skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
the WaPo article links to a forbes blog which argues against the deflationary effect of bitcoin by saying:

"Removing the gimmicky God hypothetical doesn’t change the basic insight: if market participants become convinced that “the price of a bitcoin is on a steady upward trajectory,” they’re not going to hoard their Bitcoins for weeks or months waiting for the price to rise. They’ll bid the price up right away."

This is incomplete thinking. It is true that if people internalized the deflationary aspect of bitcoin they would automatically bid up the price but there are two aspects of this the author ignores.

One, the deflationary effect is small and continuous. Not at all like his "God analogy" of a one-shot increase. And for the most part that is exactly what we have been observing with bitcoin - with the occasional exacerbation of this through old fashioned human irrational exuberance thrown in for good measure (April 2013 and now).

Second, at the same time as the deflationary effect which serves to increase prices, there is another force pushing prices down (slightly). That is the need to use bitcoin for purchases either illegal or legal. This obviously requires both the buying (if one does not have bitcoins) and the selling (after one has acquired them whatever means, either mining or purchasing in an exchange transaction).

The conclusion is that there are several forces or layers of push/pull at work at the same time on bitcoin prices. This does not magically remove or nullify the fact that a deflationary force exists! Nor does it mean that the deflationary force is not the major one.
Johnson also wanted the court to force Hasbro to open its books to determine sales of Super Soaker products from 2006 to 20012.

That's a lot of sales they're disputing :-p
Madison, Wisconsin. The University of Wisconsin & the fact that it's a state capital generates a lot of cultural attractions, and you'll probably find it easy to hire some bright CS/engineering students if you get to that point. The core is very dense & walkable compared to other small Midwestern towns since it's on a tiny isthmus between two lakes (a nice geography too if you're into outdoor activities, although the summers can be surprisingly steamy & the winters are fairly cold). You can easily find cheap housing. Also only two hours from Chicago.
“Free speech is uniquely important to the University because we are a community committed to reason and rational discourse. Free interchange of ideas is vital for our primary function of discovering and disseminating ideas through research, teaching, and learning. Curtailment of free speech undercuts the intellectual freedom that defines our purpose. It also deprives some individuals of the right to express unpopular views and others of the right to listen to unpopular views.*

Signed, The Thought Police.

______

http://isites.harvard.edu/icb/icb.do?keyword=k72845&pageid=i...
If someone holding an opposing view to you leaves you speechless, it generally means you are indoctrinated in your belief and should reevaluate it.
This took longer than I expected.
Now that is brilliant. Bravo.
You made the BTC-zealots angry. Be careful; most of them have nothing to lose.

Get it?
Montreal isn't very expensive. Sub $1k for a decent apartment outside the core - I pay a bit more and am within a 10-15 minute walk from dozens of startups in the Plateau.
It has nothing to do with nationalism, get over yourself.
I really liked this post, is full of good advice on how to implement big changes, like having small, bite-sized goals where performance is easy to evaluate. The networking part was very well done, forcing himself to engage the community, it puts him out there and provides positive value. And finally, building a very simple website for someone was a great idea, there's nothing like getting experience from a real world project. Joshua, congratulations!
uninformed prediction: "pg called us to correct their mistake, we got an interview and we're in" by the end of next week, though you might be asked not to talk about it in public. meanwhile, nothing will come of the "acquisition" talks.
Myrtle Beach, SC:
Yes, we're building a startup community here, and promoting the reasons why its a great place to live at http://WhyNotTheBeach.com

We have a coworking space: http://CoworkMYR.com

Startup Incubator: http://cocelerator.com

Along with other community resources and great projects: Hackerspace/Makerspace: http://subproto.com &
Coworking Space Management Software: http://lemyr.co

For our size (city of 30k), we have a lot of big city amenities due to our tourists, even more-so than cities like Charleston, and a much lower cost of living, inexpensive flights (~$75 RT to NYC, BOS, PHL...)

Feel free to contact me via my profile to learn more.
And now they're all on instagram instead... Yeah, that purchase makes a lot more sense doesn't it?
... and half of what I hear :)

Reminds me of a phrase from one of the original broadcasts of 'The Shadow': "Believe half of what you see, and nothing you hear." [spoken to sidekick Margo Lane]
Ask HN: What's the best place in Europe to live and work cheaply?
Similar to the U.S. thread, but for people living in Europe.
"Data drawn from years 2001 to 2004 of the National Survey on Drug Use and Health consisted of 130,152 respondents, randomly selected to be representative of the adult population in the United States."
A Tour of Rails’ jQuery UJS
In high school there were a number of bullies I would've gotten revenge on by trashing their names with social media. I wonder if it could be made a crime? It may not be possible to criminalize it, since it's usually accidental rather than purposeful. Therefore social media seems a dubious metric under any circumstances.

And yet it works quite well for YC to filter out potential applicants. So there are some circumstances in which social media provides signal.

Maybe making it impossible for someone to forge your identity is the way forward. It's certainly an uncomfortable thought that all future children will be judged by what they say as young teenagers, though. But maybe it's inevitable.

They'll just have to mature more quickly. Adolescence is an artificial invention anyway.
Web proxy addon
Jim Duey's protocol-monads[1] library is compatible with ClojureScript, and the State monad[2] can be a great for mechanism for "passing around the world". It's not always the best choice, but it's a good option to have in your toolbelt:

[1] https://github.com/jduey/protocol-monads

[2] https://github.com/jduey/protocol-monads/blob/master/src/clj...
ninjas and robots?
I love how you automatically assume I'm a feminist or have some connection to the feminist community, despite me never proclaiming that. Is this another PUA technique? To fall flat on your face in an argument?
It is becoming easier and easier to keep separate surnames, I'd guess more and more people will do as you did. It's sad it still clashes in some people's mind and paperworks (ironicly non official agencies most of the time, i.e. my wife kept her name and we can't sign up as married in some bank forms because of a stupid name validation on the fields.
Chicago, IL.

The neighborhoods in the north side, say north of wrigleyville, are very interesting culturally. Housing and other costs of living are low and it is still an urban center with all the amenities you'd expect from one such.
This article is both accurate and highly misleading. The author is correct that there is very little reliable evidence that links glutamic acid and/or glutamate to health problems. The backlash against MSG as a result of the "Chinese Restaurant Syndrome" craze, was not rooted in scientific inquiry.

However, MSG is not just a source for glutamate like seaweed and tomatoes are. MSG is the sodium salt of glutamic acid and contains not just glutamate but also sodium ions. Having 2000mg of natural glutamate should be harmless. Having enough MSG to give you 2000mg of glutamate means you're getting a shit ton of sodium. That's not good for you, especially if you're one of the many people for whom excess sodium intake adversely affects your blood pressure. So while MSG is presumably no worse than NaCl (and is perhaps better in that the umami flavor means you don't have to use as much sodium to get an equally rich taste), to say that MSG is totally harmless without even mentioning sodium and hypertension is ridiculous. Even in terms of short term effects, I've had plenty of MSG-free hot and sour soups that made my head itch. Not from MSG but from thousands of mg of sodium found in their gratuitously added soy sauce and table salt.
For people living in Europe:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6703058
Actually, I think that the biggest driver would be if my bank account gave me a bitcoin address that could receive money into which would be immediately transferred at the current rate into my account, and allow me to make payments to bitcoin addresses in the same way that it lets me (through online banking) make payments to other bank accounts.
looks like the repo is still up
https://github.com/DiogenesTheCynic/FullScreenMario
I'm thinking that it's easier to get support for reforming details about the lawsuit proceedings than the patent system itself. The bill is smart in keeping its scope very small and clean, tackling the real common sense improvements that will have a big effect of frivolous litigation.
Exactly, Bitcoin will ultimately fail as money as it has no intrinsic value or real scarcity. As to those who might argue that fiat money has no intrinsic value either I beg to differ. The "intrinsic value" of, e.g., the USD is that there exists an organization (US government) with gargantuan physical force that stands to lose a lot if the value of USD goes to zero too fast and so holders of USDs can rely on that organization to deploy that force against rapid devaluation of their currency. There is no such comparable organization in the case of Bitcoin. In the absence of that, only real intrinsic value (the kind of gold or silver has) may prop up a currency and Bitcoin has none of that either. Tulip mania was very rational compared to Bitcoin.
Ask HN: Code checker for Javascript
I need a program that I can enter my Javascript code and it will tell me what it is doing line by line to understand some Javascript code is there such program out there?
Here’s How to Save an iPhone from Water Damage
Of note: $400k in 1953 dollars when Eisenhower was president is equvalent to around $3.5m today. Source: http://www.usinflationcalculator.com/
Here right now. The main reason I don't want to move here to be with family is it's all suburbs/exurbs with no public transport to speak of. If they ever build a streetcar/light rail system between Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, this region could attract people away from bigger cities, no doubt.
One of my favorite things about tests is that they let me read a new codebase more interactively. If I don't understand why a function is built like this and not that I can rewrite it the new way, run the tests. Without names I'd know I broke something, but with a good name I'll often realize why that something matters in the big picture.

(I think about tests a lot: http://akkartik.name/post/tracing-tests)
I think you're completely backwards on this.

Code folding in an IDE is an example of a way in which text files aren't necessarily static and behavior-less. I see no reason to move away from an underlying representation as text.
Why doesn't it cover the eyes?
Ahem: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Productivity_paradox
Somehow, it looks a lot more like lua with a bunch of type-checks and tests added then like python. No named parameters, no generators, no comprehensions that I can see, no focus on iteration in general, no significant indentation, etc.

Instead: "end" syntax, unified number type, all blocks produce new scopes (not just functions), local variables are explicit instead of default, etc.
Of course they did. Everyone told you they would. Copyright is not just something that a bunch of greybeards imagined and have been lying to young programmers about.

Simple steps to protect yourself:

* Try not to clone commercial products to the pixel

* Pay attention to software licenses. Sometimes they matter

* If prominent news websites accuse you of doing something illegal, consider what they have to say
The MSG allergy is a myth, plain and simple. There have been plenty of scientific research studies done on the substance, and they found absolutely nothing. I don't know why this myth has persisted so long in popular culture. I compare it to people who rave about homeopathy. Any (perceived) effect is either anecdotal or placebo in nature.

What most people don't know, is that MSG occurs naturally in many foods. Beef, Chicken, Spinach, Tomatoes, etc... If you don't get an MSG allergy when you eat those foods, you don't have an MSG allergy. Source: http://zidbits.com/2010/12/is-the-msg-allergy-a-myth/
'sandwich' gives a great result. there is some song called sandwiches and it's taking that into context. may be looking for the closest match of the given word.
Code bubbles looks cool, but I don't see the connection with your point about clay tablets. Any digital data is, by itself, flat and behavior-less, whether it's in the form of traditional files or some specially-designed backing store for something like Code Bubbles. I don't see any point in really trying to hide that base reality.

I am in favor of giving links between data a more prominent place in our storage systems. I envision a system where the data is mostly fine-grained trees, like sexprs, where hard-links between trees are first-class entities. But at the end of the day it's just an abstraction over a bunch of bytes.
Sorry about that, from the wikipedia page on MSG:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Monosodium_glutamate#Safety

The oral lethal dose to 50% of subjects (LD50) is between 15 to 18 g/kg body weight in rats and mice respectively, five times greater than the LD50 of salt (3 g/kg in rats).

Which references:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/10736380
Is a pneumatic squirt gun with integrated pump really a huge innovation? If you gave an engineer a task of building a hand-held water gun that shoots more than 50 feet, how many wouldn't think of something similar? The first patent for a compressed air squirt gun toy was 1949 [1] and the Cosmic Liquidator (1977) [2] enjoyed moderate commercial success (the market for high-end $6 squirt guns was limited; everything else was $3). (Johnson's patent cited these.) Shooting water with compressed air has a long history, nor is putting the pump on the device (air pellet guns have done this for a while, for example).

While the Super Soaker was a wildly successful product, it was still an incremental combination of existing technologies (moving the tank from a backpack to the gun and borrowing pump ergonomics from air guns). Is it really fundamentally different from the software engineer that puts together existing packages with some tasteful glue code?

[1] http://forums.sscentral.org/showthread.php?t=4019
[2] http://www.isoaker.com/Armoury/Analysis/1978/cosmicliquidato...
Krugman - Why most economists' predictions are wrong (1998)
You can also do the same with multiple stills and retain full resolution, which may be easier to work into a regular photo workflow. Take a dozen shots at ISO 9000000 and pipe into enblend -> crystal clear result.
No, there are definitely problems with the patent system itself in addition to the problems with the legal system.

Take the Rockstar suit against Android. We know who the real parties in interest are (Apple, Microsoft, etc.). Rockstar isn't going after small businesses who are more likely to settle than go court. They're going after Google (which will almost certainly fight back). I don't know about the validity of the claims, but they're at least plausible enough that Google felt compelled to bid for the patents.

Nevertheless, the Rockstar suit feels wrong. And it's because Google created Android independently of anything Rockstar (or the previous holders of the Rockstar patents did.
A thing that also really helped me I found in a footnote of Functional Javascript. There the idea of a "free variable" is presented not as free as in freedom, or even free as in beer. But free as in escaped. The variable hitches a ride in the closure and is no longer jailed in its defining scope, and lives on much longer than it normally would.

I found that to be a really valuable shift in the way I processed the phrase "free variable".
I'd personally prefer a simple CLI for the tool over a GUI, so I'd certainly be interested. Anyway, as long as you're not doing a competing KS or something, I can't see any fundamental ethical problems with releasing it. The sprite lamp idea itself is not that original, although the presentation is very neat. In fact, I'll probably support it in any case, because it brought the idea up.
Wonga is the symptom, not the problem
> I wonder how things would look if they went by seniority, and simply fired the last 10% to join

It would look like a company that would have a terrible time hiring anyone decent, perhaps ever again.

Who would want to volunteer to be the most likely to be let go, especially given that you'd stay at risk round after round (if the hiring after you was able to absorb 100% of the next layoff, you'd still end up the lowest tenured employee). Ossified has-beens isn't a comfortable or profitable staffing model.
It's great to see someone else mention SixDegrees; it's the progenitor of the modern "social network" as people relate the term today, although I'm not sure it ever attracted many teenagers in the late 90s.

Hard to believe that was 16 years ago. Jeez.
I'm not talking about genes. I'm talking about the passing of culture, values, etc... It seems pretty obvious to me that good habits produce more good habits, and bad habits produce more bad habits among family lineage, but no one seems even willing to admit that!
Probably nothing, unless they have features that are sufficiently more desirable to the market than what Bitcoin offers?
A relevant issue from several weeks ago: https://github.com/Diogenesthecynic/FullScreenMario/issues/3...
I've found the cost of living in San Diego extremely inexpensive if you shop at the right places (Local Mexican groceries, for ex.). If you're comfortable living in less than attractive areas (city heights) you can get apartments for a steal.

I'm paying $1k p/mo for a 2br ~900 sq ft. one in little saigon, and it's about five minutes from the downtown core. You'll find lots of funky benefits in any city I imagine, but quality of life in San Diego can't be beaten.

Now, that's from someone who:
1. Doesn't commute. Traffic here isn't bad, but there's a few chokepoints.
2. Works odd hours, so I get to take advantage of empty parks with my kids at 2pm in the afternoon.
3. Loves the outdoors, though, I miss deciduous trees. The odd trip an hour away to Palomar mountain & Julian fixes that though :)
4. Rides motorcycles, so, that's part of why I love the weather :)

I've also lived in Chicago, Vancouver, Toronto, Ottawa, ~12+ years in Florida and the Eastern coast of Canada, in addition to Costa Rica and a few other random places..

Overall? If I were looking to save money I'd be in Florida (Tampa, Orlando, Miami), if I were looking for best quality of life, I'd stay right where I'm at.

I'm still undecided on where I'll be in another year or two, but only for family reasons (two children, proximity to grandparents would be nice).
I'm throwing in my vote for Philadelphia. We've got a great tech scene, cheap rent and easy access to New York, DC, and Baltimore (just in case). We have the most bicycle commuters per-capita in the USA and great restaurants, bars, and live music. The city is increasingly interested in fostering the tech / startup community, and there are major universities in town that provide talent and venues (I'm at a hackathon at Penn today, Drexel hosts the Tech Breakfast meet up every month).
> Massive overpopulation, caused in part by over-aggressive family planning measures

Eh?? How does over-aggressive family planning lead to massive overpopulation?

> Rampant Regionalism -- India is less like the USA (a collection of states) and more like the EU (a collection of countries with very distinct cultures). People find it hard to always have a strong sense of ties to the nation.

Double eh?? Because India is a collection of distinct and heterogeneous states, unlike the homogeneous US, it suddenly becomes like the EU?

> Will, say, a Greek person feel sad about leaving "Europe"?

I don't know. But people don't emigrate because they're feeling sad or happy, but because they feel they may have better career prospects.

> A political system plagued with dynastic politics and ruled by old people (the average age of a Minister in India is 65) who still retain outmoded adherences to their own specific brand of religions / regions / castes / whatnot.

True, but pray how did you come to the conclusion that this was what caused people to emigrate?

Fact is talented people emigrated from India because they found better value for their skills in the US. That's pretty simple.

But if you're going to link Indian emigration to every ill that plagues India, from its political system to its "overpopulation" (which btw many others call a "demographic dividend") and "regionalism" (which others call "federalism"), then you'd better have some evidence or sources.
This thread seems to have been in reaction to this existing thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6700531
Padmapper. It's not hard to find a place in San Diego for <$1k a month.
Thanks for the insight. I'm pretty sure I can negotiate better than them as my partners and I have done a ton of complex M&A deals in the past so no one is going to fk me over in any way, but I do agree with you that this can be an expensive distraction. I was thinking whether to invite other suitors to play it off each other to make it worth my while and this in turn, can help with the fundraising side with the whole intention of just maximizing the deal structure and terms and amount raised w/r/t fundraising. Thanks so much for your input!
Sharing personal anecdotes is fine. You however seemed to be espousing cheating the system. You didn't go to class, and instead built this collaboration system (which is awesome) but then used it to cheat (not so awesome).
that distinction exists only for us, ie. ones who do it. It doesn't exist for subjects of our actions. Refusal to understand it that is so widespread trough the society is a major roadblock in development of emphatic ability which is the key to triggering the next qualitative stage of the human species brain development.
You don't know that they're judging you based on perfect syntax and probably they aren't. Just because someone points out a syntax error doesn't mean they're marking you down for it; maybe they're trying to be helpful.

But that's the problem; there's little or no feedback from most interviews (for legal and other reasons), so many candidates assume the worst.

Yes, the key is to turn it into a technical conversation. Pretend they don't know the answer and genuinely want your help. Interviews are artificial but talking about technical problems in front of whiteboards is a normal work activity. It's not about perfect code but more about coming across as someone they'd want to go to for technical advice on a tough problem.
Απλές Συμβουλές Επιβίωσης Στο Ηλεκτρονικό Επιχειρείν
Yes, it was published posthumously. There is another book that was actually finished by another author after Crichton died which is called Micro.

I get the feeling Pirate Latitudes was closer to a first draft than a final draft - but it's still Crichton.
Is it ethical to read programming books on the clock?