skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not sure of Alan Kay's childhood, but in my case I was reading at a 6th grade level (IIRC) when I entered kindergarten, and was reading and writing stories from a very young age. I can't speak to the nature side of things, but I can speak to the nurture:

Every day from the time I was born, my mother would spend hours reading to me; not just "See Spot Run" level books, but things like the Bruce Coville "Magic Shop" series. Instead of just letting it stay there, she'd ask me questions about what she was reading, and then we'd make up our own stories that riffed on the same concepts/characters/settings. When going to bed, she wouldn't read to me, but rather we would make up our own stories using a theme that she'd select, which forced me to think through things at a higher level.

The one part I wish I understood better was how it went from oral to written, both in terms of reading and writing stories; I remember well her reading to me, but not how it switched to me reading. Regardless, I imagine that the nurture side of things had a huge, huge impact on my abilities, so: thanks mom!

[Edit: Linked her this thread, so I'll update with her thoughts whenever she sees it, if she doesn't comment herself.]
None of that addresses any of my points. Yes of course there is a finite supply of bitcoin and thus it is inherently deflationary. That's a good thing for hoarders, and the current volatility is great for speculators. I'm not seeing any key advantages for the average consumer, not until they're paid in bitcoin and there are similar financial services as today. But then what has really changed?
People generally want to be convinced of an idea's value before implementing it, and this is reasonable. For tested and tried ideas, this value is generally a known quantity, or at least one that can be estimated reasonably well. As long as that value is high, convincing people to do it is relatively easy: it's mostly a matter of presenting that value in ways they'll accept.

For untried (i.e. "creative") ideas, this is much harder. Further complicating the process is that the creators of ideas inevitably place a very high intrinsic value on them. There are many reasons for this, but a lot of them are tied into the ego, either directly ("I had this idea, so it's good") or indirectly ("This idea reinforces beliefs I hold, or advances a cause I favor, or lets me practice my favored hobbies, or may answer a question I'm personally curious about, etc., therefore it is good"). Other people just plain don't find these ego-tied arguments compelling, nor really should they, and so they cloud the process of convincing people to go along with a new idea.

It would seem, then, that the trick is to remove one's ego from the convincing process, and argue solely based on what's left. But the ego still complicates things. Even when more observer-independent arguments can be found, they never shine as brightly in the eyes of the creator as the ego-tied ones, and so it feels like you're selling it short: not something creatives like to do, and for obvious reasons. Worse, though, are the many ideas that just plain don't have many (or even any) arguments that don't tie straight back into one's own ego. No one else will ever be convinced to go alongside these, but to attack them is to attack the creator's ego, leading to accusations of sour grapes and headlines like "People don't actually like creativity."
HN people might not care about this sort of thing (ending a sentence with a preposition), but it screams out at me:

"We'll make sure everyone knows for whom to buy a present!"
vs.
"We'll make sure everyone knows whom to buy a present for!"

Good job on the who vs. whom though..
Ask HN: How to buy and store bitcoins?
I'm interested in buying a couple of bitcoins and keeping them as a part of my financial portfolio.

I imagined this should be simple and straightforward, but it looks like this currency is only meant to be used by mathematicians. Finding a place to buy it does not seem hard, but there are many sites. Should I be careful about some of those or can I just buy anywhere? Is my credit card info being coupled with BitCoins then?

Once I buy them, how do I ensure I will keep them safe in future? I plan to hold onto those for years, without any transactions. I tried to read about security:

https://en.bitcoin.it/wiki/Securing_your_wallet

But understanding this is way to complex for me. Is there some simple guide that says just "Do these steps 1, 2, 3" and you're done.

Can anyone give me a short and simple explanation of how would you do this yourself?

Thanks.
can you imagine if every RFC had been turned into a patent where we would be today?

i think this alone should be telling of how every software patent rides on the goodwill of a culture of open source and standardization that has existed for decades (when true innovation was taking place).

it's complete insanity that patents can be granted for inventions which rely so fundamentally on an infrastructure which could have only been built so successfully - and explicitly - without them.
Don't forget that burning coal releases more radioactivity into the environment than nuclear power (because of trace amounts of uranium).
Thanks for sharing the book with your friends!

I'm intrigued by your 0 vs. 1 experiment. I wonder if there is something fundamentally different in how we learn the concept of ordinal numbers (1, 2, 3) versus, say, integers (-1, 0, 1). Usually we teach numbers by counting physical objects, and perhaps it takes a little longer to understand the concept of zero if you're used to counting objects.
You're presenting a complete straw man argument and you're incorrectly trying to make a reductio ad absurdum by comparing these views to mythical pop culture conspiracy theories.

It doesn't seem to me like you're well versed into the actual arguments presented by authors and thinkers who write on the inherent flaws of compulsory schooling.
> It is very popular to talk about improving creativity in education. Many educational leaders recognize the issue. But at the same time there are even more discussions about Common Core standards and other ways to standardize education. Sometimes both conversations come from the same people.

You do realize that the two aren't actually contradictory, right? The adoption of open standards for the web made it more possible for an outpouring of creativity. That's what standardization does.

For a problem you claim is "easy to identify", you haven't even found it.
One would say that these kind of questions only show that BitCoin is not ready for wide public adoption.
Hackernews "editors" or whateverthefuck you call yourselves, hang your heads in shame for letting this absolute drivel even make it on the site.
This is the sort of English up with which I will not put.
I think we are talking about two different things. It may be that spammer are telegraphing that they are probably a scam to catch people too dumb to know what a scam is, but...

I've also personally seen how "boring" and "ugly" web pages with lots of bold and italics and even underlines convert better than a trendier, "prettier" version. For non-spam, non-scam products.
On ubuntu it says 'W: kvm binary is deprecated, please use qemu-system-x86_64 instead'
And I was thinking the CopenHagen Wheel was invented by Andy Botwin (Weeds series - http://www.fastcodesign.com/1665013/how-weeds-became-a-marke...)
HIV virus returns after cure hope rose
Sorry, not a native speaker. I'll fix that.
I have a rather large spot on my desk I could use to put some plants on. Can anyone recommend a starting kit of sorts for a man who has no gardening skills whatsoever? Can someone help take the guesswork out of this for tools like me? :)
I downvoted you and wanted to explain, as the downvote was not for your content.

I, as a rule, downvote posts by sparsely populated, recently created accounts. Reason being, I generally believe them to be throwaway accounts created for the purposes of spamming and trolling. I think it does a disservice to HN to engage in that behavior.

I wanted to give you some advice on how to avoid downvotes in the future. If you have something to say... say it on your own account is probably the best piece of advice. Also, if you really are a new member, perhaps you could put more profiling information in the account you create so that people don't ascribe malevolent intent to your activities. I know that the older members don't need to do so... but they have a track record of useful contributions to discussions.

Lastly, if you are not a spammer or troll... Welcome to HN.
So, being pedantic, really it means you rely entirely on the GC for memory management. You can run unmanaged code on the CLR.
Except that gold was not the first metal to be used as currency.
I agree with almost all of your points. The only issue I have is with Azure. I cannot for the life of me get them to take my money so I had to look elsewhere.
Is this a joke ? Should we really take this seriously ? Specially, because this is being reported by a Magazine from a country that iPhone runs Android ?
best historical overview on Mandela for those of us who have only heard the word 'apartheid' but didn't know what it refered to (video): http://on.msnbc.com/1cpfpAr
Crapshaming
click bait headline, this should have been edited.

subtitle is "Cicada 3301 online mystery enthralls codebreakers around the world"
Having tried Litecoin CPU mining out of curiosity the other day, I'd not consider it worthwhile. My 2.0GHz i7 MBP was getting around 4 khash/sec (and running at 99C, so I bottled out). I then tried it on an otherwise pretty idle server, which got a steady 2.0 khash/sec.

Feeling smug that I'd be using spare, paid-for server cycles to make money, I looked up some expected earnings. (Warning: I'm an LTC noob, so may have plugged in bad assumptions), but even at 4khash/sec, I was looking at less than $3 a year

http://www.coinwarz.com/calculators/litecoin-mining-calculat...

I'd like to be proven wrong on this, of course. However, talking to a couple of people on IRC (hardly guaranteed 100% reliable info, but good enough for me) it seems that even LTC has moved to GPU mining being a lot more realistic than CPU mining)
Whenever this comes up, I'm reminded of this series:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Codename_Icarus

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0301116/

Very popular with the teens in my family with fantasies of being whisked away 'cause they're just so damn smart.
This has a nice list. http://ventureburn.com/2013/11/5-great-movies-entrepreneurs-...
Codeacademy is great if you actually want to learn to code. You should be aware (and I'm sure you are) that you'll probably have at least a year of learning before you create something from scratch that's good enough to be visible to others. I'm all for learning for the sake of learning, but if you want to get something quick and professional up, you'd be better using drupal/wordpress with a theme and ecommerce plugin, finding a service that will create an online store for you, or hiring someone/finding a partner.
How big a problem is it that bitcoins are finite ? The minimum unit of a bitcoin today is a satoshi, there can ever be max about 2200000000000000 satoshi. Is 2200000000000000 units of currency going to be enough to run a global economy ?
I guess I'm one of those Americans. My direct challenge to you would be... What do you do when the travel is over? Where did all the money for your trip come from? Where are your savings?

Maybe these aren't important questions to the world traveler. Maybe experiencing the world is much more important than career and financial agility and job security. That's fine.

But for me, that's a really sharp value change, and it makes me uncomfortable. I think that's what people are really feeling.

It's kind of like entrepreneurship. Everyone says it's a good idea. But when you get right down to it, most businesses are failures. Are you willing to take that risk on for the possibility of creative freedom?
Ask HN: Which SaaS apps have the best UI?
I spend most of my time in a bubble of Google Analytics, Visual Website Optimizer, and Basecamp. But I'm building a side-project and I want to get some design inspiration from new & shiny apps that I might not have been exposed to. Which SaaS web apps that you use have the best user interfaces?
See this comment - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6862280

It appears that the PCB is even the same one as in the other watch.

I'd have no issue whatsoever with a KS that said "we found a pretty cool watch and we want to make it more awesome with some hardware tweaks and our own ultra-cool software stack!"
But that doesn't seem to be what's happening here.

>> maybe he was hacked( internet can become very vengeful for almost no reason )and that person/competitor succeeded discrediting the project.

It's certainly possible, though it seems that the communication in the repeatedly spammed (and then denied) message was similar in style and content to the guy's previous comms and even if you ignore that he hasn't given any answers to his backers' questions.
Ideally, setup.py is for generic minimum-version-known-to-work dependencies of a package. Pip requirements files are for very specific known-good combinations of dependencies of an application. https://caremad.io/blog/setup-vs-requirement/
It's certainly possible the general public won't view it that way, but it's clearly the right way to view it.

By calculating volatility using nominal values, we can conclude that the Google stock is 200 times more volatile than the AMD stock (because the Google stock has risen by $10 today ($1057 to $1067) and AMD only $0.05 ($3.64 to $3.69). And that a share of Berkshire Hathaway is 130 times more volatile than Google (and 26,000 times as volatile as AMD). We can also conclude that a company can reduce the volatility of its stock by performing a stock split.

Clearly this doesn't make sense, and it doesn't serve its purpose: to assess the how much money you gain/lose when buying $x worth of something and the price changes. Whether you buy $1000 worth of bitcoins at $1 and they drop to 50 cents, or you buy $1000 worth of bitcoins at $1000 and they drop to $500, you've lost the same: $500. That's the relevant metric.

Ask the general public whether they would rather hold $1000 worth of bitcoins going from $1 to $15 or $1000 worth of bitcoins going from $500 to $1000 and I'm fairly sure you'll get the right answer.
The creativity came before the reading. Coming up with a plan to allow taking 6 months off and living in another country. The 6 months of reading fuels the next set of creative ideas.
Ha, looks nice! You could monetize this by letting everyone fill out a wish-list and offer affiliate-linked suggestions based on what is filled in?
(Same as http://namentrekken.be does this; that wasn't an option for your gf? :)
My one-year tourist visa was issued July 12th. Did I just squeak by?
Court to rule on patent rights
Peter Platzer of NanoSatisfi on Democratizing Space
An accountant using quadratic functions?

I would guess that the most advanced math people use in their daily lives is cross-multiplication.

That is also true for what is usually considered math heavy fields.

I've studied in mechanical engineering. I've never EVER seen anyone use calculus to solve their problem in the real world.
Intel unveils 72-core x86 Knights Landing CPU for exascale supercomputing
I like this comment because it reminds me of a quote from the late 60s movie Easy Rider, where a pair of guys take their motorcycles across the country in pursuit of "freedom." I think it has the same general sentiment and some interesting historical/societal connotations. Here's the quote (note that George is played by Jack Nicholson, whose other famous quote from this movie involves Venutians interbreeding and living among us...):

George Hanson: You know, this used to be a helluva good country.
I can't understand what's gone wrong with it.
Billy: Man, everybody got chicken, that's what happened.
Hey, we can't even get into like, a second-rate hotel,
I mean, a second-rate motel, you dig?
They think we're gonna cut their throat or somethin'. They're scared, man.
George Hanson: They're not scared of you. They're scared of what you represent to 'em.
Billy: Hey, man. All we represent to them, man, is somebody who needs a haircut.
George Hanson: Oh, no. What you represent to them is freedom.
Billy: What the hell is wrong with freedom? That's what it's all about.
George Hanson: Oh, yeah, that's right. That's what's it's all about, all right.
But talkin' about it and bein' it, that's two different things.
I mean, it's real hard to be free when you are bought and sold in the marketplace.
Of course, don't ever tell anybody that they're not free,
'cause then they're gonna get real busy killin' and maimin'
to prove to you that they are.
Oh, yeah, they're gonna talk to you,
and talk to you, and talk to you about individual freedom.
But they see a free individual, it's gonna scare 'em.
Billy: Well, it don't make 'em runnin' scared.
George Hanson: No, it makes 'em dangerous...
Wow- Digg? I thought we were supposed to continue to ignore/punish them into oblivion for eternity.
I'm confused. Noisy neighbors and the "round up to the hour" AWS billing can both be fixed by more active instance management. It's not trivial but it's also not incredibly complex. Moving completely off of AWS has huge ramifications for your business in the long run, some positive some negative, and it seems weird to make such a bold and disruptive move based upon two issues that are both well known and fairly straightforward to address.
That's the worst straw man I've heard in ages.

If school systems are so inherently broken, how come all the economically successful countries have public school systems that go on for years?

This is a very narrow and one-dimensional argument. You're assuming that everything is sugary, benevolent and works for the common good. No. Compulsory schooling serves a strategic purpose, it's defective by design.

Replace "school systems" with "retributive penitentiary systems" and you'll see what I mean.

It's the same tired argument as "Capitalism is inherently evil."

Not even close. I do not oppose capitalism in any way, personally.

Yeah, maybe, except that no other system was shown to be better.

No other system has really been tested. There's a lot of alternatives that are applied on small scales and are shown to work just fine (i.e. Sudsbury schools), but they receive little attention and are often deliberately misrepresented.
> Tor [... is] estimated to be 5,000 times larger that the “surface” web

Am I missing something? That obviously isn't correct.
It's important to distinguish the difference between elegant design and creativity.

Elegant design is often easy to recognize and appreciate. We celebrate its creativity and thought because it "looks right" and "feels familiar."

But true creativity is abrasive, uncomfortable, and many times, divisive. It doesn't often look right or feel familiar, especially when it comes from persons or sources not easily understood.

Which is why it struggles in environments where the goal is to stay focused on the task at hand.
>But I think if EC2 didn't let you borrow CPU, nobody would use it because they would realize how absurdly underpowered EC2 offerings really are.

yeah, that's pretty much the crux of virtualization; it's a lot like buying bandwidth. Yes, your upstream is oversubscribing. Yes, if they do this right, 99% of the time, you won't notice the oversubscribe; you will get more service for less money vs. something that isn't oversubscribed. But, oversubscription needs to be managed carefully.

One thing I've noticed? If your upstream has a 1000mbps line, and sells 1000 unlimited 10Mbps ports, you are almost never going to see contention, even though it's a 10x oversubscribe.

If your upstream has a 1000Mbps port, and sells 10 1000Mbps ports? that's the same 10x oversubscribe. But I /guarantee/ that you will hit contention at least once a week. Probably more often. If people expect 1000Mbps reliable off that, they will be very unhappy. (Of course, if you setup your QoS properly, and tell the customers that it's 100Mbps CIR and up to a gigabit of best-effort burst? it can work out just fine. But nobody is going to get a reliable full gigabit out of that deal.)

90% of your users are using like 10% of your resources. But you've always got a few who are running torrents (or, in the case of CPU, mining primecoins) In the 1000 10Mbps port situation? it doesn't really matter if you've got a few bittorrent users. In the 10 users who can all completely fill the pipe situation? it matters a /lot/

That's the thing about CPU sharing, though; most of the time you don't put that many guests on one machine, and often you give each guest the ability to use the whole machine (when it's otherwise idle) - so you are in the situation of selling 10 1000Mbps links when you only have 1 1000mbps uplink, which ends in tears if anyone actually expects a reliable 1000Mbps uplink. (Now, if everyone understands that it's actually 100Mbps CIR that can burst to 1000Mbps, then sure, people can be happy. but you have to be careful with those expectations. With the 1000 10Mbps links on a 1gbps uplink, customers can treat their 10Mbps link as 10Mbps dedicated, and 99% of the time, they will get what they expect.)
"I'm a developer at a company that uses a lot of open source software, and I've spoken to other developers at other companies as well. Where I work, it's required to get legal approval to use GPL software. Software under more permissive licenses may be imported and used freely at the discretion of the development team. So in my experience, InfiniSQL faces a much higher barrier to adoption due to GPL."

Interesting.
We use about 8000 open source packages, and add roughly 90 a week right now.

"Perhaps you work with companies where adopting technology stacks is more of a top-down decision where legal counsel is always involved. In those situations, GPL doesn't pose a particular barrier because all open source software faces that same barrier. But some companies give more autonomy to their developers, and in those cases there's a difference in overhead when managing GPL compliance."

Actually, i work at a company (Google) where autonomy is given. People are free to use basically anything but AGPL. We simply tell them what will be required of them if they use it, and enforce that this happens.

The overhead of GPL compliance is not any more than the overhead of any other license compliance, for us, in practice.

You still have to do stuff for BSD and MIT anyway, so you need a process that knows what is going into shipping software.

The short version is that:

Overhead is kept low by doing it as part of the same check-in process as any other source code (IE you don't fill out some magical form and send it to lawyers), among other things.

Shipping time is simple verification that nothing changed (and the build system will verify it anyway).

My experience is that companies find GPL compliance overhead higher because they aren't doing the right thing for other licenses anyway. In particular, they never produce correct attribution for MIT/BSD/etc, so having to do "anything at all" is higher overhead.

This experience comes from reviewing a large number of companies for acquisition :)