skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can practice economics as a science. For example, the book "Critical Mass" by Philip Ball ( http://www.philipball.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&vie... ) includes a fair amount of economics from a thermodynamics perspective. However most of economics is not approached in this fashion and is more comparable to Axel Leijonhufvud's satire "Life Among The Econ" ( http://www.econ.ucla.edu/alleras/papers/life%20among%20the%2... ).
IMO, don't worth it. Sam is good enough. Your pay for brand mostly. It's like to compare what's better Mercedes or BMW. Probably you are a member of some fraternity it would be must. Apple's prices are unfairly high.
Seriously. I almost never just flip through slides without a video but these were engaging and to the point, as a slide show should be.

...and now I wanna work at GitHub. :)

Keep it up!
We've been on HipChat for a bit now. Campfire seemed a bit ugly to our tastes.

We don't use chat so much for the Hubot-ish stuff, but I have enjoyed using Robut[0] as a culture tool. I usually serve it directly from my computer, which is fun.

https://github.com/justinweiss/robut
Frustrated.js - Discover and react to frustrated users with 1 line of javascript
Is there any service provider whose TOS compels them to provide service unconditionally to the general public? If you were running an SaaS service, wouldn't you want some recourse if a customer was abusing your service?

If you're a large customer and you're really concerned, you can probably negotiate a contract with GitHub that guarantees your access to the service. But if you're a large enough customer to warrant a custom contract, then no rational service provider would unexpectedly cut you off, because your business is valuable to them.
This looks like it could be really cool. AWS is really on a roll this week!
The idea of comparative advantage for trade between countries was first spelled out in 1817 by David Ricardo in "On the Principles of Political Economy and Taxation". He used the example of the Portuguese trading their wine for English cloth, and said that it was to both countries advantage to be engaged in such free trade.

Well, two centuries later, how did that wind up? As Joan Robinson pointed out "the imposition of free trade on Portugal killed off a promising textile industry and left her with a slow-growing export market for wine, while for England, exports of cotton cloth led to accumulation, mechanisation and the whole spiralling growth of the industrial revolution".

In science, theories have to follow the data, the real world, reality. In economics, the examples and data have to be twisted to fit the theories. The OP article said the author article has a Nobel Prize in economics which of course if false, Nobel's bequeath to his prize foundation included Physiology/Medicine, Peace, Chemistry etc. but not economics - after he died people invented an economics prize and stuck Nobel's name on it so to try to give it the allure given to the other prizes. Economics uses to be called in more honest times political economy, that it was given the more scientific name economics or economic sciences was a sign of it becoming less scientific - Ricardo may have been wrong about comparative advantage, but at least he tried to take an honest look at the economy. Nowadays the theories he made which were disproved by history are held up as models, while his better ideas have been supposedly "debunked".

Economics is not a science. In its normal form it's mostly a propaganda arm for some force in society trying to justify its actions. I suppose in some sense economics could be a science, but only in the sense of being a branch of anthropology dealing with political goings on - a branch of anthropology the study of which would itself be highly politicized. One reason science works is that no astronomist gains or loses by saying the next nearest star than the sun is Proxima Centauri. It is light years away, and has little effect on things, and thus objective observation and scientific consensus are easy to achieve. If a star closer than Proxima Centauri were observed, after some time needed for verification, surely the entire astronomical and scientific community would get behind the idea that the newly observed is now the second closest star to earth. Economics fundamentally deals with the question of how the pie gets divided up, in which case scientific consensus is impossible and objectivity goes out the window. It is one of the rare subjects on which you're better off reading the material from two centuries ago - Adam Smith, David Ricardo, Benjamin Franklin, Jean-Baptiste Say, John Stuart Mill etc. - then that of today, because they were generally objective and fair, while most economic writing today is either partisan, or written under the influence of highly partisan ideas.
Well, maybe I've lived there for the period of time that has been simply too short to judge, but after being raised in an urban/suburban environment in Europe (Warsaw, Poland to be specific) it just felt like there's nothing to do in the Bay Area without a car. And believe me, Warsaw is certainly not the most exciting place in Europe. :) Maybe that was because of cultural shift I've experienced, but the fact is that distances are way larger than here in Europe. Yes, you have a relatively good network of bike lanes compared to for example Warsaw, but the distances between the places where you sleep and where you can spend time nicely (restaurants, pubs etc.) make it way harder to get there on the bike. It's not a big deal if there's a good public transport that gets you from point A to B quickly, but there hardly is any public transport in the cities like Santa Clara, Sunnyvale or even Mountain View. And there usually is just one main street where you can feel a bit of the city life and vast areas around where people just sleep or work. I don't question those cities are safe or that you can live in a more attractive neighborhood. I have also appreciated that those places are clean and close to the nature, but I've found myself feeling bad that I can't just cross the street and buy some food for the breakfast or cross another street and grab some coffee/beer/whatever with my friends. I guess this is because of cultural difference between America and Europe, set of things you're accustomed to, but I know quite a few people in London or London's sattelite cities who moved there from SF Bay Area and feel exactly the same: suddenly there's so much to do and everything is so much closer! Even when I visit my parents house on Warsaw's suburbs I feel I can get everywhere I want way faster than in for example Santa Clara.
The long and short of it is that you do not have an account with super access (you can't perform normal actions like killing threads, viewing processlists, change variables, etc). You instead have to use special stored procedures to perform basic administrative functions.

Also, you can't take advantage of replication (aside from their own read replicas within other RDS instances) or binary backups. Anything that requires access to the machine itself is impossible except through Amazon's support channels.

Its gotten better than it was, but it's still a headache to monitor and manage as a DBA.
newspapers produce information in order to attract readers, whose eyeballs they sell to advertisers. most news is an indirect advertisement of a sort. we happen to make software and study the business we're in. then we write about it. the awesome is free.
It depends on the point that you are using the analogy to support. The tool analogy often gets trotted out to make an argument about something like language or framework choice not being important to the success of a project, but I think that the analogy becomes very brittle here for the reasons stated.

Deciding to switch something like a hammer (or text editor) mid project is likely not a big deal but switching to another language or framework can be an ordeal that requires planning. Since software projects are almost never "done" until they are obsolete the choice of language can have significant implications down the road that you wouldn't have if it was simply a "tool".
Rolf Potts, author of Vagabounding is doing an IAmA
Reminds me of Wolfram's earlier book... http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_New_Kind_of_Science
interesting, as i can't really name any tool i'd buy. Anything what i think is needed is available for free.
I've rarely seen a "Why not X?" so concise in getting its point across. Thanks!
I love almost eveything GitHub does, and the way they do them. I'm a GitHub fanboy. There it is.

I had a similar crush on Google, maybe 6-7 years ago, they lost me somewhere on the road.
nice - this seems pretty useful
At some point in any rational discourse, all analogies become tortured analogies. The trick is in not focusing on how the analogy is wrong, but in what can be improved about the underlying idea. By all means, cast the analogy aside, for it is worthless on its own. It is only a means to relate to or understand the underlying idea.

Any time you feel inclined to dig-in and tear apart an analogy, it's wise to consider whether you're contributing to the refinement of the underlying idea, or just bikeshedding.
I go by my middle name, but some places have forced me to use my first name, so my cards are a mix of my first+last and middle+last name. So then I would look like two different people to this coin wallet?
I worked on a product like this at Amex about 20 years ago and while it was a totally neat concept it was completely stupid in practice. All those plastic cards are marketing vehicles that can also transmit a number. And, really, are they that difficult to manage?
Github repo for the lazies: https://github.com/mailgun/flanker
Yes, there is a trade-off. But the choice should exist, which is not the case so far, unfortunately.
Comparing to most common web dev languages:

- Python, Ruby, Coffee don't require wrapper functions and classes for small examples, eg hello world or the Fibonacci example on dartlang.org. That said, another commenter mentioned the examples for Dart include these wrappers needlessly so this may be a documentation problem.
- JS, Python, Coffee, Ruby and Scala drop semicolons to terminate statements (which users already mark with line terminators)

- Python and Coffee ditch the marking blocks with braces (which users already mark with indentation)

- Python, Scala, Ruby, and Coffeescript set either 'public' or 'private' as a default for new methods, so users don't have to specify unless they want the non-default behaviour.

(I have very little knowledge of PHP but from what I've seen it's generally not as chatty as Java either)
My guess nano-bots that save, will come after we've made them kill.
Oh dear god yes. I just rigged up a PostgreSQL instance on Ec2 for a new project, so excited to shut it down and let amazon deal with it. Hell yes.
>> When someone can't reason from such a basis, and they are insisting on some plan or assertion based on their 'gut' I find it very hard to accept that as acceptable. When they won't even talk about how one might reason to the point, I find it unacceptable.

Not all people rely on linear and logical problem solving abilities. People who are creative tend towards "gut/intuition/instinct". Take for example Magnus Carlsen, who is the highest rated chess player of all time. He does not calculate logically which move to play next. Using his vast experience, he knows intuitively the best possible move to make next. Likewise there are chess grandmasters who are more methodical and calculating.

“The intuitive mind is a sacred gift and the rational mind is a faithful servant. We have created a society that honors the servant and has forgotten the gift.”

― Albert Einstein
Ask HN: anyone want to work on sharing plans?
http://techcrunch.com/2012/01/22/post-mortem-for-plancast/

would you be interested in building an app prototype taking a different angle?
It wasn't the monopolisation of currency or governmental regulation that caused the financial crisis - it was derivatives, and too many people using them off-load their risk to too few people(i.e., AIG)

You can avoid this by attracting a large number of risk-takers who diversify their holdings. But, that doesn't obviate the fact that too little derivative regulation caused the financial crisis, not too much.
Unfortunately things that take 5 minutes in a complex application typically required an order of magnitude larger investment up front in manual reading and experience.
Ok, let's look at the world with no Copyright::

Books: Writer writes a book, self publishes it, and starts selling it. It starts selling really well. Big company comes along, buys one copy of the book, and starts publishing copies of it all over the place. They publicize the book, make money from it, and pay nothing to the author.

Magazines and Journals: Magazine comes out. I take it, scan it, remove all the advertisement, and completely legally post it online for free. No one buys the magazine, because why should they. No one even looks at the advertisement in the magazine, so they cant make money from that either. TV and Radio are the same.

Plays: Writer rights a play, sends it to a play producer, producer likes the play, produces it, pays the writer nothing, because, why should he, it's not like the writer has rights in his work.

Open Source Software: You, as a programer, write some great open source software. Company comes a long, takes the software, incorporates it into their closed source project, improves it, and NEVER redistributes the code. Because they don't have to. After all, OSS is only a thing because under the copyright law you can release things under a given license.

Hmm, does not look like such a good world, to me at least. People should really think about these things before screaming "death to copyright." Do copyright laws need to be changed so the copyright term is some kind of fixed, reasonable time period. Yes. Do we need to get rid of it all together. NO! Remember, life is about balance.
They forgot: "Stock the bar"
Curious to hear what the team at Wallaby thinks about this, and whether they're planning on competing directly or focusing squarely on rewards cards.
Hah, maybe not on purpose.
I essentially did a remote PhD for the last three years of my doctorate.

While it was possible, and I'd defend my decision to do it, it's a tough road, and not one I'd start out on if I could avoid it.
We seem to have stronger laws about this sort of thing in place at the moment. In the US, it seems, just swiping the magnetic stripe is still the way it's done. How quaint!
Couple Completes 101-Day World Tour Entirely on Bitcoin
Seems like a useful reworking of SQS, but all the hard work is being done in the client: "client library automatically handle complex issues like adapting to changes in stream volume, load-balancing streaming data, coordinating distributed services, and processing data with fault-tolerance."

Unfortunately, there's no explanation of the mechanics of coordination and fault tolerance, so the hard part appears to be vaporware.
Well in sequential state machines (computers), true randomness has to come from the outside. I have the feeling that it's the same for the universe as a whole: there is no mechanism which can make true randomness- it has to be a source of information from outside of the system. I suppose it makes no real difference if that's the case, or if you just call randomness an intrinsic property of some parts of the system.

BTW, related questions: is the universe finite? Is the universe discrete or continuous (or better, do you need infinite information to represent it)?
I think that using the term "in principle" is the only way to pretend this question is difficult to answer. We observe what appears to be inherent unpredictability at the quantum level. The butterfly effect claims that imperceptible differences in starting conditions can cause significant effects (over time.) If this is an accurate model of how our universe works, we would expect that not only is nothing deterministic, but it would be extremely difficult to predict the state of reality over even short time periods. This is exactly what we observe on the macroscopic level.
This is a repost, I think the earlier one was removed? Anyways, seemed prudent to submit considering the content of the post!!
I think they lost a lot of us as soon as the G+ train started rolling.
Tweet for extended trial - 100 growth hacks in 100 days
50% of students at Harvard, MIT, and Princeton can't answer this question
You Know You Are A Programmer
I did my dissertation remotely, and to keep up with people, make sure my network was strong, push through the things that sometimes just need you there with a piece of paper and keep everyone happy, I was in the car an awful lot.

It's not a tactic I'd recommend to anyone unless their circumstances were strongly dictating it, and there's definitely stuff lost in the process. And my department wasn't particularly "collegial" - for the places that are, it'll be worse.
Stories are fun, let me try one :)

"I go to pay at the checkout counter. Oh wait! I suddenly remember I have a rewards card here. Good thing I carry it in my wallet along with the other 10 rewards cards I have...shoot, which pocket did I put it in? Maybe it's here? no wait...oh shoot, now I have to take all the cards out. I know it's a red card, but so is my Target and Walgreens card. Now all my cards are out all over the place. People behind me in line are getting pissed off with how much time I'm taking. Now all I have to do is collect all my cards from the counter, reorder them, and put them back in my wallet. I wish I just had one card in my pocket that could work for everything."
I wondered why would Amazon enter the keyboard market...
Hey, the cool hipster dude with a beard says it's cool, so it has to be.

Seriously though, they did a fantastic job with the overall experience of the landing page/video. The product, however, is not that great.
Pick a specific area, read lots of papers, find out what the bleeding edge statements 'we can do X' and 'Y would be nice and seems within reach but we're not doing it now' are there.

Do something interesting and novel based on that - not neccessarily a detailed implementation, but at least a quick&dirty proof of concept; and then also describe and publish it as a formal paper, it's not particularly much work compared to actually doing the stuff. For example, if you "want to work on tools that advance how we think about software" then picking some specific narrow area of how, say, Bret Victor's concepts could/should be implemented in real practice would be an interesting topic.

All of this can be done w/o a PhD as a hobby/side-project, and such a project+publication would also be a ticket to a decent PhD spot.
Bittorrent/TPB ticked off a small number of industries (media,software, etc...) their persecution was largely a function of how well those industries could lobby the government.

If bitcoin ever got large enough to be perceived as a threat to USD (which is a long ways off) the bitcoin community would not have the resources to take on the US gov. Being geographically spread out is irrelevant. For a small fraction of one of its many defense institutions annual budgets the US gov could easily build an ASIC cluster larger than the entire bitcoin mining network. They could even just start maliciously buying/selling large quantities of btc to keep the btc market volatile. To put it into perspective: btc current total market cap is ~4billion, and the NSAs annual budget is ~12billion.
The GRE Computer Science exam was pretty heavy on theory and systems. This made sense for 1990, when CS departments were heavier on theory and systems. It has grown less relevant as the field of CS grew to encompass additional areas.

Thus, CS programs stopped requiring it, so fewer people took the exam, so the ETS decided to drop it.
Intel compiler/tools perhaps. But generally speaking, as a developer I am mostly interested in buying support contracts on OSS.
Very neat.

Thought I'd have a crack at doing something similar in Rebol. Here's my attempt:

Rebol []

; Here's the beef!... the spreadsheet object
spreadsheet: context [
update: func [block /local b] [
b: compose/deep block
bind b self ; so action happens in object context
do b
]
]

; make sheet with following cells
ss: make spreadsheet [
a1: 5
a2: does [a1 * 6]
a3: does [a2 * 7]
]

; simple usage example
print ss/a3 ; => 210
ss/a1: 6
print ss/a3 ; => 252

; use /update method to keep it within the objects context (needed for DOES)
ss/update [a3: does [a1 + a2]]
print ss/a3 ; => 42

; and compose in variables from current context, see (a1)
a1: 1000
ss/update [a3: does [a1 + (a1)]]
print ss/a3 ; => 1006

You could probably do something very similar in other prototype based object languages.
Except that the CVV from the magstripe is missing - wich means ypu can only use the printed CNP CVV, ie. only use the card data for internet transactions.
>> staging servers so non-technical staff can check the work of "their" developers

Surely staging servers have some other benefits? Maybe some teams consider running code on the production setup for the first time to be risky to their customers? Perhaps some teams have encountered differences between dev laptops and production servers, which run on different OS/memory/etc. combinations?
Coming from a MySQL background, I sort-of assumed PostgreSQL worked the same way. I remember after setting up the server, pgAdmin was very difficult to navigate. I managed to get a database and table made and got some data in (using SQL) but I couldn't view any of the data. Compared to MySQL + Sequel Pro it was very difficult to use for a beginner.

Postgres is very powerful and can do a lot. I think I just need a good tutorial and some time to get used to it.
User Centred Design
Same here. Speaking of which, surely someone has written a phone app that will scan and display all your barcoded cards on demand?
That blurs the content inside of a div, how is the content tied in, is it scroll synched?
Chrome is at version 31 now. Maybe you should upgrade.
SUPER clever idea -- kudos for that. In theory, this is awesome. As a consumer, I love it.

As a merchant, however (which I am), there is no chance I would accept this. None. Unless the issuers (that is, Visa, MC, Amex) drastically change their policies, which I don't see happening anytime soon.

Why? Because the issuers are very clear about a few things: When push comes to shove and it REALLY gets down to it, unless the merchant takes a physical swipe of the actual card AND has backup to prove it (i.e. an imprint of the physical plastic), the issuers will side with a consumer in the event of a fraud dispute.

So why, do you ask, do most merchants not bother taking imprints of the actual cards? Because a visual verification and physical swipe is usually enough (for 99% of cases). Instances of fraud via card duplication are rare, so it's usually not worth the hassle. But in some cases, it is.

My business runs large-ticket purchases though CCs (average is $2000), and we take super extra precautions when our customers buy from us. We take magnetic swipes, visually verify, AND take physical imprints.

We've lost several chargebacks because of lack of doing this. You'd be surprised how these little-known rules crop up when you least expect them. "Sorry, customer claims charge not authorized. Merchant doesn't have physical imprint. Chargeback approved." It's happened and we've been defrauded out of $thousands because of it.

The ONLY way we've been able to successful combat chargeback fraud is through the multi-layered approach.

Anyway, I know this is a fairly esoteric perspective and my business may be different from lots of others where this isn't an issue, but I have a feeling V/MC/Amex aren't going to get behind this.
Really? Did I miss that memo? Because my family got fcked over by Obamacare and will be paying 2x premiums next year for a lower quality plan. That's the good, right?
Awesome I'll be using it