skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
one of the few things virtually all economists agree with is that inflation can be too high, but also too low

Yeah, and that's a completely retarded model of economics. It's a consequence of the field being a giant circle-jerk of professors who cut their teeth in undergraduate classes where your merit was judged by how gnarly a formula you could come up with to prove your prowess at taking derivatives (I say this having been a math tutor at the University of Chicago, and helping econ students with their homework. There was even no concept whatsoever of dimensional analysis, much less error propagation analysis).

How can I say this model is completely retarded? Because there was deflation in the US from 1860 to 1900. And the country recovered from a civil war that decimated the population (literally, 1 in 10 were killed), built up incredible amounts of industry, made several world-changing inventions, emerged as a world power, and began closing the wealth gap.

Central banks are not run by Roman Emperors, they are run by economists - who derive no benefit from inflating a currency

Let me ask you something. Has there ever been a central banker who was part of the bottom 1%? Or have they all come from the top 5%? If it's the latter, they derive benefit from inflating a currency. In any case, this is an inapt comparison. The central banker is not like the caesar, but rather the overseer of the roman mint who instructed the slaves running the coin machine to dope it with silver.
Then, on that Hike - Someone decides that the fastest way to the top is to hire 2-3 more guides. But before you can give those guides any meaningful work, you have to take them through all the previous bad paths...
Actually, Vol two contains the decorator book (and the functional/compreshion book and the iteration book) :)
why is there no mention of Vanilla forums - http://vanillaforums.org/ ?
Because management looks at you funny when you say something simple will take 4 months. Then they lie and say that it couldn't possibly take that long. And the reason they lie is because there's no negative to them tying to you. Their job is to get you to go faster, and they are allowed to lie as part of their job, if it makes you go faster. The reality is that it doesn't make people go faster. It makes people leave faster. It makes people give up.
Never give an estimate to management. Estimating is their job, as they control the inputs to production. If you give an estimate, they will pressure you to meet it, no matter how unreasonable it later turns out to be. That also makes people want to leave.
The school I attended had Bioengineering which was more ag-bio engineering. It is something I'm looking at learning more about specifically the gene/biology coding aspects.

My $.02 is that you are in a good position to learn computer programming as it applies to sensors (ag/biology) and to learn how to process/mine/filter large data sets.

I'd talk with a professor or two in your major and see how many computer science classes you can substitute along with seeing what you can learn on your own.
I admit it's funny but if I showed this to a non-programmer friend, he'd be asking why I didn't research my route better or start on an unknown trail with minimal planning.
I did not make an appeal to authority. That would be if I said Cowen is wrong merely because Block and Barnett said so. I am saying that Cowen is a joke for the reasons spelled out in Block and Barnett's paper. Those reasons are not merely "neeyah" and the arguments therein are not somehow invalid or cease to exist because I don't care to regurgitate them for you.
Then whoever was planning the hike decides to go to a different peak when you're halfway up the mountain.
"Oh it's just one state over, I didn't think it mattered. See you tomorrow!"
List of important publications in philosophy
"Oh I get that this is the key fact, I put a smiley in there because I was fishing for a more exact number that is unlikely to be given"

The honest truth is that I actually don't know how many servers we have because it's not a number that I have to worry about.

I do know that floor(log_10(#servers)) = 2.
I just don't know why people won't arbitrarily add 2-3 more time on the estimate...
I second this, Mike Pall should write a book. I will buy any book Mike Pall writes.
It's simple. People don't like the honest answer.

As a developer, I have pressure to keep my estimate down. I can give you a guaranteed date with few problems, but the project is going to end up more time-consuming than what another developer is going to estimate.

The good news is that I will usually significantly beat my estimates under this system. However, I will then be accused of padding my estimates and will be given more aggressive targets, some of which I will miss.

The best way to combat this is to give me a team that has worked together on multiple projects within the domain, and account for changes and ambiguities as part of the process.
http://coding.abel.nu/2012/06/programmer-time-translation-ta...

I occasionally just paste this link with no explaination at the end of emails containing time estimates.
Comments in here currently are on par with YouTube. It's disgusting - we get it, you don't like NSA's spying programs. Breathless pontification on that point is utterly worthless. Stop.

Source report for the article: http://www2.itif.org/2013-cloud-computing-costs.pdf

I always laugh at graphs who move steadily upwards from the beginning of recording to the present, but then do insane things like dip dramatically and then rise prolifically in the future, like figure 1 in the report.

After looking at the endnotes for this report, it's clear that the writer has actually bought the meaningless blustering these companies and governments are doing. Threats, promises, and warnings aside, there's a distinct lack of actual action on the part of governments and companies towards this idea of harming US companies for what their government did.
Civilian control of the military was tenuous in the early decades of the cold war.

Curtis Lemay, head of the Strategic Air Command, made his own plans for a pre-emptive strike on the Soviet Union. Lemay also clashed with Kennedy during the Cuban missile crisis.

And Truman had to recall Macarthur when the latter refused to obey presidential directives.
Pray — free 3D renderer written in Perl 6
"Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." - Benito Mussolini
I swear something like this was posted about a month ago.
Those industries have lobbied a long time, and have been close with people who've built seniority now. It'll take a while for Tech to do that.
True, I was just pointing out that not supporting silicon valley is not a sign of being against technology, so much as being suspicious of one area of it. Silicon valley aligns itself with a lot more than just technology and I suspect it is other factors than the engineering that the politicians are lukewarm to. From their point of view, a bunch of hippies have just managed to blow the doors off the restrictions on access to presses and other forms of mass influence. I suspect that that is the bit that annoys them.
YouTube comments are great. Everyone always bags on them, but the complainers have no sense of humor.
Just out of curiosity, how were you carrying it? I'm picturing it stuffed in your bag like most people carry an iPad.

I'm wondering if you'd be better off carrying prototypes in a separate, custom piece of luggage, like a Pelican case. Something that says 'this is expensive and important', rather than 'someone made this in a garage'.
The joke between us engineers at work is to estimate the project time, then multiply by pi.
You let it sound as if it would be such a great hazzle to setup a website, yet websites and comment sections existed for so much longer then disqus. And guess what, spam also existed back then!

Ok, i get it, people are just to lazy to do that work (but they find the time to integrate disqus...) but from my point of view they are leading me to a website i don't want to use at all. Disqus is like a hidden website embedded in the one i want to visit. The difference is that I know that and i block that. Other people use that service and might not even recognize that they are leaving their tracks on some other website they don't even know about. And in contrast to the usual ad/cookie tracking they might even leave their email address there.

And seriously... an easy to setup CMS, that has a "user identity system, optional openID, an anti spam measure like recaptcha"? Does such a feature-beast even exist amongst the quadrillion CMS that exist since the dawn of time? (<-- sarcasm)

When i go to blogger or tumblr or wordpress and leave a comment i am aware that i leave a comment on that site, and only on that site. That's a big difference. To me at least.

From my point of view the hoster of a website is somewhat responsible for my user data. He shall not send my password to some other party, or he shall not send my email to some other party, etc. Using disqus only shows that he doesn't really care to the extent i would wish my data to be handled.

Of course it is up to me to use disqus, but, as i mentioned, 99% of people wouldn't know what is happening.
Spike Lee Responds To Designer Who Claimed He Wasn't Paid For His Work
Very interesting work. By the way, I'm planning to work on the project with the close purposes, but I have started with a more low-level tool first. My first work is a library to construct incremental parsers: https://github.com/Eliah-Lakhin/papa-carlo The idea is that the language's compiler based on this library will be easier integrated into the exist code editors and IDEs. Maybe we should somehow unite our efforts with the author of Nimrod?
Why take a car to the neighbourhood store when a fit-for-purpose bike would work just as well, while being free of all the complexities that a car has?
"The heart wants what it wants"
China may have a tyrannical government, but a fixation on the moon even though stark poverty exists is not an indictment. Otherwise almost every luxury in every first-world country would be a similar personal indictment, and the US's own moon-shot would prove it too to have a tyrannical government.
Exposing Online Trolls
because it actually isn't helping your health or the environment to use RCS, and actually isn't more complex to do with another tool.
I think were all just color blind.
Would Lincoln Have Survived If He Was Shot Today?
The Beauty of Japan's Abandoned Ruins
99% of the time you'll die before reaching the peak due to lack of water or food.
What makes UAAppReviewManager so much better than Appirater?
nimrod sounds even better than google go. why did you start it? what's the desired program that made you design nimrod?
This works:
(font color='red'>Red, anyone?</font)
Syndicalism: a replacement for Capitalism
While I agree with many of the other reasons and believe people in general can't estimate very well, I believe that for businesses this is indeed the fundamental reason. Even in a relatively understanding and engineering-centric environment, when I give what is probably still a bad under-estimate, I will get pressured on how we can reduce that number. I can't even imagine what it would be like in an environment that wasn't relatively understanding and engineering-centric.

If you don't want to hear the truth, you won't. Humans have known that since long before software engineering existed... or a subset of them, at least.
My old Motorola Backflip, for one. Apparently AT&T removed the "unknown sources" setting from their phones prior to 2011[1]. I think my girlfriend's Samsung Exhilarate from a year or two ago is locked out of installing apps from unknown sources, but I should make sure before I go talking out of my ass again.

[1] http://www.sleetherz.com/2011/05/att-users-now-you-can-insta...
Hold Your Forks: US May Lift Ban on Raw Chinese Chicken
Egos.
Yes, but via hckrnews.com (so H for me). It's a good pointer that I really am procrastinating when I do it repeatedly in the space of a few minutes.
Love seeing creative web architectures with nginx + lua like this, nicely done.
Game Maven
i hear you! working on changing it as we speak. :)
i hear you - working on changing it as we speak! :)
Thanks very much for being cool about it! I understand you didn't do anything wrong, it's just good to be aware of latent stuff in what we write sometimes, I totally do it to :) I love HN - only place around that I probably wouldn't get downvoted and flamed because of this. BTW, your grandmother sounds cool!
and

3) nothing is stopping anyone from upvoting the two
More like n + down arrow + enter, but yes.

I will also fully admit to having closed an HN tab and then immediately opening a new HN tab out of habit.
ICTSA Programming Competition 2013
AMD A10-6790K APU Officially Released
Your boss has also read about this hot new way to hike up mountains, and it is now mandated that you hike in this fashion.
Restaurant bans tipping, service got better and they made more money
So the article tries to describe the hidden complexity of software with a hiking analogy but then it leaves a huge part missing. Let's extend the analogy somewhat... this isn't your first hiking trip. In fact, you've been on dozens and dozens of hiking trips. You're an experienced hiker. Yet, why do you continue to give meaningless as-the-crow-flies estimates of how long it will take you to get to your destination? The reason is that if you miss your estimate, it probably won't matter. Your sherpas will be there at every stop with your food, water, and tent. You have nowhere to be any time soon, so estimating your time just isn't important enough to worry about.

Developer estimates are regularly off because they seldom impact the developer directly. Experienced development managers will pad the hell out of the developers who give them the worst estimates. Most developers will explain all the complexity of what threw their estimate off without acknowledging the huge mistake of not anticipating extra complexity in the first place.

My estimates in my early career were no better than anyone else's, ie way off -- especially for more complex projects. I'd explain what happened to my managers and soldier on. The very next task that came up, I'd give my manager some best-case estimate of how long something would take and the cycle would begin again.

That all changed once I started to do consulting for myself using "not-to-exceed" pricing. The first multi-month project I did killed me. My effective hourly rate went down to sub McDonalds levels and took much longer to deliver than I had expected. After that project, I did a post-mortem on the project to figure out where I went wrong. I came up with several spreadsheet templates and checklists to run through before giving any more estimates.

Mostly I just concerned myself with getting a hell of a lot better at estimating project duration and difficulty. Like most things, when you really pay attention to it and practice it, you get better at it.
I'm curious what you think comments are for, if not for people to express their opinions. Or is it only the comments of people who disagree with you that you'd like to stop?
> CISC has won (heck, even ARM is not RISC anymore). Deal with it :)

If by RISC you literally mean a reduced number of instructions, I guess that's a valid point. But RISC is mostly used to describe instruction sets in which each instruction performs a limited amount of work, especially memory accesses. That's why RISC architectures are generally load/store, while CISC architectures allow access to multiple discontinuous memory areas in a single instruction.

By the way, modern x86 chips are RISC machines that translate the x86 instruction set to native microcode.
Ah, distributed crawling. What a great idea. :)
Cmd-L + n + enter is the Chrome winning combo for me.
Reverse psychology against hackers/spies. Let them think that it was a super obscure, difficult code to crack.

Nope, according to the article it was listed in the instructions handed out to the soldiers who manned the silos. If there had been post-it notes back then, they probably would have stuck one right on the console with the code.
I'm thinking about creating a generic version of this that checks on a single RSS feed for you.
I think that the banana peel is a reference to this: http://www.reddit.com/r/WTF/comments/1qkd9x/secret_staircase...
MPAA Banned From Using Piracy and Theft Terms in Hotfile Trial
According to the article it was actually "General Tom Power" they were worried about.

Reality is better than fiction.
Every blog there seems to do this by default, which means that Pocket, etc., can't read them.
Or just Cmd-T + n + enter
Mmm, the US is known for its crazed gunmen, and a spy has little incentive to ensure mutual destruction.
Does something like http://erlangonxen.org/ fit into this area?
I just brain-deadedly tried that to see what it does and... yes, apparently. (plus the down arrow)
http://theonceandfuturecoffeeaddict.files.wordpress.com/2012...
Because the research will take a significant part of the project time. Once the thorough research is done - third-party libraries are verified (that they do what's needed, and not too buggy), prototypes are written (to confirm libraries and internal dependencies work as expected), proof-of-concepts are run (to actually see that it's possible for a reasonable effort), time is measured (to confirm the way to go), interfaces are clarified (as part of the research, specifically, in the architecture department), results are estimated (basing on all results above), specifications are formalized (and agreed upon) - there is an awful lot less of what to do.
I hope a nuclear war erupts right now so I don't have to go to work tomorrow. I hate my job with the passion of a trillion suns.

The only thing preventing me from not blowing out my fucking brains is living is slightly cooler than not existing.
Yes; and it is unfortunately the entrance to the "dark playground" for me.

See http://www.waitbutwhy.com/2013/10/why-procrastinators-procra... for the full expansion of the dark playground.
Facebook reveals friends list even when it’s set to private
I suspect they know. They just happen to be the types of people who would "burn down the kingdom so long as they could be king of the ashes."
Why Procrastinators Procrastinate.
Cool project. How does it accomplish the realtime GC max pauses of 1-2 ms after compiling to javascript? Wouldn't the js implementation's GC have the final say on GC pauses? Thanks.
True. It used to be the best auto-complete out there, and for some reason it has become just as bad as Chrome's.
Actually I'm just trying to get Karma by sounding smart. I really just copied and pasted everything from Wikipedia. I have no idea what I'm talking about.
Tutorial, Beginner: Dynamically change TinyMCE language based on context lang
Okay, I agreed (had no other choice) with management to not have less than 20% variance in my estimates.(read: negotiated-and-reduced estimates) as a part of our performance metrics.
The Official Bitcoin Black Friday T-Shirt
No, I think I type news + Return (Firefox).
It looks like the third number specifies an index, not a length.

var array [10]int
slice = array[2:4:7]

> its capacity is now only 5 elements (7-2)
My guess -- without any data behind it -- is that the belief is a function of the understandable depression about job hunting (read: desperation) when everybody around you is enjoying holidays and spending money.

I was once fired on December 15th, _after_ I had bought all the holiday gifts of course. At that point (30 years ago! and in a non-tech field, back then) it was impossible to get anyone to look at a resume. I started a new job on January 15, but boy was that a lousy Christmas.

As the article points out, however, the "nobody's hiring now" assumptions are out of whack. Maybe this news will cheer up _someone_.
Yes, sadly. On my machine it is win+w - n + enter (new browser + hn ). If you don't want to waste your whole day on HN try the procrast settings in your profile. What works for me is every 70 minutes I get 10 minutes HN.

I started developing a site which domain starts with "news". Sometimes in some mysterious way that is the first. :)
This is nice to hear, I suppose. I just separated from a company due to failure to pay/contract term violations and been thinking the odds of me finding gainful employment would be pretty low or non-existent until late Jan.

Still seems like its going to be an upward climb as my normal places to look for python and or backend dev are somewhat sparse right now.
I'm currently working in an academic setting and from my observations the "phenomenology" approach to papers is still very prevalent. I see a lot of papers which are just measuring A vs B vs C in some way.

The point about project size is also still valid. There is no way a small research group at a university can "compete" against Rackspace or Amazon in cloud computing innovation.
"Every time I read about the moon and mars I think about how humans are going to change the environment after living there for a while."

There is no environment on the Moon. Can't 100% guarantee that for Mars but it's still the smart bet.

Repeat that as often as it takes to understand it. In the way most people mean the term, there is NO environment on the Moon. There is NO environment on the Moon. There is not a SINGLE LIVING THING on the Moon. If you want to be a Moon environmentalist, then you should be in support of Human growth onto it, because until that happens, there is no environment on the Moon to even become "changed".

Unless you really are in favor of some right for literal rocks, utterly lifeless, sterile, dead, unconscious rocks with absolutely 0 probability of any of that changing to remain "undisturbed", there is no current environmental concern for the Moon.
Spot on. NTE billing puts the onus on you and gets you actually thinking about it. Helped me a ton.
Great question. Any fault in my post is surely with my quick summary. The model is complex, and goes beyond tech: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diffusions_of_innovations

I describe the innovator group that way because high-tech early adopters will often try a new tech just because it's an exciting new tech.

I don't think that's fashion, exactly, because those people are only 2-3% of the market, but you could look at it as fashion within that group. A good recent example is Google Glass. Some people surely bought it to be seen as cool by other tech adopters, but I know a bunch of people who bought it just to see what the hell it did, to experiment with it. Ditto for low-cost 3D printers.

I think the name "innovators" pre-dates applying the model to high-tech types, and outside of tech I think the term is more clearly appropriate, because tech folks have an especially strong fondness for novelty.
"Developer estimates are regularly off because they seldom impact the developer directly."

I think I most disagree with this. Developers, in my experience, are quite often asked to leave the company after such estimates.

It's good to have a template - it helps not to forget things - but it is inherent in the work to have unknowns. Large unknowns. A good consultant would probably refuse to work on a project which would require him to use several major technologies which aren't familiar to him, but developer in a company may not have such a luxury as selecting a kind of a project.
H enter for https://news.ycombinator.com
Safari is smart enough to check the title tag
I use the letter 'Y' for y-combinator