skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Indeed; I tend not to find too many kickstarter projects that I'm interested in, but as I continued to read this one I continued to be impressed. John obviously has a gift for bringing sciences to the masses.

My favorite is the "spitfire kit": "Each kit will allow users to kindle a ...fire... by using two chemicals and a drop of spit."

Brilliant.
Day traders help stabilize the prices and ensure liquidity. Sure, they screw over other day-traders to get that position, but long-term investors overall benefit from this sort of squabbling.

These HFT guys are complaining about fractions of a penny. Meanwhile, illiquid markets such as the Bond Market have real issues going on, where bid/ask spreads are completely opaque, and pricing on the same bonds are vastly different from broker to broker. (with differences measured in hundreds of dollars... not fractions of a penny)
It sounds good in theory doesn't it?

I hope it passes. It will be a great study case. I fear that it won't be pure welfare and therefore the conclusions we can draw will be limited.
Is "evil" really the word?
Revised standards for statistical evidence
Process Earth Science Data on AWS With NASA / NEX Public Data Sets
Disassembling and Reassembling a Mill
Swiss referendum proposal: Legally capping highest salary at 12x lowest salary
People can do both good and bad things. I feel this is very obvious but rarely acknowledged - perhaps due to our immensely polarising media which can only deal in simple narratives.
One of the greatest philanthropist of our time.
I think that OP mistranslates "extreme functional programming" as "we never have side effects and compose functions".

Also what exactly is "extreme functional programming"? Only using functional programming paradigms and abstract data types instead of OOP paradigms and objects? Is "extreme functional programming" not taking advantage of do notation, ST monad, etc and only programming in pure functions thereby accomplishing nothing?

I think the author should have defined what he believed to be extreme OOP and extreme FP before going on such a diatribe (on mostly FP and haskell in particular, since others don't separate side effects).
Agreed. Don't know what it is, but I see this kind of comment all the time on HN, Slashdot, and the like, but rarely encounter it elsewhere.
I find it hard to empathize with this article, for a lot of reasons, but mostly because I'm not sure if the premise is true.

It is indeed very easy to write software that will later fail, and not know that it will fail while you're writing it. It's even very possible to have software that is failing, very publicly, and not know why.

Aside from levying blame here (which I think falls to management for having changed scope within weeks before launch), the thing that most people seem unwilling or unable to accept is that the website itself is a black box to a legacy government system. As with all black boxes, there's absolutely no way to know how it's expected to behave under load, especially when it seems that nobody ever got around to load testing it.

I would be very surprised to hear if there were those 'in the know' who could have scuttled the launch here because there wasn't any testing. Now, for sure, there very well ought to have been people saying "We can't launch without testing!", but even if there were people in that capacity, that would have surely seemed like fear-mongering, and could likely have gotten them cast as evil Tea Party members, given the public pressure (and political pressure) to launch.

Let's not forget that the alternative would have been to delay the effects of the law, which is a debate that shut down our government for a time. The outcome here, in my opinion, doesn't levy blame on the software industry, but at worst, on software industry within the government. That system is indeed very broken, and I think blame appropriated upon it is warranted -- even though systems do succeed in spite of it.
What kind of brute force are you talking about? If people want to unionize they are free to do so. But business owners should be free to ignore unions if they wish and use force if unions decide to occupy the business private property as protected by the constitution. They are free to stop working and protest but business owners should be free to replace them if they can. None of the parties however should be allowed to steal from the other's property and if it happens they should be able to ask the state for protection of their belonging.
Congratulations, a new way to fire people quantitatively. I imagine this to actually be useful for call center owners, staffing managers and whomever that sells fixed units of activity for money.
So my point stands... he already deviated from what was originally tested in order to favor PHP.

Why would that be acceptable, but not a simple config change for NodeJS?
It's like we're back in 1996 with a MIDI of Enter Sandman lovingly rendered by your Sound-Blaster 16's OPL chip with all the intensity of elevator music.

I remember the line back in those days: "If I wanted your web site to make noise, I'd lick my finger and rub it across the screen."

Oddly anachronistic since monitors don't use that kind of glass anymore.
I feel that is largely Nolan's intent, that Cobb has chosen experience over memory and guilt whether that experience is truly real or not.
> but I guarantee every single person on HN will rather take the chance of malaria than the certainty of not being born in the first place.

Perhaps that's true. But what about kids in all the destitute places on the planet? Using an average HN user as your test case just shows how biased your perspective is. Personally I'd rather not be born than be born in a place where I have a high change of dying of malaria, or dysentery.
Ask HN: Most successful startup that applied but never got into YC?
I like the way this guy thinks :)
It would be really useful for someone with experience developing in Go to explain the pros/cons of using Go over alternatives. Why should I develop websites in Go over Node or Python?
Couldn't read past the first two sentences.
Beyond24: Voter ID
Anyone know how "mergeable" the project files are? Are they git friendly?
That's a nice perfect scenario.

Marketing (in its current form) does not attempt to overcome a lack of information. It exploits the lack of information.

See: The consumer driven debt-march of the American people.

"When I walk past a shop, I am amazed at all the things that man can do without"
Why Wal-Mart can afford to give its workers a 50% raise
JetBrains support is interesting. But given that Google bought Instantiations, and had much sunk effort in the Android plugin (not just code, but documentation and training) there has to more too it. I think IBM reducing their support to the Eclipse foundation must have had something to do with it.

Fair dues on the plugins; my own frustration with the plugin architecture is probably just my own frustration :).
He's also making accusations and not providing proof for them. As well as casting each paradigm in a negative light (extreme friendliness, extreme helpfulness, extreme eating all sound negative) without even defining what exactly "extreme OOP" or "extreme FP" are.
Forget about the VCs. How much would Potash Corp pay to be 20 years ahead of their competition?
Right, I'm with you. When we talk about Europe as colonists we're not talking about Albania and Slovakia. Albania was an Italian colony, right? We mainly mean England/France/Spain/Portugal/Italy/etc.

A lot of those in Eastern Europe probably wouldn't be considered European to many in the west of Europe, which is also part of the problem.
Exactly how is it relevant that you would rather not be born than be born in rural poverty? Congratulations. Nobody asked you, or anybody else. Now what?
Clearly you're not familiar with the markup that Drupal shits out.
What happens to farmers who don't buy new seeds and just reuse seeds from their current crop, licensed or otherwise? Are there examples of them being pursued by patent lawyers?
How did you get that far with the stealth cruiser? I love playing the ship but I never survive past sector 3. I have logged hundreds of hours on FTL and never once beaten it with my favorite ships :(
The Fighting Style: Reading the Unabomber’s Strunk and White
So sort of .NET for Chrome? Cool. I like the language agnostic approaches we are seeing these days.
I would disagree in that during my starving student years I occasionally submitted tax returns vaguely resembling those kind of figures. You need roommates and can't be too picky about food and entertainment, but its possible. Its certainly a lot easier to live on than $0 !

This does have certain implications where either it gets indexed to some kind of cost of living index, probably very corruptly, or it gets polarized into some kind of coastie/non-coastie or urban/rural issue.
I like IDEA a lot but I ended up going back to Eclipse because it's so much better at hotswap than IDEA. It's baffling to me that the talented engineers at JetBrains still force me to restart my servers all the time for changes that are explicitly documented in the JLS as hotswappable.

I restart servers all the time throughout the days, all the nice things that IDEA offers still do not make up for the fact that in Eclipse, I hardly have to restart any process ever as long as the changes I made to my Java code are hotswappable.

There's that and the fact that Eclipse's incremental compilation is hard to give up (another thing I don't understand why IDEA hasn't caught up to).

At any rate, anyone who says that one of these two IDE's is awesome while the other one sucks probably needs to take a hard look at the way they work and question their skill at assessing tools.
100% agree. And I think it's important to talk about the late stages of demographic transition. As we urbanize, birth rate goes down. This has happen in many countries, including Japan, Italy, Germany and Sweden. Some of them even have the opposite problem, of population going down too fast!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographic_transition
> The UI of Google spreadsheet works much better than Excel (not to mention OpenOffice). No such nonsense as, for example, you can only paste something you copied once.

I'm not seeing this.

You can indeed paste from the clipboard multiple times in Excel. I just tried this, and it works fine in both Excel 2013 and the Excel web app.
Unity really desperately needs a Mono upgrade, as their version is years old. Unfortunately it seems to be a licensing issue with Xamarin, because of LGPL constraints on mobile platforms.

It's quite frustrating to work with C# without all the features of the last few versions, particularly if you want to use third party libraries.
I enjoyed (and highly recommend) FTL, but I don't think that a few new weapons gives me a reason to play it again.
The weakness comes not from the unreality of the special economic status, but from the improbability that that status actually changes whether it's a good idea.
I think that, ultimately, most viewers would rather have a movie that presents a picture of humans having a chance at triumph, rather than one where the truth of the story is that we cannot win (because the computer overlords are merely simulating our win to placate us). The latter is far, far more dystopian.

Interestingly, the Thirteenth Floor did a pretty good job of that overall premise (sims inside sims), but without the dystopian overtones.
One guy has time to go walk in the park on weekday afternoons and can go out to a bar or to a show any night of the week, while the other is at work all day and can only do late nights on the weekend. One guy can lounge in bed then take you to brunch, the other has to leave for work at 7am. One guy has to schedule his vacation a month in advance, the other can be spontaneous to hop on a train somewhere today.

My point is that there is motivation to have more free-time than your peers, especially for young people.
It's not remarkable in most small towns and rural areas. Big cities are more of a mixed bag - there is always "the bad part of town" with very high crime rates, but the middle-class suburbs (where a great many HN users live) usually have rates of violent crime comparable to western Europe. Naturally the prison population comes almost entirely from those bad neighborhoods, and so our insane incarceration rates are mostly invisible to the suburb dwellers.
I agree that crime statistics are highly context sensitive and must be handled with caution. Sweden's rape statistics are a good example. Sweden has more rapes per capita than most countries, it's even the second highest in the world. However, that's because Sweden's definition of rape is including so much more than any other country. Ask Julian Assange about it.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rape_statistics#Sweden

That new crimes are codified in law, such as "internet fraud", and is one of the fastest growing seems to causing more crimes, not fewer. It doesn't invalidate the comparison between years for all crimes, and unless you want to argue that newly codified crimes are less serious than old ones, I can't really see a problem with new laws being included in statistics, too.

I'd like to conclude saying that I appreciate your posts on this subject and have read them with interest.
This seems to be a common impression among those who start playing the game. However, I have seen an experienced player win 10 games in a row on normal difficulty (in response to someone making the exact claim you did, so it wasn't like he got a lucky streak), switching to a different ship each time. So obviously the randomness is not a complete killer if you know the game well enough. That said, I'm not that good at the game.
I used the eclipse-based zend studio for years, was perfectly satisfied using it for all my php projects. Then I tried phpstorm, and i found myself unable to return. The biggest thing for me was that phpstorm made me notice how slow zend studio was, and once i saw it i couldn't stop seeing it. On small projects you don't notice it as much, but all the eclipse-based IDE's i tried ground to a halt on our 500k line php codebase, and phpstorm made me realize this was not an intrinsic aspect of php ide's.
Absolutely agree! I wish I had seen this video earlier.
Unfortunately, I don't think there is any chance this will pass. Swiss are very risk averse and I don't think they want to mess with the successful economy they have now. There is way to much uncertainty.

The initiative to increase the minimum holiday (4 to 6 weeks) failed already.

For those interested, there is a initiative this month to limit the maximum salary to 12x the minimum salary in the same company (1:12) which might pass..
Does this abstraction of native OS environments mean lesser supported platforms like Linux will see more apps? Of course, only if the app dev decides to port it to PNaCl.

One thing I am concerned about is, since PNaCl is essentially yet another platform, how Google (or anyone) is going to manage the host of supporting tools required. Tools like dependency management, libraries, process control etc.

By the way, Google has already proven their "platform-creation" skills with Android.
Facebook - Mobile Apps with Open Source Tools - Mobile @ Scale
That depends. Maybe the person being taxed is not a beneficiary of how the money is used.

It's not nearly as clear an exchange as trade, although of course there are things (like roads) that we wouldn't have at all except via taxes.
Pray do tell where in the world is an unlicensed medical practitioner called a docter?

My point being, in this day and age, to call yourself a docter, you must be licensed. Bringing up history does nothing to change that fact. I would state that should also apply for engineers, and already does in most countries.

Merely the fact that train drivers are called engineers in the US proves my point. It dilutes the term to be basically meaningless.
Please consider which is more likely:

a) The author believes the NSA has a toothbrush moustache, wears its hair combed in a side parting, and is responsible for invading Poland and starting world war two, or.

b) You have taken a metaphor literally when it was really meant as an illustration of why a certain line of argument is not accepted any more.

Please don't do this. This type of exaggeration has a tendency to shut discussions down rather than allow the points to be considered.
How so? That is how warrantees work. They're designed to protect you against premature failure. Unless it's a necessary competitive advantage no company is going to warrantee something past its expected lifetime. And in that case it's going to be included in the price.
In certain places where there is a limit on the supply of housing this will probably happen.

However, when rent prices go up, it encourages people to build more homes/apartments which in turn drives prices down. There is a feedback loop (granted, many times it's interrupted, and there is a delay)
I am well aware of local exchanges. But you know, there is this thing called "the internet", which ought to allow me to trade BTC with anyone in the world.

With a local exchange, you get the best price for BTC in your city. With an internet-exchange, you automatically get the best price for BTC in the world... INSTANTLY, without having to schedule a meetup.

The more BTC exchanges converge, the better things will be overall. Trades will execute faster, at a lower cost, with maximum convenience with maximum fairness. It is damn near impossible to settle on a price without an exchange.

Its simply a matter of which BTC exchange will be trustworthy enough to hold the title of "defacto exchange of the entire internet".
Call me a cynic -- here is a well known, renowned software development methodology expert who makes money on giving talks, books, etc. He argues that regulation of the software industry is a solution. Specifically: "I'd be thinking about what languages and processes we should force them to use". He just argued his business case. This makes me take whatever he says with a large pinch of salt.

Also, he makes dramatic points which have little to do with the problem. He describes the challenger problem, where a teacher's life could have been saved -- there were children waiting for that lesson! How is that relevant to what we're dealing with? I think it's a poor analogy only used for dramatic effect.

All this makes me feel the article as insincere and merely cashing in on the bad launch of healthcare.gov.
I know it will be a wildly unpopular question to ask but, after his own history at the helm of Microsoft, where he made most of the money he's using now, can we trust him?

Is there a way we can be sure his donations (and the donations of people and companies that decide to donate because he is doing so) are not furthering his own agenda and creating a market for the companies he invests in? Even if they are beneficial to the affected populations, can we call that philanthropy?
Or possibly: http://xkcd.com/606/
I took the plunge. This is a once in a lifetime chance for me. I've never seen a chemistry set I've actually been interested in before now (that's in production).
> Smalltalk functions are first-class objects

What about the functions inside those objects? And functions inside that function object. Like a chicken and egg problem. I neither agree nor disagree with him, what he's trying to say is that there is a difference between methods and functions. Methods (1) are functions (2) wrapped inside an object. (1) and (2) are different. He's just trying to say that "everything is an object" can't be rigid. At least that's what I understood.
The claim is usually that inter-state violence has been falling steadily since the end of WWII, the same way that inter-personal violence has been falling since, well, basically since civilization started. He's probably referring to the arguments in this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nature
Un-Procrastianation
>Besides, I prefer to eating natural ingredients regardless if science finds no problems with GMO in the future as we

This statement is absurdly irrational. I'm surprised to see this sentiment on here.
I live in Switzerland, I will vote for this idea, but there is absolutely no chance this referendum will succeed. The Swiss are very conservative people and don't want to change their model until it's proven more effective.
All those who think Inception should be considered as just another cool action flick must watch this video.
> If Gmail were built with a stock install of Drupal and nobody took even a little time to customize it

There. I fixed the title for you. I've built some Drupal sites in years and you can do a lot better than the shit form you have in the screen shot. There is a fabulous module that allows your node edit form to be in tabs on the left just like all the rest of form (less scrolling). There is a module that lets you create your own fields elements. You don't have to have forms like you show. If all you have to offer skill-wise is being able to install Drupal and use the edit node form... I don't think you have enough skill to build Gmail.

Sure, Drupal is not perfect but it does a lot of things and you can do a lot of things with it.
Did you read the article? It is exactly that, a wage for being a swiss national (and alive). The title's a bit sensationalized because.. well.. fucking news can't get people to click on their stories otherwise, but it's technically valid.
[meteor-weekly] SQL Support, Giteor, New Pull Request Guideline and More
Yep, Futile is great. It's not quite as simple or flexible as a pure 2D engine (like PyGame/SDL), but it lets you make 2D games while taking advantage of Unity's cross-platform engine, GPU acceleration, and any other features you layer on top of it.
Despite the evil connotations associated with this phrase post-WW2, I have to say that I agree with it.
When everyone, even poor people, have an extra (say) $10k, basic cost of living could go up $10k because that's what the market will bear.
How much damage were you taking in those battles? How much scrap were you spending on minor upgrades (doors, oxygen, medical, shields, etc) or repairs?

A good player can often get through the first sector without repairing at all, without spending a single point of scrap on minor upgrades and fighting as many battles as possible. This lets you buy a big ticket item such as a cloaking device, a teleporter or a powerful weapon right away. Big ticket items (especially the teleporter) have the ability to pay for themselves many times over.

The real beauty and elegance of FTL's design is that it makes opportunity costs a real factor in game play. Buying a lot of small upgrades makes you a lot more survivable early on but severely restricts your total scrap potential over the course of an entire game. The key to winning FTL is to coast along on as minimal a budget as possible until you land a big ticket item and then invest heavily into it so that you can earn more scrap and take a lot less damage going forward. Of course, none of this strategy works if you aren't playing battles very carefully and making optimal use of the pause button to coordinate your weapons.
The problem with that approach is that it's not sustainable. It might work if you limit yourself to health data, but then you're losing a lot of possibilities, and if you try to expand, you won't be able to add every single API out there and write intelligent algorithms for every possible view of the data.

We need to standardize on common formats so that anyone can publish in them (either original data or a bridge from a custom API) and anyone can write code to do analyze and augment it.

Some fields - particularly in the "sciences" - are already linking massive datasets between them, allowing new applications that they had never even considered, but here in the common "web app" world we're still stuck in the world of non-standard APIs with custom and non-extensible JSON formats.
Snowden Running Out of Money, Lawyer Says
The plot against France