skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is really cool. For me, most of my data is "in the cloud" now. Important and frequently-accessed project files are in Dropbox, code is on Github, and most of my music is either streamed from the web in Spotify or my actual library is stored/streamed via iTunes Match. Because of this, I actually don't have a considerable amount of data to keep backed-up, and a lightweight non-time-machine solution like this looks perfect. I tried rsync before but never got into a solid routine.

I've become obsessed with the "12factor" app approach everywhere in my digital life, so that if a device ever disappeared, was stolen, or died, I could get a replacement fully operational without any problems. Like an app-server dying, just launch a new one and it will bootstrap itself.

I'm kinda crazy with my new "homelab" and started it off with an old 2U Poweredge I got on eBay for about $200. It's cheaper than a Synology/Drobo, has room for 6 drives, and the dual quad-core processors + 16GB of RAM is pretty cool too. It's running FreeNAS right now in a VM with a 3TB ZFS pool. I've created an AFP share that appears to my mac as Time Machine and over my gigabit-network it does a pretty fast backup. I really like the FreeNAS software. It's open-source, runs on FreeBSD, and the UI/admin tool is built in Django.
Windows 1.01 feels much closer to Mac Classic than Windows 3.1 does. (Button appearance, close button on left, menus must be held down to stay open, "Get Info" instead of "Properties".)
About 10 years ago the journal "Science" ran a cover story called "The soft Science of Dietary fat". If you have access to back issues through a library (sadly it's paywalled), go pull it and read it. Your mind will be blown at how thin the evidence is for many dietary recommendations. We know shockingly little about how our bodies actually work.
I'd recommend Peter Schiff or Max Kaiser for an interesting look into the Fed's QE policy minus Mainstream Media hype/

The problem with the FED, and every Keynesian economist is that they think the US will indefinitely be the world currency reserve, and that 5,000 years of gold based monetary policy is less stable than the post war economics that have given us rising inequality, lowering employment, indefinite QE, China calling for a de-Americanized world, and an interest rate ceiling of 1% (look it up, Bernanke said it!) that was the bottom rate of Greenspan.

I just love when current economists tell me I'm naive, and that government debt isn't the same a debt debt... Or that there isn't a borrowing limit. The limit, is when other governments stop buying your currency. See China-Australia trading deal, China's ease on buying bonds, and look up an interesting theory on how Japan will soon stop buying US bonds, due to it's self-inflicted inflationary policy, which will force it do invest in it's own money supply soon.
I dont understand why everyone feels obligated to let people into their lives who have little to no meaning, and is embarrassed by being honest and removing them.

If you didnt lead the person on, why not say something like "Hey, I really reserve that for personal friends and family."
If they seem a put off, invite them over for dinner sometime, you may find that the irl interaction gets you a need friend, and if they dont accept, then you get exactly what you were looking for.
Ask HN: What are some services that lets you sell digital goods online easily?
I am looking for some services that lets one sell digital goods(templates/ebooks) online easily & quickly without the need to setup a website. It should have option to send earnings through paypal or any other payment method through which I can get money in an Indian bank.
Great news for bitcoin owners.
After clicking on 'schedule now'...

"All interviews are 30 minutes long over Skype, Google Hangouts, or phone (customer's choice). After the interview, you will receive written feedback and ways to improve."

So, it's like a practice interview.
>Science pays itself off in the long term but in the short term it is a pretty bad investment.

Respectfully, that statement doesn't make sense. (Bear with me.)

Whether an investment is good or bad is orthogonal to whether the returns manifest in the short or long term:
any calculation of investment return will discount value that we have to wait for.

Maybe you mean that the payoffs don't come in the short term. But, at a societal level, so what? As long as the expected payoff (appropriately discounted) is large enough, that's what matters.

That is my objection to FD3SA's comment that "Science has never payed off as a logical financial investment."
and my objection to FD3SA's comparision to art.

Just because science's financial payoff is long term does not mean it isn't a good investment. To confuse the two issues is illogical, in an important way - which is what I'm trying to object to in FD3SA's comment.

I'd accept the argument that it is difficult to capture privately the return from fundamental science. That might be a reason why much science has been government funded. But, again, that's a different issue.

Governments should continue putting money into science because it is a good investment - it has a high expected return, over the long term.
And, in fairness, substantial public money, globally, is still invested on this basis.

>In the current economy we favour short term gain hence why science is in decline.

How our economy is managed in the short term is a different issue from whether the long term expected return of science is positive.

Maybe you mean that the way our economy is currently managed, it doesn't make sense for private actors to do science. But that's a totally separate issue from whether the societal return is positive. Almost regardless of how the economy is structured in the present, if science has a high enough long term return, its still a good investment, at a societal level.

Someone could argue that funding art has not produced meaningful financial gain - if they were very 'practically oriented' (for want of a better term) - but the same argument would not apply to science which has produced huge returns.

Even today, there is a massive delta between the funding science and arts gets - find me the arts' equivalent of NASA or CERN - because the long term return of science is recognised.
Because the real world isn't like that.

Facebook treats friendship as something binary. You're friends or you're not. Friendships don't work that way, though. You don't usually wake up and suddenly become "not friends" with someone. You drift apart one minute at a time. Maybe someone moves, gets married, has kids. Someone else moves. Someone gets divorced, switches jobs, goes to graduate school on the other side of the world. By the end of all this, someone who you once spent time with every day is not really a part of your life anymore, but you can't really point to a moment when "it" happened.
I am torn how I feel about ads.

It seems that they work for web and app publishers, because it's a way to collect micropayments, while making people feel like they are not really paying anything. Instead of asking someone to micropay you $0.001, you ask them to waste brain cycles to tune out the ad + cause some increased chance that they'll overpay for a brand name later. This might end up being more expensive than the payment would have been.

I must admit I would behave the same way. If you gave me a way to pay $5 / month that would be split among the sites I visit based on the pageviews I generate, I probably would not do it. I wonder if there would a way for such a system to be set up, so that it could offer something more than just installing AdBlock would. I doubt it, but would be happy to be wrong.

It seems that ads are the only realistic way for this to work for publishers, while adding an unfortunate mental tax for everyone not savvy enough to install AdBlock. I hope one day we will come up with a solution.
I stumbled upon this post recently and I love it. It summarises very nicely my own feelings.

I went down the path of exploring HATEOS and Collection+JSON and it all started to feel like enterprise architecture style over complication for very little benefit.
To elaborate... I suppose it's more about being the person with the most wealth, and you are actually causing a net motion of wealth away from everyone's pockets and toward yourself.
> you have options such as commodities, non-US currencies, and hard assets like real estate.

True, except that buying and selling of these is taxed. If the govt. had said, "buy and sell as much glass as you want, and you won't get taxed for its trade", I's switch to glass in a heartbeat.
> existing money becomes worth less over time, then you can simply continue to print more money

Only, the act of printing more money. deepens the problem of your currency losing value. The US thinks it's impervious to inflation, but many including myself see it simply postponing the inflationary event, which will most likely coincide with a currency crisis.
I found this video to be quite helpful in explaining what I believe you are describing:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=iFDe...
Absolutely no discussion of inflation is complete without recognition of the fact that inflation and inflation expectations are at historically low levels[1] right now. Economists aren't arguing that we should inflate our way out of debt--they are arguing that we should return to the historical norm. Of course, it's possible that these economists are secretly just pushing inflation as the "hidden tax" we're all up in arms about. But I find this unlikely. I find it far easier to believe that most economists actually believe that moderate inflation is good for the economy.

Why do economists believe this? Prices are sticky, and some prices are stickier than others. Prices for labor are especially sticky, which means that when growth expectations fall, it's very difficult to decrease wages, which in turn makes it difficult for supply and demand of labor to balance. In the Cliff Note version, inflation helps because people are willing to take real pay cuts when they're disguised as a nominal pay increase. There's a vicious cycle during a recession, where falling output causes the price level to fall, which in turn causes more imbalance in the labor market.

It's important to recognize that the standard argument for inflation has literally nothing to do with "the government printing money to pay for things." Does the US government make money from seignorage? Yes, it does. Is it a significant source of income? No, not in the context of US government spending or revenue--it's roughly $30 billion dollars a year. Are these crazy inflationary economists suggesting policies that would increase seignorage to a significant level? No, they're not.

Finally, most of these arguments are disputed by the so-called "Austrian school" of economics. It's important to recognize that this school is much, much, much more popular with laymen than with professional economists. This doesn't mean that the school's arguments are wrong, but it does raise questions about why the school's arguments which seem so utterly convincing to so many people, don't manage to gain many converts among people who research the subject professionally. Once again, I don't find "conspiracy" a particularly good argument.

[1] http://www.clevelandfed.org/research/data/inflation_expectat...
This is great, here's hoping it spreads like wildfire on facebook!
All these features, and Reversi!
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tGvHNNOLnCk
No, Hotspot 2.0 (and its underlying standard, 802.11u) are focused on enabling a mobile device to automatically “discover” APs that have a roaming arrangement with the user’s home network and then securely connect.

Multiple [E|B]SSIDs (which I co-invented, and patented about 14 years ago) are fundamentally different. Hotspot 2.0 requires client changes, whereas multiple SSID does not.
Come on, you only need to have been alive for the last 10 years to see wages go up.

Minimum wage where I live is 80% higher today than 10 years ago. Average wages are much higher too, though by a lesser percentage.

Here's an inflation adjusted chart of American wages, you'll see that wage increases have actually outpaced inflation slightly...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_US_household_income...

Edit - some more charts for you:
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...

Sorry, numbers don't lie.
Glad to see a shout-out for Ronald Solomon. His group theory course was probably my favorite math class. That's more about the material than him; we just worked our way through the first part of Rotman. But he sure didn't do anything to wreck it.

E.g., there was the time before class started that for some reason I went to board and led the team in classifying finite groups up to order 60. He just paused at the door when he saw that, smiled, and didn't start class until we were done.

(Note: The reason that could be done in a few minutes is that for the purposes of the exercise, prime numbers are trivial, and so are integers that are the product of two distinct primes. That didn't leave a lot of other cases to worry about.)
What world leaders do we currently spy on and how?
They need to sell you skimmed milk so they can also sell the fat as ice cream, butter, and cream.
Is Glenn Greenwald the Future of News?
As there seems to be a lot of interest in emulators in the browser, here's my effort:
I ported an emulator for classic Mac and IBM PC to the browser.

Mac System 7 Demo: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/

Windows 3.0 Demo: http://jamesfriend.com.au/pce-js/ibmpc-win/

IBM PC doesn't have mouse support... Yet. For Mac OS it's writing the mouse position directly into memory, but I've yet to add that hack for Windows.
I am really enjoying a lot of the retro things being posted recently. Sadly, they miss out some of the details. Like Elite being playable at 4 MHz, but really hard at 25 MHz, because that's how clocks worked then, and that's what the turbo button did. (It was a de-turbo button, turning your machine into a slow machine for compatibility. If it was connected, that is.)

And this makes me wonder about the Wayback machine. I can retrieve an old web page, but can I recreate the experience of posting to that site? Is anyone archiving the various social network sites code, so that the Future People can recreate the experience of Friendster or Facebook or Myspace? Or are the Future People going to have to guess by looking at screenshots and videos?

One of the first (perhaps the first?) commercial games for Windows was "Balance of Power". I think it either came with a weird runtime version of Win 1.0, or a voucher to get it, for people running dos.

http://theodor.lauppert.ws/games/bop.htm
Even better, Zork: http://jsmachines.net/disks/pc/games/infocom/zork1/

And it appears to save your state between runs, which is nice.
Every fiat currency in history has failed.

http://www.caseyresearch.com/editorial.php?page=articles/tho...

What makes the US$ so special?

And each time, people go back to something tangible to call money. That's usually gold or silver. Not that they're as easy to use as money or anything. That's why gold backed currencies tend to make sense (even though they too are not perfect).

People working at minimum wage would laugh at your "wages historically track inflation" argument.
Hemhaus: Drawable, Luminous Apparel
> All of these implicit value transmissions are harmful to audiences, but the effects tend to be distant in time or space

Well I see harmful effects now. The word "consumers" for one. Children being manipulated for profits. Over-sexualization. Creating the idea that things will make you happy, and make this one of the most popular concepts in society. Dividing people through the message of "Individuality", even though that only really means buying things your neighbor wants.

> I've always found it interesting that prior to us paying for services with our private data, we paid for it with our attention.

And now we pay with both our private data, and our attention, as both are extremely related when you want to either control, convince, or confuse someone.
In exchange for that piece of paper (promising money later), you have given me money now. The difference in what you have given me and what will be repaid is interest. It is the price of money and its purchasing power transferred through time, and it is the reward for lending.

Now imagine your scenario where you go with your saved money looking for borrowers (people willing to write you that promissory note). But no one is willing to write you that promissory note, because the banking system is willing to lend to them whatever they want with a value of X so low that you find it not worth the risk. In fact the value of X is presently less that the pace of inflation (negative real interest rates).

So now all the baby-boomers with their life savings can't earn a penny on it while bankers with printed fiat front run them in the money market.

Inflation may be good for those excessively leveraged in debt, but it is equally bad for all those who have saved and are investing their earnings. It perversely rewards the over indebted and punishes the prudent saver.

Interest rates ideally should be set by the market. In times of excess capital to invest, rates would be low. In times of capital tightness, rates would rise. In this way rates are a measure of the health and state of the capital and investment markets. Interest rate mechanisms are now so completely corrupted that there is not market mechanism left. Rates are not a measure of the economy any more, they are miss-set centrally and then the entire market distorts around them.
I have not tried the service yet. But I really like idea. In our startup we cannot afford designer and I do most design work (with the help of themeforest and such). Often I just would like an opinion of an experienced designer to see that I did not miss anything obvious. Hopefully this will be usefull.
Link-backup does this as well, plus it knows how to build hard links to old backups even when directory structure or filenames change, effectively de-dup support. It does this by building a content addressable index on the destination filesystem that backup trees hard-link against.

http://www.scottlu.com/Content/Link-Backup.html
Facebook can be the place to share programming stuff
This is something I have used non-technical or non-smartphone owning people start to use, it is a bit confusing.
Run Mac OS System 7 in your browser
OpenBSD. Stable as a slab of granite and pretty much just stays out of my way.
Calc is the most interesting item here in my opinion and the browser support.
http://caniuse.com/calc

I'd kill for the ability to do variables in CSS like LESS and SCSS.
Sure, then it will only be a $1000 an interview.
"It's one of the most basic rules of growing a company that pursuing short-term gains (1-2 years) with risky maneuvers, directly translate into long-terms losses in the 10-fold numbers of the short term gains."

That may or may not be true, but my basic position is that I want to do business with people who don't care whether dodgy practices will or will not make money in the short, medium, or long term, they have scruples that outweigh their venality.
I'd say that it isn't to mislead someone, but to allay their feelings. It's out of kindness and not malice that's for sure.

I like this comment, I think it explains why it's not as simple as being honest: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624928
Some more, fairly randomly chosen: Peter Norvig (USC->Berkeley->Google), Chris Lattner (Illinois->Apple, LLVM), Daniel J. Bernstein (Illinois, qmail/djbdns), Donald Knuth (Stanford, LaTeX), Hadley Wickham (Rice, ggplot2), the whole PLT Scheme/Racket team, etc.
By the way, for those who believe wages don't track inflation, they do.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Household_income_in_the_United_...
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Median_US_household_income...

Argue about the merits of inflation all you want, but I see a ton of 'facts' being thrown around which simply aren't supported by historical numbers...
If we really think that it's not something to be proud of, we could stop calling these people "growth hackers" and start calling them spammers.

Edit: to clarify, "these people" refers to the type of people the parent was complaining about, who use deception and dark patterns, not to all people working on growth in general. Making the distinction is what I'm arguing for.
Taking a test is better than studying, even if you just guess
Questions are a burden to others; answers a prison for oneself.
While I don't disagree in principal I'd wager to say that LinkedIn wouldn't have seen the success they have without using these tactics.
It seems like the solution to this is fairly simple. Use some statistical or machine learning method to figure out the probability that a certain thing is true using the information we know about it, like what journal it was published in, the results of replications, maybe even stuff like how crazy the result seems or the experience/reputation of the scientists, etc. There is a ton of data to work with, on top of the actual data itself.

You could predict with decent accuracy how probable a study is to turn out to be true or false. Then you can use that information to decide whether it would be worthwhile to do more studies.
http://www.advisorperspectives.com/dshort/updates/Household-...

Numbers don't lie.

Fiat currencies have failed because empires and nations have failed. A fiat currency always depends on a guarantor - someone who guarantees its value, usually through projection of military and economic power.

So of course currencies will rise and fall with nations. But the idea of currency has always persisted, from ancient times.
Because it is simple enough to teach to 4-6th graders.
Well you know there are also really great/impressive ways to growth hack, such as Noah Kagan who grew Appsumo with his really cool emails that people loved or the guy who made Dropbox go viral by giving 250MB additional data for each new person that signed up.
My (layman's) understanding of it is that central banks seek to keep inflation within a target range; in Australia this is between 2 and 3 percent [1].

The primary tool to manage inflation is interest rates, however interest rate movements also have other effects, positive and negative, so it's not as simple as turning on a tap.

It's important not to let inflation get too high because that makes new investment unattractive, the cost of living go up, and retirement savings worth less.

[1] http://www.rba.gov.au/inflation/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Warrant_canary
Life is never cut and dry. You make friends, you lose touch, you have new friends.

You may even have a friend who just comments way too much, and it becomes annoying.
Python vs Perl vs Lua - speed comparison
Well. The original question author did ask for "proof" that people get more stuff done during a US phd vs a UK one.
I think that one of the claims in the parent was that the feds can just hand the NSL to the data centre provider or whatever and monitor all the traffic that way -- they don't necessarily need compliance from the person running the service.
Austrian school not holding much weight with academics is like wondering why creationism doesn't hold much weight with academics. Lots of things can be explained with creationism, but it doesn't mean it's right. Many Austrian economists rail against the use of quantitative models and such. But without them, how can you measure the efficacy of your policies? Faith that the policy works... But most academics like to be able to test things.

I'm also not saying creationism isn't right. I can't prove anything.
Recent history would seem to indicate the US can somehow simply buy their own debt. It seems impossible to me but its been working so far.
Mild inflation promotes growth by encouraging money to be put to use rather than sit idly in savings. Banks make more aggressive loans to keep yields high.