skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How about the idea of actually hiring people, rather than handing out money? As in, the employer of last resort hires people to clean and fix roads and parks, etc. Or perhaps in some cases, being paid to go to school or doing basic research in fields deemed to be relevant at the time? (even if it means you do research for a couple of years for low pay, then bail out)

There are enough things in the commons that need doing, I can't see just giving the money away to the able bodied/minded.

What's wrong with using tax money to approach 100% employment, and if you want a larger salary, get a private job? (as for the more grungy private jobs, if they can't find people to do them for $MIN wage, maybe they should up the automation or fold, in some cases)

Note that I am NOT advocating government ownership / communism, just basic Keynesian spending directed at useful activity, with the goal to keep unemployment near 0%. I suppose that in itself could be a nightmare for some corporations, but screw 'em. Treat people w/ dignity, or they can/will work elsewhere. (at least in the fantasy world in my head :-))

Recapping some other comments in this thread:

"Money for nothing" is very likely to cause inflation. So would full employment, but perhaps actually having something of value produced by the employed would offset that some?

Not many people would be satisfied sitting around doing nothing all day. Even in high school, most people got a bit bored after the end of summer break.
Heh. And the success of the first group is dependent on the success of the second group.
"After all, the thought of perpetual poverty is a huge motivator."

Pain, fear, and force are by far the least effective means of motivating labor, and they massively undercut the more effective means (enjoyment of the work, pride in the product of your labor, identification with and emotional investment in the enterprise, etc.). The threat of destitution is not necessary to procure labor, but only to procure it at a bargain rate.
I have thought the same thing. However, after a little thought I realized I would have sold as soon as their price got multiplied by 10x. I don't have the nerve to keep them from 1$ to 1000$. In no possible universe I am rich.
The one (and only) problem I had with the posting was this line:

>Salary: Negotiable, but you should know up front we’re not a terribly money-motivated group. We’re more likely to spend less money on salary and invest that on making your day-to-day life at work better.

That immediately jumped out at me. That came off so off-putting. If you're not a "money motivated group", that means you pay more, right, RIGHT? No, of course not. Again, the author probably didn't mean for it to come out the way it did, but it felt so sleazy, like they were trying to put one over the applicant. "We can't pay you a lot because we're not about money here". .. urgh.

All the other stuff about work-life balance and multiple roles, I didn't have a problem with. This job is made for a single 20-something guy or girl who wants to hang out with the penny-arcade crew, not someone with kids and a spouse.
Coincidentally 62% don't have tablets.
I'd love to see a typeahead especially for games. Then you import a more robust catalog.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_PlayStation_3_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_xbox_360_games
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Wii_games

have you considered more 'black hat' strategies for adoption?

http://davegooden.com/2011/05/how-airbnb-became-a-billion-do...

craiglist is quite the hub for used games where I live.
Security don't helps when the poor are motivated. There are a lot of kidnappings in Mexico City.
There were some good parts near the end. I think it was more of a demo than a polished set. A polished set would be nice to see.
But people expect BTC prices to go down at any time. They also expect it to recover, so who knows. It brings to mind Peter Thiel's recent comment about "the idea of money being a bubble which never ends." Of course, never say never, but until then...
I don't think you're full of shit. I think you're onto something.
But even electronics do not change value on a daily/weekly basis. And when it does, like pending the release of a new iphone, people do stop buying them.
Gather feedback in realtime via sketches, notes and selections
Hi Ycombinators,

Right in time for Thanksgiving I'd like to share some great improvements of Notism
- our design collaboration platform that will make reviewing design work much easier.

We've added different ways to communicate ideas: deliver feedback or communicate
ideas via notes, sketches or selections. We've also added a solid task management
system with the ability to add tasks right to Basecamp. It's also possible to attach files
to notes and even upload PDF files.
Everything in Notism is happening in realtime so no need to hit refresh all the time :)

I've created a promocode "ycmbntr" - that gives you a 2 month agency plan subscription for free
to see if Notism suits your workflow. You can apply the code on the account page after signing up at www.notism.io

Would love to see some of you test-driving and looking forward to your feedback.

Many thanks in advance,
Jan
Maybe not thousands, but perhaps 5-10? I bounce around from book to book quite regularly, especially technical books.
A not-unreasonable penalty for risking pollution of his ground water, especially since he probably did the same thing to electronics many times before. I can't believe nobody is talking about this. Illegal in many US states.

http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?story...
How refreshing it is with a tech product that doesn't launch in the US first! I'm quite happy that there are more non-US non-China competitors popping up in the mobile market.
Is BTC-E the only one that allows this, what alternatives are there?
Thing is, the fact that this is still newsworthy in the tiny HN community means that it's on the bleeding edge for people in the real world. I was talking about bitcoin to my workmates the other day and none of them had even heard of it (I've been following it since the Wired article in 2011).

While it's clearly too late to be first, second isn't a bad place either. Just that the arbitrary line is the sand is higher. You can still ride the wave created by the early adopters (who took on the initial risk and validated the entire ecosystem).

As an aside - it would be interesting to see the adoption curve for BTC as compared to Paypal (probably the last disruptive financial platform) and whatever else preceded that (Western union, gold, seashells?).

Nonetheless, I share your pain of not having invested more at the beginning, but that's just the nature of any speculative investment / bet.
4 stories of fraud, hacking, and digital currencies,When bitcoins go bad
With Bitcoin interest (and prices) spiking, you might be considering investing in your own little cache of digital currency. But before you set up a Bitcoin wallet, you should think long and hard about who will watch over your digital wealth. In its relatively short lifespan, Bitcoin wallets and processors have been a target for hackers — and old-fashioned fraudsters. In fact, within the last week, one of the most prominent European exchanges reported it had lost over $1 million worth of bitcoins to hackers.
He is not the only one, back in 2010 I did mine 160 BTC, however at some point I stopped caring. Months later I had to format hard disk because ArchLinux did a great job breaking the whole system with an update, in the moment I just didn't remember that there were a BitCoin wallet in my system. Damn ArchLinux.

Although I didn't lose much as him. Now I kinda feel relieved knowing his mistake, he lost much more than me, I am sure that there are much others at the same spot. We all just contributed to elevate the bitcoin price by making misery out of our selves.
Just out of curiosity, what is the rationale for a non-SSA bytecode? Is the idea that each implementation will have a platform-optimized SSA format?
Ok, I'm sold. My first search was useless, but I searched for "ES6 ready date" (scrapping 100k top sites), and got https://mail.mozilla.org/pipermail/es-discuss/2013-November/....
What if it's a batch ETL process where there is no "user" to tell that it went wrong?

The point that when you're worrying about string length, it's often an indicator of a separate problem is a good one. But some things really do need the ability to measure/truncate strings and not every situation allows just throwing the software in the trash as an option.
I think you missed the point. The difference brador highlighted is the difference between unrealized gains and realized gains. "Paper money" is just "(gains of) money on paper" if I'm reading his comment right.
Now, look over here! When I substitute this context with that, ka-pow! now it's an array of characters!

Big deal. I don't understand what the point of this article is when it shows the shortcomings of half a dozen different string implementations in random languages. Yes, if you don't understand the language, then your assumptions about how it works may be wrong. Big surprise, that doesn't mean every string implementation needs to conform to your expectations...
The company is small. It's a handful of people in a small office. Influence is not closely tied to size with a business like PA.
Three interesting pieces of data that help this discussion:

1) To combat extreme poverty, a lot of great studies show that giving direct cash is better than giving non-profit services. http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...

2) Instead of expanding the welfare state, it's probably better that we expand the Earned Income Tax Credit (EITC) which has HUGE support on both sides of the aisle. It was first created by Milton Friedman and is one of the only things that is a policy that we predicted would be successful and became hugely successful. The issue is that each party in the United States has found that public opinion polling finds that "SNAP" or other parts of the federal government are hugely popular compared to the wonky sounding EITC.

3) Some studies also show that despite poverty, human beings will also forgo basic necessities (as determined by the state) and buy things like smartphones, text messaging plans, etc.

All in all, really, what we should be doing is likely cash infusions to the extremely poor, expanding EITC (which somewhat supports the article), and keeping the important parts of the state alive, e.g. healthy food, early childhood pre-school, etc.
And technical books have a requirement of being at least 500 pages.
Be careful. You are moving into Keynes heresy territory. The imperial inquisition (aka the very serious people) may want to have a word with you.
Since this seems to be confusing people, I'm providing a small hypothetical example here.

"Any software that defines "do something" here as "silently discard 1/3rd of the user input" is software I'm going to throw in the trash."

You are reading far more in than I put in. I merely said somehow you need to resolve this; you put a particular resolution in my mouth, then attacked.

I did choose the web for one reason, which is that you can't avoid this case; you can try to limit the UI to generating 100 characters only (and I still haven't defined "characters"...), but it's 15 seconds for a user to pull open Firebug and smash 150 characters into your form submission anyhow. Somehow, you better resolve this, and as quickly as you mounted the high horse when faced with the prospect of mere truncation, throwing the entire request out for that will cause somebody else to mount an equally high horse....
I disagree for novels etc, but for textbooks and review papers it is really unbelievably better to have a printed copy. The ability to flick back and forward and quickly take notes is so, so useful. Nothing to do with the smell or cracked spine though. Fuck cracked spines.
Penny Arcade is not a small company - at least it shouldn't be. That's what people are saying.
The article references $10,000/yr BGI for all over 21. Thats some $2,400,000,000,000 which is 15% of USA GDP.
Dude.. you're eating away a new Ferrari every Saturday morning. Stop that!
Are there any downsides to the subreddit approach? If not, wouldn't that be a good solution to the broad userbase problem?
Thanks for this, I too am curious as to why this isn't in the sale copy on the page. I actually thought it was a dev framework of some kind.
I can't help out a lot. But I did accidentally order a pretty nice Christmas present that it turns out I don't need. Drop me an email with your address and I'll forward it for the kids.
How is the Enforcer system related in any way to technical roles?

Since you didn't seem to get it, the Enforcers are people that 'volunteer' for parts of the event in exchange for free tickets to attend the rest.
Would something like an adaptive replacement cache, where there are two caching mechanisms (LRU & LFU) but one list, help mitigate this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adaptive_replacement_cache
How much inflation would be necessary to make $68000 worthless? If obviously can't be reduced to the buying power of $0 in today's dollars, because that would require infinite inflation.

Let's break it down: $68000 annually is $5667/month or $186/day. Let's say 20% is intended to go to food: $37/day. That's a reasonable amount: for a couple they'd have to shop and prepare most of their own meals and wouldn't eat extravagantly, but they wouldn't be eating rice and beans for every meal either.

For $37/day to become essentially worthless for the purposes of feeding a couple, I think it's buying power would need to drop 66% to 75%. The latter gets you down to $9.25/day, which is rice and beans territory. It's still survivable, but you can't survive well on it.

This couple would still have the equivalent of $17000/year, which is about what one person working full-time at minimum wage would earn. So, if one of them gets a minimum wage job, they'd be earning as much as two people working minimum wage, while one stays home (perhaps to care for children and avoid the costs of child care.) That's already better than the system we have today, where both of them would have to work to earn that much and any children are left to fend for themselves much of the time.

If they both get minimum wage jobs, they're now earning as much as three minimum wage workers instead of two. Again, much better than today. This keeps one of their teenage children in school instead of joining the minimum wage workforce to help support the family.

All this is assuming that the entire economy is hammered by enough inflation to cause a 75% reduction in the earning value of a dollar. Historically, it takes decades for that to happen under normal circumstances, and I don't think that changing the way the government spends money that it's already spending anyway is likely to cause hyperinflation.
Howells ran a program on his laptop for a week to generate his stash

CPU based bitcoin mining, probably solo without a pool, 7000+ coins. Ha. Those were the days.
Ask HN: Best Dotcom Bubble Stories
As we debate whether or not we are in a social media-driven tech bubble or not, it might be fun for those of us who lived through the one 15 years or so ago to post your favorite stories around the excess and lack of success in that era.
Not sure how old you, but one of the central sacrifices that a young entrepreneur has to be ready to make is on the matter of family formation.

The moment you are a family man, things are different, you can still try starting a business but you really need to think long and hard about what you are doing before you make a move.

In fact I would say if you already have a family to support the only business you should start is one where you already have customers lined up ready to pay, or you have investor money to cushion you.

Good luck with everything am sure things will work out.
There is something I would like to point out: the State is the only institution that can work at scale without having to extract benefits. It's the only thing that can get the economies of scale without having to pay the shareholders, it just has to break even. A State insurance is a quite different beast from a private insurance on this aspect for example. So giving money for people to buy a private insurance, or having the state running the insurance is very different.
Yes, I have a similar question. One of the major reasons to have social programs that buy things like health insurance is that governments have a lot more bargaining power than individuals (up to and including the legal authority to set price caps). In the case of healthcare, governments can get the same coverage and care much cheaper per capita than individuals could if they purchased it on their own. Giving individuals a basic income does not give them this bargaining power, so doesn't that mean that either (a) there will still be a need for social welfare programs for things like healthcare, even with the basic income; or (b) the basic income level must be much higher per capita than what the government would spend on these programs? I think I am probably missing something here, so I'd appreciate it if someone would explain this.
This statistic is not very useful in isolation. What percentage of people in this age group have tried using ebooks? They say that 45% of those surveyed don't have an ebook-ready device... what percent of the ebook naysayers have not even tried it?

It also seems odd to me that they treat 16-24 as one group. 24 year olds are adults who hopefully have college degrees, jobs, perhaps have a long commute, and nontrivial income. 16 year olds are most commonly living with parents and unemployed. It's not hard to imagine these differences being a factor in digital media habits.
Liquid store of value. USD is liquid, but inflationary. Gold is a good store of value, but you can't really spend it like you can spend Bitcoin.
You missed that it is not designed as a lower-cost Android phone?
Pictured here: nobody dancing.
I already have a sandbox, it's called a computer.
I don't think single payer health care and this proposal are mutually exclusive. Additionally, the proposal behind this link stipulates that $3k be spent on healthcare, which could easily be implemented by a voucher system.
The divisibility of the currency doesn't matter for this calculation. Currency represents wealth. There is a finite amount of BTC that will ever be available. Any BTC that is locked away like this means there is less BTC to represent the same amount of wealth (actually, it's a growing amount of wealth presently). This means the value (or potential value) of each BTC has gone up.
It does seem unfair but that's just how it goes. For instance consider that a third of the worlds gold ever mined comes from one country, South Africa. That's a bit geographically unfair. Since South Africa was in the empire (and now still in the CommonWealth), it means the mining rights for that gold went to Britain and other friendly countries. That's a bit politically unfair.

Or consider when gold became the gold standard in the 19th century, a lot of that gold was controlled by a single family, the Rothschild's because of success 100 years earlier though Mayer Amschel Rothschild. That is a bit unfair.

Economics has never been fair. Say you bootstrapped a new digital currency and gave it out to all the people in the world evenly and they all recognised it as holding value, eventually through luck, and intention, some people will have more of that currency than others.

The way BitCoin was bootstrapped took into account that the earlier someone got on board, the higher the risk they took. So if you think of it that way, its not completely unfair.
sounds like real state agents
Everyone cites the same wikipedia article and news reporter. Where is the actual data on this?
I'll upvote any use of the word "cooze" especially one so apt.
As a parent, it's incredibly important to read physical books.

First, it shows your children you can be entertained without an electronic device. My oldest son is three and already an expert on the iPad and iPhone. It worries me how much he wants to use the device, and telling him he can't use it and the whole family is taking a timeout from electronics is important to his growth. He can draw while I read a book, for example.

Second, buying physical books at a bookstore is a great bonding experience. I love taking my little guys to the local Half Price Books which always has a great dedicated kids section.

These reasons aren't only for parents, of course, but as a parent I find having physical books present is important.
Nemo, replicant, webos? All fully free OSs afaik.
The value investor should be mentally prepared to endure further big drops while holding, though.
> How about the idea of actually hiring people, rather than handing out money?

I think the thing behind the increasing popularity of basic income is that we live in a world in which capital is increasingly important, and the fundamental idea of wage labor as the main source of income is breaking down. Creating make-work government wage-slaves is not a solution to this problem; creating a tax-and-general-benefit structure which amounts to an assessment on those making the most from the commons that is redistributed on an equal basis, OTOH, is.
Thanks, this makes a ton of sense and I will hopefully get to see the term sheets today
Hipsters wrote this article.
Travel. Going away for two weeks and taking 1 ebook compared to 8 or 9 paperbacks is really nice.
All of these examples work in Haskell's canonical text library, 'text'! It's the only language I know of that works.
Pretty cool but I wish either that they had integrated with coinbase instead of bitpay, or that bitpay would hurry up and approve or deny my 3 week old application.
Can someone explain the "write barrier" stuff? It's hard to glean what the problem is that they're solving here... And what they're saying about Arrays, Strings, Hash, etc, in relation to WB protected vs. WB unprotected.
If you get sent another 0.05 BTC to your wallet, you will have a 1 BTC balance again.

The single unit (1 Bitcoin) is just an arbitary measurement.
It's unfair to compare a phone hardware company that needs to make money to survive to a company that gets almost all its money from ads, searches, cloud and personal data and uses that money to subsidize hardware as a loss leader(or making bare profits) both to gain marketshare and also to undercut and weaken other smartphone companies' profit margins so that they have less money to compete in web search now or in the future. [1]

From a consumer point of view, you're right though. The market is heading towards commoditization and Jolla will most likely fall into the moat if people compare them on price alone.

[1] http://techcrunch.com/2011/03/25/search-googles-castle-moat/
Vibe.d 0.7.18 has been released
My security conscious nature has always been distrustful of using a public cdn. It represents a potential security and privacy concern to my clients. It'd be an interesting attack vector to inject malicious javascript code into a wide pool of sites at once. It is also an operational concern that these systems are going to continue operating for the long term or not suffer service interruption.
Here's an important piece of demographic information for the survey:

> 45% of those surveyed don’t own a device that can read ebooks – this includes both e-readers and smartphones.

So almost half of those polled don't actually have steady access to ebooks. I wonder how the statistics change for a sample who have ready access to both.