skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I would like somebody to explain why gold is inherently valuable

Basically, gold is valuable because it is useful. For example:

* Gold is the most maleable and ductile of all the metals.

* Gold is very efficient for transmitting heat and electricity.

* Gold has the highest corrosion resistance of all the metals.

* Gold does not oxidize.

* Gold can be used to make jewelry, which people find naturally attractive. It is the only "gold-colored" metal.

* Gold is used in electronic components: connectors, switch and relay contacts, soldered joints, connecting wires and connection strips.

* Gold alloys are used for fillings, crowns, bridges and orthodontic appliances.

* Gold is used as a drug to treat a small number of medical conditions.

* Small amounts of gold are used to remedy a condition known as Lagophthalmos, which is an inability of a person to close their eyes completely.

* Radioactive gold is used in diagnosis. It is injected in a colloidal solution that can be tracked as a beta emitter as it passes through the body.

* Gold is also used as a lubricant between mechanical parts on space vehicles.

* Gold is also used when making specialty glass for climate controlled buildings and cases.

* The visor on the helmet of an astronaut's space suit is coated with a very thin film of gold.

What can you do with a Bitcoin?
How to Stalk Your Dog
Hey Buddy,

It happens to many, It happened to me. Entrepreneurship as we all know is not easy, if you are financially unstable don't think the world is Goog to end day after tomorrow. It doesn't and shouldn't. Get a relief, get your skills tuned, get employed somewhere and work on your passion and if things work out you can be / will be a success story. However don't Loose hope and passion for what you do. Beat wishes .
What if Satoshi is actually a group of NSA agents who created a new crypto-currency as a honey-trap to attract bad guys so that they could either stop them or use them as slave agents. What if?

Would that Satoshi want to be identified?
With deflation (i.e. prices drop so the purchasing power of $100 rises over time) you lose if you're selling a product/service with fixed costs or paying off a loan while your salary is dropping. With high inflation (i.e. prices rises so the purchasing power of $100 drops over time) you lose if want to buy a certain amount of products/services and your income is not rising as fast. I'm not an economist but both are bad.
Technology Jerks: An open letter to sexist dudes ruining everything
While not completely analogous, when I graduated with a 4 year degree, I didn't know what to do in life. Went back to grad school - then exited - still lost. Two hospital stays with a wife and young child. No job. Life sucked. If your religious, cling to that. If not, cling to your wife and kids. THEY are the important thing.

I am religious, so I will be praying for you that everything will turn out. Keep us posted, man.
TC Cribs: Inside SoundCloud, The Berlin-Based Startup Fueled By Music
Why must Mental Floss always tease with these under-informative articles?

Looking at Wikipedia, B batteries were 45 volts! No wonder they didn't sick around. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Battery_(vacuum_tube)
There were a number of answers, but if you actually work out the math, outside of big jumps where one exchange may be moving too fast for people doing arbitrage, with all the fees and transfer costs, the prices work out to be about the same. So, BTC-E has a 1% fee, plus whatever cost it took you to do the International Wire Transfer (say $35 bucks). That already gets you to ~$900. So, you get into Gox and sell. Well, that's 2200 JPY, you have to pay for the wire, $920, plus your bank probably charges you $20 for receiving a wire, $940... and that's before the 4 weeks+ it takes for Gox to get you your money + the trading fees. It may look like there's room for arbitrage but the price differences, for the most part, do take all costs into effect.

(PS Yes, I know the wire transfer fees can be lowered in terms of percentage of the cost by transferring more money at once; it's just a simple illustrative example.)
Don't worry, I'm sure the next person you meet will bring you crashing back to reality.

@OP.. it may not help much in your position, but that Man in the Arena quote seems relevant here. Imo you still deserve more respect (all other things being equal) than the vast majority of the world that not only never attempt great works, but actively try to prevent others from trying or succeeding too. Hope that your next endeavor goes better.
Buy a pizza.
Good for you, sir.
If it reaches $1000, will mining bitcoins be considered a worthwhile endeavor again?
Class act, as always Josh.
Silver was historically verified too. But it lost it's value in the 20th century, when people stopped using it as a money.
Interesting, thanks. That puts it in more perspective for me. Although, still, it seems the term "inherent" might be a poor adjective to use to describe the system.
Let's shut that trope down right now.

Ruby is slow, and Rails is slow, although they are both much better than it used to be.

But this isn't bloat. Rails is a large framework that provides moderately sensible defaults. The tradeoff of that is there's a lot of stuff in there which might not be used by every app. This, and the overall flexibility of the framework, can cause performance to suffer, and combined with Ruby's relatively lacklustre performance, that can cause big scaling problems.

Twitter is a poor example though, given the somewhat unique problem space it's tackling. But - building a standard e-commerce or service site? No problem. Getting bigger? Add some hardware. Still not enough? Start customising the framework. Because it's a toolset, not a one-size-fits-all solution. And if you've got outsize scaling requirements, you are going to have to get your hands dirty.
keep up keeping on!
Wow, that was really interesting. Such a simple idea in concept, but it took a while to find the perfect material with the right type of properties to actually be able to build "things" with. I wonder how long before bacteria will adapt and evolve to survive on that surface, or would that be impossible due to limitations in size of the bacteria?
I knew this is a bit irrelevant, just want to show a pure js ripple effect which I borrowed before: http://jsfiddle.net/esteewhy/5Ht3b/6/
Oh God,

Your post seems like nothing but that "genre" of hn post someone pointed out recently. It's the "let me show you I'm smart by pointing the article is technically incorrect in how it states things even though its statements are how both informed laymen and experts tend to express thing" Post

OK, for "Quantum state", substitute "states requiring a specifically probabilistic/quantum-mechanical description" and for "classical states" substitute states amenable to a classical description.

And someone else can explain the other things for you if you need it.
There are around several hundred thousands of bitcoin users. There are more than 7 billion people. Bitcoin is in the very early phase.

For comparison: first GSM call was made in 1991. In 1994 subscribers hit 1 million, nowadays there are several billions. Would you consider someone with GSM phone in 1994 an early adopter or not?
If you have any technical skills, you should immediately go get a good paying job.
As the article states, a patch exists which implements the functionality required by the author, so the only 'demand' is to apply that patch, hardly a monumental task.

The problem here is that Nginx developers refuse to implement a free patch which already exists for a feature easily found in the competition in order to protect their business model.

Sure, what Nginx devs do is a legitimate practice, as legitimate as the author complaining about it and proposing a change of software or a fork. I don't understand why many get so upset about it.
So they'll probably get the person that they ask for, but the question is what value they will get out of that person. They've asked for qualities that make for a good PM, but without emphasizing any of the qualities that make for a maintainable code base. Anyone they hire is guaranteed to be eager to please, and may have a problem saying "no" to work that comes at the expense of their focus.

I don't trust their technical vetting abilities, as their technical staff is small, and were not themselves selected by people with much technical expertise. The issue isn't that their job posting is unfair, it's that it weeds out the wrong people.
3D Printing - Could It Change How We Make Food
Didn't watch this video. But as far as I recalled back then, the guys at Twitter was complaining about the slowness of Rails and MRI, as Rails was not asynchronous and MRI was CPU-bound, so instead of fixing this root cause to apply the tricks from V8 to Javascript to improve Ruby，they chose the more "pragmatic" way to use Netty that is asynchronous and Scala that is way faster.

I don't accuse them of not saving the world, but Ruby and Rails lost a great opportunity to dominate the web community. If Rails were as performant as Node.js, I doubt lots of companies would change gears.
I had to take care of an ill relative, and my startup was immensely supportive throughout. I've seen similar things happen at a variety of companies.

You're creating a false dichotomy here. I agree that places that push the "we're just like a family" line often do so because some boss means "I want to act like an abusive dad". And I agree that no place is perfect.

But there's plenty of room for compassion and human feeling in the workplace. Companies are human institutions, and executives ignore that at their peril.
Can you send actual gold to the other of the planet within the blink of an eye?
You mean shorting bitcoin?
> who need to send money home at low cost and with no delay.

Bitcoin is the solution to none of these problems. You cant buy rice or bread with bitcoin in Africa, let's be serious now.
"I would like somebody to explain...why government support is necessary."

Suppose you issue me a loan of some money, and I never bother to pay you back. What are you going to do about it?
Seems like a troll.
Yet another disingenuous Microsoft Scroogled ad :|
https://cointhink.com/arbitrage/btcusd charts mtgox/btce/bitstamp and calculates the amount of arbitrage between the exchanges. It uses the orderbooks of each exchange to tally the amount available for arbitrage.
>Web Workers are true threads, it's just the shared memory part that's missing.

And thank god for that. I've never understood the fetish C/++ programmers have for shared memory, and locks, and mutexes. Erlang has a much saner approach to concurrency/parallelism, and web workers isn't terribly far away from Erlang's actor model.

EDIT: That said, I thought about the idea of only allowing typed arrays to be shared, and I actually really like it. I think that's a sane way to approach shared memory in JS, and it could cover some of the use cases that web workers aren't a big help with.
Both of those are Informational documents, not Standards. :) Documents like this one are Standards: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2616

Given the quality of MSFT's and Apple's firewalls, and the ease of use of MSFT's (I assume Apple's is easy to use, but I have no direct experience), I cannot agree that a default DENY firewall policy is a good default configuration. We'd be back in the world where consumers would need something uPnP to manage firewall rules on their router.

I can agree that refusing to route requests to things like port 445/tcp is reasonable.
Part ordering is time consuming and annoying, and the pricing in low volumes (typical for development work or upstart products) is really awful (high, and large disparities between suppliers). We created http://sandsquid.com for making it easier to purchase components online (especially at the early stage of the product life cycle) while still maintaining reasonable pricing and an ability to easily scale up the orders as needed.

Sandsquid was born out of our own need, manufacturing USB test jigs for a customer of our consulting business (we then made it as a bunch of scripts, but then decided it's too good to keep for ourselves). We just couldn't come to terms with the amount of effort it takes to order parts for a moderately complicated PCB.
it will be alright! there is always a way out. Good Luck
Dude, you got a paypal donation link somewhere? Just put it in your HN profile if ya want.
Now I know how you command line guys felt..
The current price of gold is far greater than the values of all those things. If gold price was based on intrinsic value alone it would be worth considerably less than it is now.
You're really going to come on a technical site and complain about other people's jargon and opaque writing?
"Devops" can also be considered a buzzword, misused so frequently by marketers and executives, that it has become a useless term for anything besides techobabble.

P.S. who the hell refers to someone as "a human"?
Text normalization in Go
Microsoft mocks Chromebook in new video ad for its Scroogled campaign
The World Famous staff on Chromebook: No deal
How stupidly self-centered are you? "All academic papers should be written in a way that I can understand no matter whether they would be comprehensible to the intended audience!" What a fucking egomaniac.
The plural of anecdote is not data. Ever heard of 'your mileage may vary'? We can throw opinions around all night, but it's clear that either people are looking through rosy and 'cynic' glasses at the same companies... or there truly are different workplaces than you've come to know.
I think organization type plays a role here too. ROR is an excellent fit for startups where speed of iteration is paramount; but once an organization settles on a business model and functionality matures a bit, the code stops changing so rapidly and the ability to do rapid development is not important any longer. At the same time performance becomes increasingly critical due to costs of scale. Hence a switch to something like scala makes perfect sense.
Not true. I count "new" being used about half as often as "&Point{}" in the Go standard library. That's not "practically unused".

g% cg -c -f 'g/go/src/pkg.*\.go' '\bnew\(' | total 2
1485
g% cg -c -f 'g/go/src/pkg.*\.go' '\&[A-Za-z0-9_.]+\{' | total 2
3051
g% cg -c -f 'g/go/src/pkg.*\.go' . | total 2
430482
g%

So 430,482 non-blank lines of code, 1485 lines with new, 3051 lines that look like a struct pointer literal.
These uses form a negligible amount of the value of Gold, presently and historically.
That still matters a lot. Almost universally one of the reasons to hire remotely is to hire people in lower cost-of-living areas and pay them accordingly.

Adjusted for cost of living you might be making more on taking a few basis-point discount since the Valley is so insane, but location absolutely factors into remote work salaries.
For what it's worth, apparently the Basecamp team was hitting ~50ms request times with their new (well, now it's not that new) design: http://37signals.com/svn/posts/3112-how-basecamp-next-got-to...

All technology has its trade-offs. Rails can be plenty fast, it just all depends on how you're using it.
Kind of reminded me of Steve Ballmer laughing at the iPhone when it first came out. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eywi0h_Y5_U

Millions and Millions and Millions...
Leakers, privacy activists find new home in Berlin
With example one why do merchants have to sell at fixed prices? Why not dynamic, pegged to something more stable like usd?
There are also tens (hundreds?) of thousands of piano tuners. Does that mean piano tuning is in the early phase?
People should be able to knowingly enter into whatever contract they want.

Glad you agree.

Should a company should be able to...

Contract theory is far more rich a subject than you realize. In your example, a rational theory of contract wouldn't be enforced based on mere promise, but would allow contracts to be broken so long as it puts both parties more or less back to where they were before. E.g., if you promise to paint my home for $100, but then you don't paint my home, I can't then enslave you and force you to paint the home, rather, I get my $100 back.

This is of course an approximate explanation.
Smart Transitions In User Experience Design
I agree, if he were young and single with no dependents maybe "hang in there" would be appropriate, but this guy just told us he has a wife, three kids, and a fourth on the way. To add to that he is out of money, out of credit, and out his house. When you haven't got a nickel to your name and you have five dependents, that's hardly the time to go "down for doubles" on a big risk (unless you are out of options)
In what sense did you intend it? What can an archive of a website possibly have to do with being "successful in material terms"?
Find a job for now. (Indeed and Linkedin aren't half bad for that nowadays; there may be better more specific resources in your industry also.) Get back on your own two feet. The rest will take care of itself later. It always does.
Rails performance tip: https://engineering.groupon.com/2013/misc/i-tier-dismantling...
If I am reading you right, the strategy you're describing is known as Value Averaging.
This is awe inspiring. I wish I can help like this too..
They said that were promoting this because it was controversial. One, of course that policy is going to result in controversial comments, that's the point. Two, that means a significant fraction of YouTube's user base liked that comment.

You can tweak the comment system all you want but you can't fix the users themselves. The best that can be done is personalized filtering. Some kind of system that automatically knows you don't like comments like that and tries to give you better comments instead. I believe they tried something like that but it doesn't seem to work very well (and it might be too computationally expensive to begin with.)
Amazing. Really nice. You're a good man.
About 50% were through my personal network, the rest came from various online sources. Angellist worked really well for me, I highly recommend trying them if you're looking for early stage startups. Linkedin was overloaded with recruiters, I got little use from it.
You're probably right that it's both. That said, you can nuke these with CSS. I've taken to pretty liberally modifying site stylesheets (I've compiled almost 700 of these), and nuking things like interstitials, "social" toolbars, "related content", slide-outs, etc., is high up my list. A few of those are now in my default CSS (the Tumbler teaser most notably). Pretty easy to do using Stylebot (Chrome).
I remember moving a few of our older products to NRND status at my old gig. It basically meant that we're EOLing the products and it's your last chance to buy in bulk before they'll become unavailable. We let this be known very clearly to our main customers, but I doubt small time buyers who buy from our Distis really got the message :(

Definitely a good thing for hobbyists/Kickstarterers to keep in mind!
I'm sure azakai is familiar with emscripten. ;)
Simple solution: don't go into debt. If you must go into debt, make the debt in terms of hours worked or some other asset.
Well that's a lot lower than I thought.
Bitcoins are arguably useful to everybody, unlike piano tuners.
Despite what people may think based on his "style", he's always come across as a really nice guy to me. Reminds me of one of my best friends actually, seems like an arsehole but is one of the most genuine and caring people I know. Funny how that can be the case :)
I'll give you 10 bucks if I can sleep with your wife?
The features you just described are equally applicable to different kinds of metals/alloys. Arguably, other metals have even more practical applications. Why shouldn't those be more valuable than gold? In addition, the practical applications of gold you've just listed are, I expect, not what gold is normally used for. Economies, hopefully, aren't defined by whether their currency can make space equipment or electronics (especially since those are modern developments that predate the value in gold). So while what you've just said is true, it still doesn't fully answer the question.
Where Film Marries Video Game
They were also profoundly sloppy with getting IRB approval for research they conducted and published.
Ask HN: Which social media platforms should a startup pursue?
Specifically:

Facebook looks like it's dead in the water for our crowd.

Twitter seems to be a common choice.

Has App.Net grown enough to be useful?

For an entertainment startup that releases content in a blog format, are blog comments useful? Could they be used as the primary/only means of interaction?

My ideal scenario would be using on-site comments for all interaction, and using Twitter/Facebook/whatever to act as feed-broadcasters (via IFTTT or similar). However, I feel like I'm missing something here.

Any and all advice is appreciated.
> [Windows doesn't have a good terminal because the Console Subsystem] is so badly designed that it's near impossible to write a good terminal for it.

Errm, Windows has a couple of decent terminals. PowerShell and Cygwin bash come to mind.

The following I say with all the love in my heart, so please read it in that spirit:

Saying that there aren't any good terminals for Windows because of the suckitude of the Console Subsystem is like saying "There aren't any good houses built on the ocean because a good, solid concrete foundation just sinks to the bottom!". There are plenty of fine ocean-going houses, they're just made out of steel, exotic or mundane fibers, or wood.
How could anyone possibly know that! Crash is a fuzzy word as well.
Silver took a sizable hit, but it has retained value. It still has two aspects to it that are very valuable: industrial and jewelry / fashion. Those are likely to remain for a very long time, providing silver with a value base.
i'm probably one of a handful of people with this opinion but I actually see Apple accelerating away from the competition. with the latest product cycle they are innovating on multiple fronts, the integration is becoming really compelling, and their competitors are probably already a year+ behind. Apple hardware are museum-quality pieces of art that clunkers like Samsung/Dell can never hope to compete with. their software has been lacking, but Mavericks and iOS 7 was a huge step in the right direction. I think the one area they're losing in right now is telling their story.
The greater fool is the one holding the bag when nobody else will buy it; People buying in today could very well be the greater fool -- time will tell.
If you are in Houston, johnny@cpap.com.

Give us a paypal link and we'll gap you.
I think IPv6 is similar to XHTML. Not backwards compatible with no clear benefit for most users. I'll wait for what follows (HTML5), or at least wait as long as I can.
My understanding is that the intro/extra axis is supported by empirical evidence from numerous studies of personality and (increasingly) neurological studies.
I worked on my own stuff for a long time, trying to live off next to nothing. It didn't work and eventually I ran out of money.

I got a job as a programmer-grunt. I saved up basically everything I made. After two years my bank account hit $50K and I quit and started working on my own stuff again. Life is so much easier now that I have some cash in the bank.

Burning through credit cards seems like a bad path. It's just not necessary. I remember being afraid I would get addicted to easy money in the corporate world. I didn't. The lifestyle was nice, but the lack of freedom made it easy to quit.

Now, I don't have a family to support. That would of course make things harder. I just wanted to strongly recommend the nest-egg approach to anyone grappling with finances.
Anyone who's rolled out IPv6 on a large internal network or public facing site, why did you bother? Right now it seems like more work and complexity for exactly zero benefit.