skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You countered your own argument.

If your house stays at $100k but there is 5% deflation. You made 5%. If your house is worth $100k but falls to $95k because of deflation, your networth has dropped, and your buying power has stayed the same.

In the first scenario you can do a happy dance, in the second scenario, if the house is 100% paid off you aren't out anything. If you have paid off 75% of the house you are behind, because the unpaid off portion of the home dropped in value, but the debt stayed the same.

This is why they try to keep inflation at 2-3% it means that debt decreased at that rate because your buying power for that financed amount has decreased effectively lowering the amount of debt.

Imagine you buy a house and pay only the interest. If inflation is at 7% and the interest is 3% you are ahead each year. I your interested is 3% and there is 3% deflation you are behind each year.
Awesome, can play gorillas in qbasic :D
When you make publishing a number of papers mandatory and tie it to tenure, it is inevitable that quality will suffer. The need is to rethink quantitative metrics and move to a more quality oriented one.
I wonder if this is related to there being an extensive "discussion" on Twitter a few days ago about ffi's LGPLv3 license. One thread to start from: https://twitter.com/bascule/status/393509979711213568 .. one of the concerns much later in the discussion seems to be how ffi changed from BSD to LGPL at some stage.
A Homeless Man and His BlackBerry
That great stuff and especially when writing after about two years of no posts on his blog.
> Another explanation for why survivors of childhood cancer would have a high rate of recurrence is that they were prone to getting cancer in the first place, and they carry that tendency into adulthood.

Don't take this as an expert opinion, but I lean slightly against that idea. For example, the linked fact sheet notes that young girls who are treated in the chest for hodgkin's lymphoma (one of the rare types of cancers that young people get) have an elevated lifetime risk of ordinary breast cancer. That's less of a "recurrence" and more of a "second cancer".

Relatedly, the types of cancer that young people get, and that old people get, aren't all that similar.
Social Media Gerrymandering
First off, I'm not sure Greenwald could stop writing. He seems pretty addicted to it.

Let's look at perhaps Greenwald's biggest article critical of a single individual in recent times, his roast (let's call it) of Sam Harris [1]. He starts by asserting that Harris "[has] increasingly embraced a toxic form of anti-Muslim bigotry masquerading as rational atheism" -- that "he and others like him spout and promote Islamophobia under the guise of rational atheism." He then goes on to observe that "Harris does far, far more than voice criticisms of Islam as part of a general critique of religion" and presents quotes by Harris himself. He explains that "Harris has used his views about Islam to justify a wide range of vile policies aimed primarily if not exclusively at Muslims, from torture [...] to steadfast support for Israel," that "Harris sided with the worst Muslim-hating elements in American society by opposing the building of a Muslim community center near Ground Zero." Greenwald writes: "In sum, he sprinkles intellectual atheism on top of the standard neocon, right-wing worldview of Muslims"...

Yes, he labels the rhetoric that Harris "spews" as "bile".. Yes, his own rhetoric is often of the pointed sort ("That is the Harris worldview: obsessed with bad acts of foreign Muslims, almost entirely blind to - if not supportive of - the far worse acts of westerners like himself"). But when it counts, his criticisms of people he disagrees with are usually maintain a careful composure, afaik.

In the comments section of his Guardian articles, it's a different story. "Do you know how to read?" from a month or so before Snowden is the example that sticks out in my mind. Wish he'd find another stress-relief activity.

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/apr/03/sam-har...
> I think it would be easier to convince people with no physics knowledge that a bowling ball falls faster than a golf ball. Intuitively, it seems that bowling ball should fall faster.

Do you have any reason to believe that their intuition is wrong? If the bowling ball and golf ball were both spheres, so they differed only in size and mass, the bowling ball would have a higher terminal velocity. The golf ball's dimples reduce its air resistance, and I have no idea how to calculate if they reduce it enough to let it have the same terminal velocity as the bowling ball.
This might explain some of it (not the original tweet but go much further down in the discussion with regards to how the licensing was changed): https://twitter.com/bascule/status/393509979711213568
I built a sports trivia app for iOS: http://bit.ly/winahat

The cool thing about it is I built an engine to scrape the web and APIs and keep generating thousands of new questions. Trivia games are fun but can get repetitive fast. I'm hoping to avoid that.

In progress is an android version, then venturing outside of sports.
Thanks for that, I'd assumed that would run afoul of some kind of click-jacking protection but fortunately it seems I was wrong :)
Anaconda is completely free to use. It is produced by a commercial entity, but it is completely free.
Thanks a lot for the reply. I'm actually really interested in learning more about IPv6 now for all those reasons you mentioned.
"It's one of the most basic rules of growing a company that pursuing short-term gains (1-2 years) with dodgy maneuvers"

They're just copying the people in the financial industry. And the people involved made very nice sums of money, so their intelligence was successfully used to their own personal benefit.

Maybe the stock runup has made it such that they think they're just squeezing the last few drops out of this before they fully cash out.

This is pure speculation of course, but I gather this scenario is a risk with any company that has a lot of hype and such employee exit paths.
Nov. 22, 1963: 50 years, and still no conspiracy
My first thought was that I'd love to run this myself. Not to spam, but to be able to skip Captchas.

That's a really sad thought.
Universal Artificial Intelligence
Read the article. It fairly clearly demonstrates that it is not nearly the risk factor it has been made out to be. Controversy is not science, and just because there is controversy does not make scientific results less valid.

On your second point, they are very much linked issues if X is something that does not need to be treated or prevented. That's what the article is really getting at: high cholesterol is not the primary risk factor for heart disease. They are correlated, sure, but there's not a causal link.

Saturated fat has been demonised since the 1970s when a landmark study concluded that there was a correlation between incidence of coronary heart disease and total cholesterol, which then correlated with the percentage of calories provided by saturated fat, explains Malhotra. “But correlation is not causation,” he says. Nevertheless, we were advised to “reduce fat intake to 30% of total energy and a fall in saturated fat intake to 10%.”

He points out that recent studies “have not supported any significant association between saturated fat intake and risk of CVD.” Instead, saturated fat has been found to be protective.

Seriously, read the whole article.
If there is any thread that might help comfort you about the pessimism sometimes found on HN, this is it.
I think you grossly underestimate the importance of the financial sector for London's economy. I've been watching the IT jobs market there for a long time. My estimate is that at least half of all IT jobs are directly or indirectly related to finance. I'm sure it's even more extreme in legal and some professional services.

Property prices do not simply depend on the number of people looking to buy. They are also determined by how much people are willing and able to pay. If you strip out the inflated salaries they pay in finance, it's going to trickle down to all other salaries and prices.

The financial sector employs large numbers of foreigners. If they leave, demand gets crushed. Also, let's not forget that London property isn't just bought to live in. It's also an investment for rich people from all around the world. If finance moves on, these investors will follow suit.
It's the standard, conventional wisdom, but it also misses some subtlety that Warren Buffett's tried to bring up a few time in Berkshire Hathaway annual reports:

Inflation isn't distributed equally. When the money supply rises, firms in strong bargaining positions with few substitutes are in the best place to raise prices, because their customers can't readily switch to competitors. So basically, Google will come out of it like a bandit, because they're the only game in town for search advertising, and their auction pricing means they don't have to take any active effort to raise prices. Walmart will come out of it pretty well, since in many communities they're the only game in town. Software engineers, skilled managers, and other workers with in-demand skills will do okay. The folks competing for all the unskilled labor positions? They're going to get screwed.

So it's only partially true that the poor benefit from inflation. They'll benefit from cheaper debt payments and possibly higher employment. But they're unlikely to see much of the added money supply in wages, and they're going to take it in the chin on prices.
I am using pdf.js with Firefox 27 Nightly on Ubuntu, and its rendering fine for me.
Gold is a commodity that is used as a defensive investment asset, that's very different to inflation.
Straight from the article:

Malhotra also points to the United States, where percentage calorie consumption from fat has declined from 40% to 30% in the past 30 years (although absolute fat consumption has remained the same), yet obesity has rocketed. One reason, he says, is that the food industry “compensated by replacing saturated fat with added sugar.”
Dropbox is definitely a case where a single person's vision was required to create a revolutionary product. Judging by the comments, leaving it to HNers as a group would have just resulted in a faster usb drive.
With this and the windows emulator in the spotlight[0], I feel that I should go ahead and link to Jason Scott's project to port MESS to the browser:

http://jsmess.textfiles.com/

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3375

http://ascii.textfiles.com/archives/3569

[0]: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6624554
Yes - they need to perform what's called a Man in the Middle Attack (MiTM) to inject HTML into your email.

Normally, your iPhone (and other clients) retrieve email from Gmail's servers using the IMAP protocol. To inject content, Linkedin setup a security profile which placed themselves in the middle so you connect via IMAP to their servers, they fetch the content using IMAP from Google, inject their content, and feed it back to you.

This is why the email is not permanently changed. Only changed en route to your iPhone.
Hi, I hacked this together, though most of the credit should go to Hampa Hug's very nice emulator[0]. I'm posting this now as I saw the neat Windows emulator project and figured today was a good day to talk about emulation :)

My reasoning for putting this together is that I think it's really important for people to learn from what's come before, and the web is the most accessible place to do that. I've written a post[1] that goes into the rationale a bit further, and also addresses the legal aspect of this demo. Ultimately I would love for there to be an interactive online museum of personal computer history.

I'd also like to get a demo of NeXTSTEP working; for the OS which begat the world wide web to be running inside the browser would be pretty neat.

[0] http://www.hampa.ch/pce/

[1] http://jamesfriend.com.au/why-port-emulators-browser
It's the outfit. If he looked like Spider Jerusalem everyone would be fine but he looks like a congressman so people expect more politesse than they get.

I guess it's too much to expect Julian Assange levels of stagecraft from everybody.
University of Chicago and the other "freshwater" schools show that non-Keynesian schools can get funded.
One of the questions I have is why/how no one came to think of the back end issues at early stage of the development. (I assume a $350 mil project involves a lot of experienced people.)

I have seen some infographic on how large the code base is and at the beginning of the parent article, I thought the guy is going to argue that the code base is huge because they had to circumvent/workaround the back end problems.
Agree. Impactjs is excellent. The documentation is fantastic and its well laid out and while you pay for it its worth the money.

Be sure to check if its applicable to whatever you want to create though. You will get a massive boost if you are looking to write a side scroll-er as that style of game is very well supported in it.
The difference here is you get digital images, so you can push the hack further and do any kind of App you'd like (for instance taking multiple picture while moving the object and reconstitute a big picture of the full object, or whatever you can think of)

Of course it may be possible to attach a camera to the microscope you show, it just seems more complicated.
Clearly meant as a rhetorical question, what do you really mean by it?

How many auditors caught the problems with Worldcom, Enron or Tyco? Extremely small minorities did, and yet people don't question whether 'accounting works, but they may question the incentives for companies to provide honest books to auditors, and the compensation awarded independent auditors.

Let's say that you need someone to think that it will be sunny tomorrow, and you believe that it will be sunny tomorrow. The meteorologist's forecast is for 20% chance of a thunderstorm. You tell your investor that meteorology is not a science. The real probability of a thunderstorm, given the conditions and the most accurate model possible is 18%, or maybe 4% or 93%.

What does any of this mean? Have you ever heard someone say that economics is not a science? Unfailingly, it comes from someone who has a bias toward a specific conclusion, and has no method explaining how they arrived at their conclusion other than something like "common sense".

There was a renaissance for economic data collection in the wake of the 1929 crash, and the collapse of classical economics (How could the same capital equipment and human capital in 1932 produce about 48% of the industrial output it had in early 1929?). That was when most of the data collection programs were created, and the industrial classifications that were only revised again in the late 90s and early 2000s.

It is about as difficult to imagine the world of 7B people without modern economics as it is without integrated circuits or container ships or antibiotics or industrial and agricultural advances of the past 70 years.

Often in medicine, advances have met strong resistance from the respected people and overwhelming expert consensus (a very long list including how to prevent Pellagra, Yellow Fever, stomach ulcers, etc), and yet that is not a sane argument for abandoning medical research funding, condemning the practice of medicine as unscientific, or for choosing folk or "traditional" remedies instead.

And yet, that is what has happened over the past six years. To understand the value of this proposition regarding inflation requires an understanding of the mechanisms and justifications they describe, and then an attempt to assess the most likely outcomes of a course of action. In other words engagement, not people throwing up their hands and stating that it is impossible to choose any actions as better than any other, as though defeatism and fatalism are wise.
The problem with the cash pile, and also with other companies' large cash piles, is that a lot of the cash, maybe even the majority, is held overseas. Hence there will be an almighty tax bill if it is brought back to the USA.
Are they? It's been long enough since I started that I'd forgotten. Still, 50 points is 5 upvotes, which is not difficult to attain quite quickly -- I earned >400 rep in my first two days with an account on Super User, and while that's not typical and took some effort on my part to achieve, a mere 50 points shouldn't be all that hard to manage by comparison.
Biological Limits of Human Perception
I don't know about the cost of healthcare or college in the US, but those are affected by other non-inflationary factors.

Eg: political changes, supply and demand, changes to the definition of the service. i.e. Imagine the difference in what treatments are covered by healthcare today as opposed to say 25 years ago.

Don't forget the "new money" also finds a home through population increases and export of actual money (black and white market).
I think the top comments there show how sometimes the HN folks can get caught up in the details.

I did a show HN today for a restaurant analytics concept and people commented on the ugliness of the launch page and over pixels.
Spent a good 10 minutes playing with Kid Pix, having not heard of it before. Turns out it has a fun history - it was designed to be usable by a 3-year-old: http://red-green-blue.com/kid-pix-the-early-years/
Thanks for the pointers to the comments. They're interesting to read, just like the replies to them.
> I also note that that page says "in general, the lifetime risk of a second cancer is highest in people treated for cancer as children or adolescents", which is definitely in harmony with the idea that radiation therapy looks better and better the less time you expect to live after getting it.

Well one potential explanation is that any treatment you get during childhood usually carries a higher risk than on adults. I haven't seen data suggesting that radiation treatment in adults increase the risks of cancer, and by the way radiation is now extensively used in many diagnostic tools and it is generally accepted that low dose of radiations are harmless or even beneficial (while the media keeps screaming that any level of radiation causes cancer, which is nonsensical).
Yeah totally. I swear there's been captchas that were unsolvable (to my eye) lol.
http://searchcode.com/

Its a source code search engine with experimental regex support. Why is it cool? For me its because search is something I am interested in and indexing the web is cost prohibitive. This way I get to play with indexing hundreds of gigabytes of code without breaking the bank. Its also useful to show off when doing job interviews.
Internet archive link to the demo/screencast: https://web.archive.org/web/20070407145348/http://www.getdro...
I'd say that the Shirky Principle also fits the bill here:

http://www.kk.org/thetechnium/archives/2010/04/the_shirky_pr...
Yep. My first thought was, what, not 100%? Then I realized that I missed 3 out of 5 myself the other day.
Nothing good can come out of knowing who unfriends you.

I guarantee it will just make you feel a little worse about yourself.
People posting those sort of comments have nothing to give, except for their opinion. Keep getting stuff done, don't let them get you down :)
Perhaps the next level is to realize that getting 3/5 means you are human. ;)
I was among the naysayers. I first met Drew at pg's house just before Dropbox did YC. I listened as he explained Dropbox, and I immediately thought of a dozen reasons why it would be very difficult and probably fail (I'd recently worked on something very similar for a month or so just to figure out whether it was a direction I wanted to go with my own company, so had some familiarity with the scale of the problem...I also knew the allure of the simple parts of the problem).

I don't recall a whole lot about the conversation; I thought Drew was smart, and he seemed to have a pretty good understanding of all the problems he was going to have to solve. But, I still had my doubts, and walked away assuming Dropbox would not be one of the success stories out of that upcoming YC batch. We see who from that conversation is now a billionaire (or will be in the coming years)...so, it seems I was wrong. Or, at least, overly pessimistic about Drew's understanding of the problems and his ability to resolve them.

I refer to this pretty frequently to try to remind myself not to be the naysayer in the room: http://paulbuchheit.blogspot.com/2007/03/how-to-be-right-90-...
Funded by a monopoly supported by the public.
Well, this is as good of a time as any to dump my knowledge on the subject.

I love dot grids, because each page has the potential to be either grid, ruled, or plain, depending on how seriously you take the dots. Having now gotten used to the various ways of using dotted paper, I don't think I could go back. If you are satisfied with other ruling methods, then you have many more potential vendors, but I am not.

So that leaves these contenders: leuchtturm1917, rhodia, behance, field notes, scout, dotgrid.co, whitelines, ecoqua, monsieur, and nuuna. Vendors seem to come and go, as notebooks seem to be a bit of a fly-by-night sort of business.

Behance and nuuna have that "fly by night" feel and seem difficult to get ahold of in the US (e.g. through Amazon, etc), so I have not tried them. Traditionally leuchtturm1917 has had this problem, but their US distributor seems to be straightening it out.

Scout and dotgrid.co only come in something like Moleskine's "cahier" configuration (e.g., not hard bound). These might be worth trying, but I prefer perfect-bound.

Field Notes only sells in "cahier" configuration, and their only dot grid product is on waterproof/fireproof/everythingproof paper. I hear they work well with pencil or ballpoint pen but the ink from my trusty G2s doesn't absorb well into the paper, so I will just be getting ink all over the place.

Ecoqua sells a glue-bound notebook with a soft cover and no pocket, so it isn't really Moleskine-equivalent in its featureset.

Whitelines is interesting because the lines/ruling is actually brighter than the paper itself, which scans well. However, their Black Ocean notebook is missing a pocket in the back cover, which is an important feature for me. I will probably pick one up eventually. They do have some nice pads though, including offbeat paper like isometric.

Monsieur is a weird size (not very pocket-friendly), and seems to have some supply issues.

This leaves the Leuchtturm1917 and the Rhodia. In my experience, the Leuchtturm1917 is smeary with G2 pens, but is otherwise perfect. The Rhodia's paper is perfect for the G2, but because the paperstock is so thick, the notebook feels a little thick in the pocket. I tend to alternate between these two notebooks.

I have also looked into abusing the on-demand book publishers to create notebooks, but it seems self-published hardbound pocket books are not a thing. Things like boundforanything.com get pretty close, but you're still missing core features like a ribbon, elastic, and a rear pocket.

tl;dr getting a notebook right is more difficult than it looks, rhodia and leuchtturm1917 come the closest for me.
It's typically not exactly mutual, that's the whole problem. Persons A and B may drift apart, but maybe B thinks they're drifting apart slower than A think. Friendship goes in both directions, with different values in each direction, not identical ones.
I really wish a proper version of Hypercard was in this emulator. I'm too young to have used it at the time, but from what I've read it stands for an important ideal of what personal computers can be that's been forgotten and I'd like to experience what that was like first-hand.
I'm guessing doing stuff in London is pretty expensive too, so I doubt that reason is valid.
Were you confused by the dead mouse scroll wheel, too? Or was that just me?
The Kindle Fire HDX display bleeds blue