skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Don't forget it was the Government that INVENTED the internet. They also heavily funded or helped to invent cellphones technology and micro-chips not to mention the research that brought us touch screens and GPS as well. So perhaps the government isn't all bad and for things like the Hyperloop they should get involved.

I think the real issue that is being talked about in the article is that long term, large scale "moon-shot" type projects are extremely difficult to launch in the private market, but history has shown us that the government is actually much better at such long term "moon-shot" things.

Sure SpaceX is cool and makes rockets for far cheaper than the government ever did, but with out a few decades of NASA spending a ton of money trying to figure out how to get into space in the first place there would be no SpaceX.

So I think what really needs to be looked at for projects like the Hyperloop is Government / Private partnership. Maybe even let the government take a stake in the company and earn revenue in the future to offset / repay all the tax dollars invested. Because unlike private equity, cash-flow is actually quite important to the government and they they are well suited to help out in situations like this.
Opinions are worthless without a justification.
"Pettis likens it to the US railroad boom in late the 1800s. “Most of it was very, very wasteful and the companies eventually went bankrupt. The railroads shifted to new owners who bought at a significant discount. That meant they could lower prices immediately,” he tells Quartz. “That’s painful, but it’s economically very efficient.”
That never happened in Japan. In fact, this is why Japan’s GDP appears not to have grown in so long, says Pettis—wasteful government spending in the 1980s meant GDP “was significantly overstated.”"

http://qz.com/94692/abenomics-will-fail-if-japan-doesnt-addr...
If you're into that kind of things, here is a similar project I did last year: http://friggeri.net/research/senate/
You forgot the biggest risk of all, Death. I'm all for the Hyperloop but lets be realistic, its way easier to give a few guys in a garage a hundred thousand dollars to build software for sharing pictures that's never going to hurt anyone then fork over billions for a futuristic transport that could potentially kill people.
Researchers have discovered additional information about black holes
The research is often there, but not read or understood by the practicing doctors. I found the book “Expecting Better”[1] to have a great analytical approach to the existing research.

[1]http://www.amazon.com/Expecting-Better-Conventional-Pregnanc...
The ITFA has nothing to do with sales tax. Your original argument was that government didn't get around to regulating it heavily here because it didn't realize the potential of the internet. Now you're saying that they avoided regulating it because they recognized its potential.
I just don't think an ATM is willing to take the coin in, which makes it unusable for me. Also, here in Europe, the magnetic strip is hardly used anymore, as the (EMV) chip has taken over.
I would love confirmation on this statement.

I'm a corelibs nazi and refuse to add dependencies to the very last when I'm writing Python.

But if what you're saying is true then I can see a very good argument for replacing email with flanker.
Yes, but even Elon Musk admits they were very close to failure in 2008 and almost had to call it quits. No matter the track record these projects are extraordinarily risky (with a potentially massive payout).
Currently, we post on wall for #1. when user join, as you can imagine the algorithm would not have much relevant data about user and to get user started it put random but definitely a trending/popular video. #2. when user share a video on joday by clicking share button.

brining relavant content is probably the most difficult problem and its never guaranteed to be accurate... our goal is to fail fast, learn from user behavior to serve more relevant next time...
The hyperloop is open source though. Even if it wasn't, 20 years isn't a huge head start to work out all the bugs and build very many lines given the cost/time to build 1.
Wire services and the Economist. And here, obviously.
Great job..
McAfee sued by daughter of dead Belize neighbour
Who said anything about centrally planned economies?
PlayStation 4 v Xbox One: Experts on next-gen battle
I've used Sequel Pro and I don't understand why others love it; it's as clunky as anything I've ever used. My preference is for SQLyog - and my dream is that to be ported to OSX...
My browsers do have WebGL, yet the site says they don't. Chrome + Firefox on OS X. Other Webgl sites/games work.
The Cities Creating  Highest-Paid Jobs, Good For Low-Wage Workers Too
It's because PG values hyper growth in the early days of a startup.
Why clever and lazy leaders are more efficient
no. once login there is a playlist of videos... over the time playlist becomes smarter based on your like, location, network and other trending signals on internet.... it also learns from user behavior and watch pattern...

you should see a lot more videos.. can you retry...
CIA Reportedly Collects Bulk Data On International Money Transfers
Did a government bureaucrat invent the internet? Or was it a person or persons who were simply financed by said bureaucrats (and not even directly by them, but rather by taxpayers' money those bureaucrats redistributed)? This is an important difference because nothing really stops private individuals finance things that may potentially be unprofitable (think Ubuntu, for instance).

When you say "but without government important initial research which is costly and unprofitable can't be done" I want you to think about many brilliant scientists from the 19th and even 20th century who did groundbreaking work entirely on their own or with the help of some private money. And also think that when government finances things, it simply says to other people "give us your money because we know better how to spend them - if you disagree, we're still gonna take your money, so you have no choice". Government doesn't convince and treat people as individuals, it commands and treats them as livestock.
Regulation != taxation. Two different things.
You would be surprised. The cultural norm (not scientific, mind you) to have women give birth on their backs in reclining position was French royalty and aristocracy, according to our birthing coach. Why that continued into modern medical practice is unclear, and many women are in so much pain, they do not question. Doulas, or birth coaches, try to tell you early to force yourself to stand or hold yourself on arms and knees on the bed, if possible.

Source: Doulas, certification info at:
http://www.icea.org/content/doula-certification
I used Xming a while back, which seemed to work just as well as an X server, just without the Cygwin horrors.
Japan has many issues... but its railroads are not one of them. Indeed, note that your article points to the JNR privatization as the model to follow...
People tend to lose their phones than a wallet.
In France they are. At least my French neighbor has what might be considered physician assistant level education in France and she would run the show during a birth. The US is very different in this regard.
Why are you assigning some sort of 'perfect knowledge' or clairvoyance to VCs ? They are just like everyone else and they make irrational decisions and have inherent biases.
our goal was to keep login page simple enough to keep but if its not getting the message out, its definitely not rite... something we will think about.. thanks...
This is probably the most accurate on point statement in the thread.
Thanks for the feedback on my profanity.

It's not about offending people, it's about venting my feelings. I'm aware that I'm just yelling into a void. But venting is it's own reward.

Also I'm definitely not going to put any thought or work into a hacker news comment. Don't throw your pearls before swine and all that.

What HN never fails to offer up to me is libertarians such as yourself who indulge my rants and raves. So thank you. Like a 50 year old fat man showing his penis on ChatRoulette, your talking to me makes me feel like I have an audience.
You should take a look at the code. It uses quite some subpackages, each importable on its own. I didn't look INTO it, but the dependency information from http://godoc.org/github.com/smartystreets/goconvey and its subpackages paint another picture, it is probably a lot less monolithic than you think...
Still, I didn't look at it in depth myself, yet.
For reads, sure. LSMs are optimized for writes, while LMDB, which is a nice B-tree implementation is optimized for reads.

LSMs are getting popular because it's harder to scale durable writes than reads, which can be handled (in many cases independently) by caching.
I can't say that that really addresses that concern.
Those are not hyperloops. Both SpaceX and Tesla are built on decades of R&D and core science paid for mostly by taxpayers to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars.

This is not to take anything away from the "layer" that Musk added to this foundation. But hyperloop does not have the same foundation. There have been space missions and electric cars before; there hasn't been anything approaching a hyperloop at scale. So the investment risk is even greater.
Yes. He's talking about BASIC and things like it, right?

10 PRINT "hello, world"
20 GOTO 10
Great line from their FAQ:

Q. Can a Coin be used to skim cards?
A. No. You can only add cards that you own to your Coin.

Ummmm... I hate to be pedantic [1], but the question is using the "is it possible" meaning of "can", but the answer seems to be using the "am I allowed to" meaning. There's a line in the previous question about how "As an additional safeguard, the Coin app will only allow you to add cards you own," but no detail on the mechanism of this magical authentication process.

[1] Who am I kidding? I love being pedantic.
Global Data Network Probed by EU Regulators Over NSA Reports
Ignoring for the moment that you're engaging in a false dichotomy, central planning actually worked very well for Russia in the 20th century.

Russia had fewer (if any) recessions compared to Europe and the US and faster economic growth. Now you might say that it is easy to have fast economic growth when you're playing catch up. However, plenty of third world countries demonstrate that it is not easy, and Russia managed to grow faster than capitalist economies with the same starting point.

It's true that the results are not as clear for other centrally planned economies. The point is that it's not as simple as "market good, central planning bad".
Go back to 4chan, kid.
This might be one of the best articles I've read on HN in a long time.

One point that really hit home with me is that we need to innovate innovation. I'm willing to bet that a huge part of our stagnation is a result of our creative outlets not being diverse enough. We seem to have become limited to our screens and our virtual worlds. And it isn't by accident. We're social creatures and social media has sucked us in. And of course the internet plus the various kinds of screens (devices) used for viewing it are very effective means of communication, advertising, etc. And we love to be entertained.

So I think the key to a wider range of innovation is to somehow reveal to the masses that there are many tangible concepts just waiting to become part of our physical world, concepts that will provide the same social, commercial, and entertaining functions as those in the virtual world. Somehow our collective focus will need to shift from virtual to physical. 3D printing is probably a good step in the right direction, but I think it will need to be combined with some kind of commodified robotics to be truly useful.
Ruby DSLs can be incredibly concise and expressive. There is a lot of meaning behind the ~7 lines of actual code that the author is complaining about, so yes, it will be difficult to immediately understand.
The abstraction-of-abstractions Ruby provides is different than any other language that my limited experience includes, so I understand why it's a turn-off to some people. I think the article, though, is also describing (more or less) what many people love about Ruby.
Potentially Dazzling Comet ISON Now Visible to Naked Eye After Outburst
I agree with this very much. Dart is a new language; JS is an existing language, improved.

Dart actually has horrible semantics in places. Only if x === true will if(x) run.
I'm not saying it's impossible, but when the California High-Speed Rail project [1] goes at a third the speed using much more conventional technology and costs ten times as much, an investor's got to ask if hyperloop is too good to be true.

It's also a big high-profile project, so if your investment failed you couldn't sweep it under the rug; and mass transit is an industry that hasn't had many high profile successes in recent years.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/California_High-Speed_Rail
Loop is a great hack, but my only concern with this system is that merchants in Europe are many times obliged to ask for the buyers' ID when paying with mag stripe CC. This means that users need to have their physical CC at hand at all times. I know this ID thing is not the case in the US but this can be a legal issue in Europe.

On another note, does anyone know why the US has not transitioned to chip and pin cards?
Regex to convert normal to roman numbers
Google Street View conquers Venice
Real friends don't let friends use Windows without Cygwin. :-D

Seriously, though. If you have machines with lower-end resources, who wants to to wait on a VM. Plus I wouldn't trust testing to a virtualized machine. I wouldn't release software without testing it on a real box.

Plus, you get cron, sshd, and most importantly a bash shell that works much like it does on Linux. For people who prefer a Linux-like environment, but have to deal with Windows (for work, or for whatever reason), Cygwin is a must-have, IMHO.
Looks like the cold war ended around 1991 with the collapse of the Soviet Union and no more tests
Also, reasoning from first principles requires you to be aware of all of the "principles" that need to be taken into account.

Say you decide to build a ship. You calculate the strength needed for the backbone when the ship is sitting in water, you calculate the size of the motor to get efficient movement, you calculate the placement and size of rudders to make your ship as manoeuvrable as possible. You calculate the exact shape of the hull at the waterline, taking into account the flow of water at the desired speed. Your ship is going to be the most efficient ship in the history of the world!

But there's a problem. You forgot that occasionally your ship is going to encounter massive waves. Massive enough that half the ship can find itself out of the water as it crests the wave. And then the backbone of the ship breaks, and your wonder of efficiency becomes an artificial reef. Or you forgot to take oxidizing effects into account, and one fine day as you negotiate the port of Newcastle, your rudder's pivots catastrophically fail due to corrosion, the rudder falls off the ship, and your oil tanker runs aground creating a massive environmental disaster.

Every time Elon Musk does something that hasn't been tried before, he runs the risk of running into these types of issues - things that we just hadn't thought to think of. Maybe that hold down system that they have for launching Falcons will one day assymetrically fail, dragging the rocket over horizontally before failing totally, leaving a very large missile to shoot along the ground. Or maybe we're going to discover that all of those redundant engines that a Falcon 9 uses create a failure mode that makes one engine failing create a cascade of failures elsewhere, due to pressure imbalances, or an engine explosively damaging those around it, or whatever. Those fires that we've seen in Teslas recently? Guess what, the designers forgot to think of something.

Which is not to knock Musk's achievements - indeed, I'm a big fan. First principles are important, they're the only known antidote to cargo-culting, but when you hit out in a new direction because you think that you've found a flaw in the reasoning of previous designers, be aware that here be dragons and your idea may catastrophically fail in novel ways...
Taming Service Variability And Scaling Deep Learning
this is pretty cool. I'm into having a thin wallet but there are a number of cards I need to carry around currently.

however, $100 is way too much for what is basically a very minor convenience. $50 is too much. For $20, I'd consider it.

from a business perspective, I wonder if they have deals with the banks. I wouldn't be surprised if they get slapped with some cease n desists just because the megabanks want their shiny pieces of plastic on display at all times.
Note: due to the ratification of the Partial Test Ban treaty in 1963, every test after that year has been conducted underground. (With the notable exception of China, which isn't a signatory, and has detonated a couple nuclear weapons in the atmosphere post-1963.)

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partial_Test_Ban_Treaty

EDIT: China.
That seems to be their secret sauce. It's not NFC as that would not be compatible with existing mag-stripe readers. It has to be some method of emitting magnetic fluctuation.
Google Books ruling on fair use
TPP IP Chapter Leaked, Confirming It's Worse Than ACTA
Isn't the interchange fee higher on some rewards cards?
SnapBox - a snaphack to save all your snapchats
Telling people how they need to behave doesn't improve behavior. It's not like telling them what they did wrong will make them have an epiphany and understand the sort of incomprehensibly bad posting they're doing. You have to be pretty consistently bad to get irrevocably hellbanned, and telling people what they did wrong instead of banning them, if it has an impact on their behavior, would tend to make them skate along at the boundary and lower the quality of the forum anyway. If those people had good comments to make, they'd have already been making them.
IT is cheap to make, you only need programmers, rent a place, some hosting and done, you make a quick buck.

Building a railroad require much more concrete things, like steel, construction and utility vehicles, fuel, many workers, a place for those workers to sleep near the site, etc.

I'm amazed that you're comparing IT and a railroad. I would be glad to see a second internet bubble. It's like saying having a smartphone is more important than transporting people.
> Can 3B dollars fund a small semiconductor company that will have a sustainable competitive advantage against Intel, AMD and TSMC?

Semiconductor does not automatically mean CPUs for the consumer market. 3B can fund a small, very profitable semiconductor company, with well-defined expertise in an important, current problem (e.g. power management, low-power RF communication etc.) from which it can grow onwards.

Unfortunately, this market is less volatile and, consequently, less attractive for people who expect immediate returns.
I didn't assign anything. You did. Stop putting words in my mouth.

My point was that if a random HN commenter is able to raise some issues about ROI of various investments then certainly VCs who do it professionally have these issues factored in. Simple as that.
What about combining online payments and customer-present, serve an intranet over wi-fi?
That's exactly my point! Musk almost certainly wouldn't be able to keep employees or visitors from spilling his secrets, if it wasn't for the laws that are in place to protect trade secrets [1]. I'd contend that it only makes sense to argue for patents on an information dissemination basis in the absence of laws to protect trade secrets.

[1] http://acuriousguy.blogspot.com.au/2013/04/protecting-space-...
http://Archive.org/

I just heard about "thefacebook.com". Reckon it's going to be pretty big.
True, but at least Hyperloop can actually be useful for someone and improve people's lives. To me, the thought that 3 billion were paid for Snapchat is not hilarious, it's horrifying.
is something supposed to happen when I press play (safari, iPad)?
Coin actually seems like it would be a pain from a usability stand-point. Say I actually put in lots of my cards in there. Now, I go to Safeway, I need to first keep clicking until I reach my rewards card. Then, I need to keep clicking again until I reach my credit card. If I accidentally click ahead, I'd need to loop over all my cards again.
Python Wheels support
Except for that gimmick apps part. Snapchat has 25M users. That is more than most countries in the world to put it in perspective. That is nothing to scoff at.
It's almost like we need to go borrow investors from the past - investing in railroads.

I like the analysis though, sad I didn't see it in August. We need a new startup incubator called "Sleepers and Ballast" instead of "Y Combinator".
IBM Watson is Fueling a New Era of Cognitive Apps for Startups
My tenth attempt to get Yahoo! to stop spamming me: a physical letter
> It is amazing that someone is willing to pay $3 billion for SnapChat, but nobody is willing to pay $6 billion for Hyperloop (which was Musk's estimate, although many people took issue with it).

No, it isn't.

Reports/rumors indicate that Facebook, Google and Tencent were interested in acquiring SnapChat, a real service with real users, for $3 billion or more. Facebook, Google and Tencent are multi-billion dollar businesses that have reasonable justification to be interested in a company like SnapChat, even if the amounts they were supposedly willing to pay for it may seem unjustifiably rich to many.

Hyperloop doesn't exist. It is a concept. The OP is criticizing venture capitalists for not wanting to invest in making such a concept a reality.

It's easy to criticize venture capitalists, and a good amount of criticism is valid. But the OP doesn't seem to understand how venture capital works. Venture firms are not businesses that produce capital in the same fashion as Facebook, Google or Tencent. They raise their capital from limited partners ("rich people", institutions, etc.) and are tasked with growing that capital through investment. They realistically would not be able to raise this capital if their funds were entirely unfocused and they stated an intention to bet hundreds of millions of dollars at a time on mere concepts.

Venture capital has already experienced significant changes over the past decade and there is good reason to expect that it will continue to change as trends evolve and the ongoing experiments in monetary policy play out. But anyone expecting venture capital to become the source of funding for concepts that require seed funding to the tune of hundreds of millions or billions of dollars is going to be sorely disappointed.

In short, the OP's apparent distaste for venture capitalists is misplaced. Those who expect [insert some idea] to be financed to the tune of billions of dollars might as well blame every person on the Forbes billionaires list, every CEO of a major corporation or bank, and every Western politician for the lack of funding because they're arguably just as responsible as the khaki crew on Sand Hill Road.
Company != startup. They dont have revenues, but they have 25M users audience that will be instantly monetizable as soon as it is plugged in the FB or other company advertising system. And that makes them a perfectly fine target for acquisition, even if they don't have revenues of their own. Does this address a 'mature' company concern?
Yes, in the U.S you can charge credit cards without a PIN for whatever amount you want. Yes, it's silly.
JS prototypes provide a single parent lookup delegation, which is not that different from single inheritance and is mostly used to emulate single inheritance class systems in the wild.

Furthermore Dart supports mixins, so it's not exactly single inheritance classes.