible to achieve superconductivity at high temperatures in any material.
If you ask me, you don't. If you're asking Jeff? He answered that in the article.

> I also flirted with the idea of dropping the standalone flashlight and relying on my smartphone camera flash as a flashlight, but in my testing smartphones make weak flashlights.
>>Does it really matter if you have a billion dollars if you have a tumor in your pancreas?

It does matters a lot if you don't have a billion dollars while you have a tumor in your pancreas.
Only with a judge's approval -- which I doubt would be forthcoming -- particularly if the putative groom sat glumly through the hearing playing video games.
I think #6, the question about sleep and dreams, is especially interesting.

On another NPR broadcast, I heard a researcher talk about how our bodies make up for sleep we lose. It's not like owing a debt to the bank and paying it back all at once, he said. If we go days without sleep and then crash, we won't quite cognitively recover from the lost sleeping time - even if we sleep for many more hours than usual.

One biological explanation, he said, is that the need to make up for many hours of lost sleeping time has not been a significant factor in evolution; modern humans are the first species that intentionally deprives itself of sleep for long periods of time.

I thought it was fascinating to think about the concept of humans evolving to go longer periods without sleep and to cognitively recover by "cashing in" on rest, so to speak.

I'm sorry that I can't remember the author's name to provide more concrete details; if anyone else also heard the talk, please share a link if possible.
I read this article and hoped to come to the comments finding support and encouragement for someone who was going through a rough time; I found 6 trolls criticizing the author for his choice of words and supposed financial decisions.

There are times to be critical and there are scientific studies that deserve to be nitpicked, but the story of a man learning to forgive despite being taken advantage of during a time of extreme hardship is not one of them.

There's more to life than bits and bytes; there's humanity, which is what we are really all building things for anyway.
I really don't agree with this Lesson 4: Let Other People Do the Programming.

I agree that you cannot micromanage it but you also have to pass it on to someone who is capable.

"However, keep in mind that the entire Indian subcontinent is learning Java. And that if Microsoft, Oracle, SAP, and Sun products simply worked and worked simply, half of the world's current IT workers would be out of a job."

The above point is true but the quality of code obviously leads to less bugs and security holes. I have had horror stories of my friends hiring coders in India. The work that was given back has been a mess and 90% of the time requires a whole rewrite.

Point - Just because it can be done doesn't mean it should.
I wish they'd stop saying "problems of the last century".

What's described in this article has never stopped being a major problem in many parts of the world.
It was a weird contrast. The photographs were beautiful. But the tone of the article was definitely biased against something about the Russian government's involvement in the economies of the places that were visited.

When I read the negative comments, I personally thought of many places I've been in the US (where I'm from) which reminded me of what I was reading. The comments about the Russian villages both seemed like they could be true and like they were a little hypocritical.
Islam is one of those things that is really hard to pigeonhole, due to the fact that since the 13th century, it has really ceased to be one brand. Muslims seem to all have their own ideas about what "Islam" is, but everyone still treats it as if it were a monolithic entity that can be characterized consistently as thus or so.

It can't. It's just too decentralized and scattered. I can argue that the actions of a mob in India that stones a young girl to death for having the audacity to report being raped are due to their culture, not Islam itself, while the same mob will be more than willing to ascribe their own actions completely to Islam.

In the meantime, the rest of us really have no choice but to regard all Muslims with some suspicion. And I think that a lot of us need to come to terms with the truth of the matter that, until "Muslim" becomes, at the very least, something of a known quantity, there really is nothing racist, prejudicial, or wrong with doing so.
The United States divided into city-states
It is a truth that we don't deserve anything we have, here in the upper class of the developed world. If we believe that in general believe have approximately the amount they deserve to have, then that would also mean that people who have nothing deserve nothing. For what fault of theirs? For being born somewhere poor, somewhere dirt poor. And if we don't deserve what we have, then we're obligated to help those who deserve to have more than they do.
I don't understand, if he located the theif with Find My Phone, why wasn't law enforcement able to apprehend the perp?

I get the author is venting his frustrations at this. I know the feeling. It's a combination of infuriated and helpless, and that's just from having property that wasn't MINE stolen, let alone my own property. My sympathies there, btw. However I would like to know why the thief wasn't caught.
I have 3 monitors: a 23", a 27", and a 13" macbook air from left to right. I keep gmail open permanently on the 23", coding editor on the left half of the 27", coding output on the right half, and http://www.sublimedash.com on the macbook air.
A nerd is someone who gets utterly obsessed by a particular topic.

I usually bring this up when explaining to a fellow programmer that I'm a nerd but not a geek.

I believe this answers your question. Being a self-proclaimed nerd, btilly clearly does, per his definition.
It's a fascinating question, but I don't see why it is one of the "10 most important questions in science".

>modern humans are the first species that intentionally deprives itself of sleep for long periods of time.

Is that correct? It feels wrong. Plenty of species will endure all kinds of stresses when it comes to survival.

From the article:
>Was Freud right about his theory that dreams are some sort of expression of repressed desires?

This one is easy. No. Dogs dream.
I understand.
Africa(-Americans) & Oakland can almost never catch a break either... trying to explain the imbalance is an uphill battle. If you only got your world-view from western-TV, you'd think America is paradise with perfect people, aside from blacks & mexicans. Everyone outside of it are savages not worthy of respect or consideration; perhaps a bit of pity though...
"Dean Shaw announced that the freshman class included students from 49 states—"We miss you, Arkansas"—and 66 countries."
From Arkansas here. Ouch.
nostalgia ain't what it used to be ;)
Eh, emotions are best left to another aggregator, if you're looking for more than bits and bytes, here seems like a bad place to fulfil that need.
Because financial situations change over time?
To answer your first question, TodoMVC (http://todomvc.com/) has a Meteor implementation: http://todomvcapp.meteor.com/

And for our Meteor book, we built a pretty standard forum/HN clone app called Microscope: https://github.com/DiscoverMeteor/Microscope

But I'm not sure what you mean by a Meteor app with a native client. Do you mean a native client that uses the DDP protocol (http://www.meteor.com/blog/2012/03/21/introducing-ddp) to communicate with a Meteor back-end? I haven't heard of that yet, but PiJS (http://pijs.io) uses DDP to do interesting things with the Raspberry Pi.
How delightfully nebulous and unspecific.
The Millennium Problems are not the biggest question in all of science. They are big questions in Mathematics.
I find it infuriating to read "the problem is choice".
The writer is offending freedom and all its prismatic facades.
If you just want source code reviewability you can use a restrictive license for the source. IIRC some vendors of sensitive software have done this.

FOSS or open source ode doesn't stop NSA infiltration though. See http://underhanded.xcott.com/ for some techniques...
I've fallen in love with Reveal.app - as an iOS developer, it's probably the most useful tool in my workflow. It and AppCode (an alternative IDE by JetBrains, far superior to Xcode) make me an order of magnitude more productive than I could otherwise be.
If participating in a technical discussion requires me to forget humanity, then to hell with all of this, I'm out.
It's just a blog post. It's not like he posted this to personally ruin anybody's day or Hacker News viewing experience.
> didn't think that his livelihood was worth backing up

Came here to make this exact point. Not to kick someone who's already down, but for god's sake people: If you do not do backups, your data is ephemeral.

There's only so many times one can hear sob stories about people losing all their un-backed-up data, especially from people who should know better, before one stops feeling all that sorry. Don't complain to me if you roll the dice and lose.
>The point of the post was about hatred and rejection of women in software engineering, and this comment was one example of it being a real thing, frequently denied all over HN.

Nope. It was a valid comment directed at a little PC warrior. Possibly from an unsavory character with malignant motives - as you keep repeating - but that isn't of interest. Further, my reply - from which your whole conversation with me spawns, and therefore constitutes the topic of this subthread (the one involving you and me) - was commenting on the reaction of people to the post itself which was a valid observation. Your contention that it is offensive and comes from someone you don't like is of no interest to me. The content of the post was not hateful toward women, even if the author is (itself dubious on a troll-filled Internet). Perhaps if you'd bothered reading what I say instead of firing off scattershot self-righteousness you'd have gotten somewhere in this thread.

>And when a bunch of HNers came in and said 'he didn't mean that, he was just trolling the stupid PC SJ types, I'm sure he wants women to be in software engineering ...

Please limit yourself to what I said in the parents, since that is what you are replying to. It's enough work to get you to read my own posts for comprehension without taking on the additional burden of defending other people in the thread who you _imagine_ share common ground with me.

>I'm sorry if I over generalised your habits from your behaviour. If you don't normally give the benefit of the doubt to people displaying bigoted behaviour, why did you do so in this case?

I don't agree that the post displayed bigoted behavior. The only reason to think the comment comes from a hatred of women is from information that you dug up. I'm not interested in digging up bullshit this guy might have said elsewhere, therefore there was no reason for me to think that's where it came from. I don't care if he's a _child molester_. He may or may not be any number of things.

The fact that you apologise for over-generalising shows that you missed the point, which is not that you affronted me by over-generalising, but that you destroyed the discussion and wasted my time by going on about my personality and the personality of the person who made the original post. And you're still doing it!
Do transponders have to be large? Obviously most current ones are made to fit avionics racks, but is there a reason why one couldn't be made as small as a cell phone?
Very, very good. I share the author's sentiments immensely, and he articulated these ideas much better than I ever could. However, the final lines bothered me:

>> When you deserve it, come back to us. Share your service with your peers and your children.

>>Then you'll be part of our family. Then you'll truly belong.

I don't know what it would ever mean to deserve the wealth and privilege that I have now. I want to do everything in my power to make sure that the injustices that have built history are righted.

To the extent that I can participate in righting wrongs rather than making them I can say to myself on my death bed, "I lead a good life", but will I ever deserve what I currently have? How would I ever know that?
I would think open-source, minus the "free software" bit, is good enough.

Freedoms 0 and 1, i.e. "freedom to run the program for any purpose" and "freedom to study how the program works, and change it to make it do what you wish" are reasonable. Given how software is taking on more and more critical functions, the days of closed-source software may one day seem quaint.

Freedoms 2 and 3, i.e. "freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor" and "freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements (and modified versions in general) to the public, so that the whole community benefits" appear more problematic.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Free_software#Definition
Racket isn't a Lisp. All of the Lisps have "Lisp" in their name, e.g MacLisp, Common Lisp, ZetaLisp, Interlisp, EuLisp, Elisp, etc.

Look at the conversation between kragen and lispm here [1].

Of course you can almost always informally call various Scheme dialects and Clojure "Lisps" (I do it all the time) because they draw very heavily from Lisps.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6068732
I completely agree that as a culture we are losing a lot of our traditional skill and craftsmanship.

But still, I can't shake the feeling like this is one of those "kids these days...get off my lawn" moments.
I know...isn't history a bitch. Sometimes being judged and accused is okay.
Sex and Marketing
Yes, this really is just a special case of one of the questions: "What is consciousness?" When we become entangled with a quantum system, why does our consciousness follow one path (apparently) and not another? If we can understand consciousness, then this is probably easy.
What happened to "Don't be evil?" I turned that off but the problem is you're never sure if you've actually handled something correctly because they make it so darn difficult.
We built https://kouio.com when Reader shut down - we've picked up a few thousand happy users since :-)
I REALLY think we're all tired of random people giving us yet another cookie to store...
Glad to hear you love it. I have been using it relentlessly for iOS 6 -> iOS 7 compatibility issues.
Extend that concept of choice to things like support for FLAC, mkv and a host of other formats. How is this a bad thing? The absence of these things is limiting, but having the choice is bad?

If choice is bad, why not prune the App Store and remove the multiple calendar apps, or the multiple memory mapping tools, navigation tools, etc - and allow one choice only.
Rise of the drone hobbyists
No, everything is a wear item. Any device exposed to the elements will see degradation of pretty much every component.
There is Objective DDP (https://github.com/boundsj/ObjectiveDDP) and a Java DDP Client (https://github.com/kutrumbo/java-ddp-client) although I haven't yet seen a finished product (i.e. a native app that talks to a Meteor app).

But it's certainly possible.
Do you think that only cost of traditional currencies are the resources that banks spend? What about the cost of the government that guarantees that the currency is worth anything? What about law enforcement that prevents money from being printed? What about costs of people that move and guard physical cash? What about the cost of fending of attack on your currency? What are the costs of having multiple currencies and exchanging it? What are the costs of additional risk to the people forced to operate with multimple currencies while doing business? I'm sure there are some costs of having traditional money that you are missing.
I'm pretty sure that's actually the point of Ghost. To strip away all the features that make WP bloated, and bring it back to simple blogs.