skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This reply should be downvoted into gray. It includes a direct insult, and strong claims with no proof behind them. There is no logic in this post, only pure bitter emotion.

I believe in the principles involved in austerity, but would argue that those using that word in government are "doing it wrong".

- Do you believe the government is inefficient with its money? ( public school system)
- Do you believe that the government has its hands in too many pies and should be doing less? (NSA)
- Do you approve of the cost of the ACA website? What about the value we're getting for our money?
- How about Mr Presidents Million dollar golf trips while he shuts down the White House?
- How much good could be done with the $420 billion in interest payment we paid last year alone on our debt [1]?

There are many reasons to try to be more efficient/austere with our money. I personally strive to be debt free and self sufficient, and I would like my country to be the same. I don't think the power our foreign lenders have over us is a good thing.

[1] - http://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2013/10/09/5-facts-abou...
The option you propose is largely what the current system looks like. The proponents of the basic income argue that basic income is better because it massively reduces the overhead of trying to figure out who is eligible and who isn't, and of administering many concurrent schemes designed to solve many specific problems.
That's temporary. The United States has huge quantities of gas, and cannot export it. Thus, the price of natural gas remains depressed. Everybody else is using expensive gas, so the price doesn't drop.

If enough LNG export terminals get built, that advantage goes away. Our prices will go up, and their prices will go down.

The oil refining industry demonstrates how bad things get in a capital-intensive industry when both the inputs and outputs are fungible. They had flush times, too, in the mid-2000s. That was also temporary.
What do you offer that differentiates yourselves from cheaper, more popular VPS options out there? (ex. Digital Ocean, Linode, INIZ)
It'll trash your credit no matter who it's sold to; at least buying it yourself would relieve you of the debt.
They don't know exactly, but they have a very good idea. It's all based on statistics.
Who said anything about major cities? There's plenty of cheap places to live in Canada. That's like saying you can't live cheap in the US because NY, LA and Chicago are expensive.
Disclaimer: I work at Backblaze but I'm on the software side, I barely ever touch the storage pods anymore.

It is not true that the pod team must remove the 4U server from the rack. It is slid out like a drawer (no tools required, takes maybe 10 seconds). The drive or motherboard is then replaced, then you slide the drawer back in. So the 4U server must slide 18 inches one way, but zero cables have to be unplugged or replugged when done. This only takes one technician and no "server lift", the drawer supports all the weight.

I'm not defending this design, just correcting a mistake. Backblaze frankly "makes do" with this design because nobody will step up and make anything that fits our needs better. The number 1 criteria is total system cost over the lifetime of the system INCLUDING all the time spent on salaries of datacenter techs dealing with the pods. "raw I/O performance" is not that important for backup, so trying to sell us an awesome EMC or NetApp that costs 10x as much and has 10x the raw I/O performance is not very compelling to us. But if you came up with a design making it faster for our datacenter technicians to replace a drive faster while not significantly increasing overall costs in another area, we SURELY would listen.
The first company is a postitive sum game if the employees of the existing companies can find new jobs. Otherwise, its machines 1: humans -1.
Can't tell if serious...in all reality though, why not? It's not like I get a big break by defaulting on my loans (or rather, being sold to a different collection agency). If Company A is going to sell $10,000 of debt to Company B for $1000, and I'm going to have my credit dragged through the mud, make my life miserable and still owe $10,000 that I might be able to settle down to $5000, why not just pay Company A $1000, have my credit dragged through the mud, and get on with my life? Company A doesn't lose anything they haven't already lost, my situation is greatly improved, and I don't think anyone is crying for the piranha Company Bs out there. And it's not like my credit going to crap is a win-win scenario.
We were seeing some significant slowdowns when running lua in emscripten (testing on repl.it) vs. PNaCl.

Take this naive fibonacci function:
function fib(n) return n<2 and n or fib(n-1)+fib(n-2) end
print(fib(30))

On my machine, it completes in less than a second on PNaCl, but takes nearly 10 seconds to complete in emscripten.
"At Microsoft, folks are given the hint early enough that they can explore other internal options before leaving the company entirely."

Except that it doesn't work. No internal hiring manager will ever allow the interview loop/transfer for the internal candidate with the score 4 or 5 (I think those are the lowest scores in the current model:-). In 99.9% of cases those unlucky who got 5 get laid off by the next review period.
Someone who drives a custom made Pagani Zonda at a price point of well over $1 million shouldn't be talking about "The perils of mixing open source and money"

edit: So, let's translate this article, shall we?

"Hey guys, it seems to me that it's getting a lot easier to get funding and release quality software products these days. So i'd like to request you stop doing that, please. It's competition to my ba$ecamp and stuff and i'd rather not have to deal with that because my racecars need new tires soooo often, lol. So yea, just make free libraries and stuff don't make anything too good lol"
From a different perspective, has anyone ever taken the time to read local health department restaurant inspection reports (if available)?

I assume most people here eat at restaurants without too much concern, but if you ever read the reports, you'll find experienced industry professionals cited for far worse infractions than these.
Huge moral hazard. Limiting moral hazard is what keeps our insurance/finance/debt system churning.

That said, lobbyists pay politicians and the media to help them believe that the people who are in a position to benefit most from moral hazard are also immune to it - something which has shown to be not the case.
Designing a device to fail after a pre-determined amount is very much against the law. Expected lifetime is different, but this is not what the previous poster was suggesting.
There are actually many methods in survival analysis -- just as in the rest of statistics -- that do not impose strict distributional assumptions, and account for the fact that many drives are still operational. But as someone else mentioned, the median is also a good statistic to report :)
Then say "better than hand-written C++", not "better than C++". It's like saying "C++ performs better than assembly". No it doesn't. It may perform better than hand-written assembly, and that's completely different.

It's just annoying when people will do anything to get on the "faster than C++" wagon.
But then banks would have less incentive to give out loans. You wouldn't have to pay back loans, just wait until you can purchase your debt for a fraction of the cost. Banks could then counter this by holding on to all debt, but this means giving out loans would be an even greater risk to them. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, though.
Perhaps I should clarify, I would hate to see this hurt the entire industry. If Soylent does not do a complete rethinking after what has happened I expect someone else to take their place.
However, won't doing this destroy your credit report history and make it a huge pain in the arse to get new credit?
Their lawyers said it wouldn't be an issue, IIRC. I don't know the details.
I don't want to get off on a rant here...
Wait until you have dependents to care for - then suddenly the choice is between paying for your medical care and feeding your family.
way to put your money where your mouth is. My respect for the Occupy movement just went up by an order of magnitude.
Surveillance-driven sabotage, perhaps?
Your analogy reminds me of this I just read the other day:

"Some countries initially felt they were isolated from AIDS, but now
they realize there is no such thing. There is no border, no boundary.
We've learned that walls endanger because they encourage a false sense
of security. Even if you could impose the perfect program for screening
international travellers, infected people will get in, and some of your
own citizens will come back infected. In the meantime, people won't
follow safe sex practices, because they figure they're protected inside
their walls. (...)

One of the major barriers we face in trying to get countries to deal
effectively with AIDS is the tremendous gap between social myth and
social reality. I think closing this gap is a useful step. It's
important to deal with things as they are, and not as somebody would
like them to be. (...)

I have asked a lot of government officials and experts, 'At what age do
young men and women in your society begin to have sexual intercourse?'
This is not prurient curiosity on my part. I'm trying to figure out when
you might start certain kinds of educational programs. The expert thinks
a minute. He may take on a reflective look as he considers his own
adolescence, and he makes a decision. Is he going to tell me when he had
sexual intercourse, or when he should have had sexual intercourse? The
answers are not at all scientific, and frankly, people often don't know
what's going on in their own society in terms of sexual practices and
drug use."

- Jonathan Mann, director of the Global Program on AIDS, from the
book: "Reinventing the Future: Conversations with the World's Leading
Scientists" by Thomas Bass, 1994

Great book. But the (somewhat paraphrased) quote fits rather nicely if
you replace screening with "hiring process" and "career advancement"
with "sexual practices".

How do we want our organizations to work? What should the life-cycle of
an employee be? Can we state that frankly in a way that's both good for
the company and good for the employees? Where do managers go as they
grow older? Up or out? If up, where does the CEO go?
wasted spending is not a social problem in itself -- it just moves wealth around, but doesn't destroy wealth.

Wasted production -- on stuff no one wants (like wartime destruction), is a problem.

Opportunity cost is wasted production (paying people to lay bricks instead of building efficient brick-building machines, say), and that's the motivation for "free market instead of central planning", but that's what austerity means. Austerity means cutting government spending to raise the government's bottom line -- but the government's bottom line isn't like yours. If the country owes its own citizens money, it won't go bankrupt -- that's just taxation under a different name
It is better for yourself and the creditor to just bypass the horrible and at times abusive debt collectors, but this would create a perverse incentive to ALWAYS default on loans.

Creditors asses your potential for default and base the rate of lending on that risk. In your scenario the rate of default would always be high therefore the rate that you borrow at would be extremely high, think loan shark high. Or you would find that no one is willing to lend money and this would cripple an important part of the financial system. Think student loans never existing.
Definitely a time-sink. And I seriously question its value as a long-tail investment. Even if you use it to document processes or a tutorial, after a couple of years or so it's out of date.

But I think you hit on the right value for someone who's not in the business of blogging: writing out the idea. We can keep ideas in our head, even code things out, but the process of putting your ideas into a blog post is a great way to flesh it out.
I'm not seeing that quote in the link, but I have to say I think it's pretty sad if the only reason somebody goes outside is to get food.
Money is influence, the source of that money is influential.

What are the perils of the other sources of money in open source?

For quite a long time the best documentation and guide for using Rails was a book.

Quite a few of the top contributors to Rails have published books about it.

Documentation is very much a weak point for open source. Should we criticize those who contribute to open source and request money for the documentation?

If not, why spread FUD around the idea of asking for direct monetary support of the code itself?
Finnish Game Industry
But the idea isn't to teach kids chemistry - it's to get the kids interested in chemistry.

I was given something very similar to this as a kid: http://www.amazon.com/Elenco-MX-907-200-Electronic-Project/d... (in fact, I think it was that, 20 years ago!)

It didn't teach me anything about electronics, I was too young to really grasp what I was doing. It taught me that with sufficient knowledge you can make something out of individually useless bits of electronics.

You're right to be more demanding of your undergrad quant class but this might be just the thing to get your 8 year old niece/nephew interested in science.
Just imagine someone makes a new movie where Lenny, Cobb and Neo are merged into one character in/out of a matrix, a dream and a story with a loss of hippocampal LTP.
What about all of the foods in the grocery store than can kill you over years if eaten as a primary source of a diet? Are those considered "safe"?

* Not trying to advocate Soylent. Just trying to point out that there are a lot of foods in the grocery store that can kill over time (and many are marketed as full meals intended to be eaten regularly).
I think a lot of software startups do extremely similar things with customer privacy. In fact there are probably places where the security flaws are worse than anything Soylent is doing.

That is not to excuse it, more to shed light on the fact that it is much more apparent when they are failing in the food industry.
Electron Shape Measurement, Most Precise Yet, Rules Out New Physics Theories
Well of course it's not true when you re-frame the argument into a strawman like that. A large percentage of proprietary programs are also blatant copies or ripoffs of something else. The issue that we're trying to get to is that free/open source software is principally better, not that all open source software is always less buggy or more featureful than the proprietary software it's intended to replace. Obviously that would be a ridiculous assumption, anyone who's seen all the crap throwaway projects on github can attest to it.
As the other poster mentioned, I was using puritanical to mean strict religious ideas and not the Puritan movement. You will notice I capitalised Sweden but not the word puritanical as it was not a proper noun.
Supercomputing simulation employs 156,000 Amazon processor cores
Another theory says that the webmasters are stealing the coins themselves. Perfect crime ;).
There are a few dietary supplements that voluntarily submit to FDA inspection of their facilities. Most don't. The protein powder I use is one of them:

http://www.1stphorm.com/products/men/level-1

I wouldn't really consider using anything that isn't, but lots of people do every day, probably mostly from ignorance.
Eliminate HTTP requests using JavaScript diffs and LocalStorage
Which is exactly what happens when poverty and disease go down and education up.
I'm not a real fan of chewing food, but having done a similar diet before I prefer it. Turns out that even though me and food don't always get along, after 3 weeks on a liquid diet the cravings for real food for me come back. There are plenty of weightlifters who have done similar full-liquid diets for years before soylent, this data exists but has been largely ignored since it's from a different kind of community. Anyways - 30 days isn't enough, many items take longer to produce issues. Vitamin C comes to mind, it's destroyed by sunlight, copper (copper is good for destroying a few biological agents it seems, birth-control and Vitamin C, oh it's uses - but we need it as well so it'll be there in soylent in trace amounts), and age, but so little is needed to avoid scurvy, and it takes about 3 months from your last consumption of it to produce adverse results, that it wouldn't be an issue... in the short run.

To address your comment about animals: I saw animals that are littered with disease standing above the product. Standing, breathing without masks, talking without masks(which means trace amounts of spit), in standard clothes that've probably been exposed to much. The rat was far less disturbing than seeing the people who were handling the product.

Contrary to the blood-work, there is a issue that presented itself after 30 days. Not a nutrient deficiency, but a chewing one: he mentioned he started chewing gum due to his jaw aching. As far as I know chewing is supposed to help keep the jaw healthy (an expert/dentist has been sorely lacking from these soylent discussions, I imagine they'd have much to say about chewing, jaw, and tooth issues that crop up), and as someone who hasn't done a great job of that in life... I certainly wouldn't want to mess with jaw health anymore.
CoFoundersLab Mobile - Talent Radar for Founders
Please. Please. For the love of god please. https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/How_to_set_up_a_secure_offline_sa...
I use SPARQL a lot although not Fuseki. I really like the flexibility it gives in the schema (flexible not less schema). As well as that one query language can be used on radically different implementations i.e. I don't need to change my datamodel or queries to try different storage models.

Although we also use BerkleyDB/je+lucene for indexing as well as a number of existing relational databases. Yet, considering the youth of the SPARQL eco system (1.1 of the standard is only out since the beginning of this year) there is some fantastic performance possible for both hard and easy queries.
I think it will be a bit like Java, not pretty, but fast enough and extremely robust in the long run. With a similar marketing pitch "Query Once Store Anywhere".

I also evaluated MongoDB, and I understand the value of a document store. I just don't think that MongoDB is a good document store, imho it just a slow /dev/null.
The means were pretty mild. Leveraging a monopoly on desktop software to force people to see IE as their default browser, pricing your product so low operating systems centered around spinning teapots can't possibly compete, and so on?

The nerdrage over all that was a little hard to take seriously even before we had historical perspective on it.

edit: I'm actually HAPPY that MSFT were found guilty of abusing their monopoly power. I just want to keep it in perspective, not just in the omg BillG is saving the world perspective, but frankly in perspective relative to all the evil that corporations are capable of doing...
If Austerity cut waste, it would probably work. The problem is that in government waste usually stems from bureaucratic calcification and corruption. Calcified and corrupt bureaucracies are highly resistant to change and have the system "wired" to defeat it, so they don't generally get hit much. Austerity's cuts fall disproportionately upon social safety nets and productive activities, hence the result.

I've been of the impression for a while that government waste and corruption grows without bound until it destroys the host, resulting in a revolution or some other kind of "reboot," and then repeat. There appears to be no way of actually cutting it without setting fire to the entire thing. Few things in nature are as tenacious as a parasite.
Flask-Scrypt — Flask-Scrypt 0.1.0 documentation
That's blogspam from Forbes. Actual link: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/02/19/magazine/shopping-habits.h...

Based on Charles Duhigg's very good book about habits.
The medical sector in the US operates this way openly, most medical providers have some sort of ability-to-pay based fee and payment schedule, if you ask. The big advantage over just taking on the debt and not paying it is that you can preserve your credit.
It depends on the numbers involved too.

Many companies give you a market rate and a bonus (sign on / stock RSU/ cash bonus etc) on top of it to incentivize extra work / ownership.

My case: my base salary is pretty competitive considering the market/location. I also get a stock award on top of that based on my future potential / current work etc. For me, the stock component has been a reasonable contributor to the final net take home.

Essentially: you work hard, you can potentially make 2x-3x your base and this multiplier only goes up as you go up levels.

I am not against discretionary bonuses like the above (obviously :). Come for the base, toil for the bonus.
You seriously don't know what are you talking about.
I'd love to say there's some more nefarious work going on, like governments trying to quash Bitcoin and executing these hacks...

But my guess is it comes down to poor security.
That's a very good question, here's a little of what I found:
http://www.investopedia.com/financial-edge/1111/how-much-has... . Less than $1 trillion total (under any estimate), bordering on having broken even or made the money back.
Fukushima is here: ‘ALL Bluefin Tuna Caught In California Are Radioactive’
The experiments most likely to shake up the future of physics
What makes you think that your judgements are any better than theirs? How do you judge performance? Do you look at code? Or do you simply go by how many feature check boxes they get through in a given time frame?

edit: and I don't ask this to be insulting, but judging performance is a very difficult task and I've never seen a reliable methodology for doing it. Thus, I'm naturally extremely skeptical when someone claims that they can do it better than others. Especially so when it includes broad generalizations about a group of people.
Eating is broken. It's time to disrupt the digestive system!
Shush, they have plenty of testimonials from real customers saying it works.

Soylent is a true superfood unlike scams like acai berry juice.

Solves long standing dietary issues that have gone unsolved by modern medicine? Check.

Helps you lose weight? Check.

Saves time and money? Check.

Testimonials? Check.

Even people with sciency sounding backgrounds think it's good! Let me just get out my credit card and sign up for a subscription. Good bye difficult exercise and time spent preparing healthy meals, hello easy street.
I watched the video. the rat is separated from the food preparation area by a sheet of plastic. This doesn't increase my confidence one iota.
repl.it contains code from a few years ago. That's way before a huge amount of general optimizations in emscripten, as well as asm.js. Here is a more up to date Lua VM running in JS:

http://kripken.github.io/lua.vm.js/repl.html

But even that is already out of date ;) just this week I found that I was building Lua with a bad choice of optimization flags. We include Lua VM benchmarks in the emscripten test suite, so for the latest numbers (with the proper optimization flags), see

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AkuGewEm05tZdFd...

It's possible to run the Lua VM in JS at only about 50% slower than a native build.

edit: fix link