skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I agree that inflation is better than deflation. I also agree that this is not controversial - that virtually all economists agree that inflation is better than deflation.

However.

This does not mean that all deflationary currencies are bad.

For example: It is entirely plausible that a currency which is almost 100% predictably deflationary would be preferable to our current currencies, the values of which vary depending upon many factors (central banking strategies, economic outlook, etc).

Whilst inflation may help spur consumer spending, and almost certainly does help the economy by permitting 'invisible' wage cuts to poorly performing workers/sectors (perhaps the biggest advantage of inflationary currencies, not even mentioned in the article), the upside of a nearly 100% predictable currency may be even greater.

Of course, it is also possible (likely, even) that our current central bank managed system is superior: The downside of unpredictability may be (likely is, in my opinion) outweighed by the flexibility granted to central banks.

But we'll never know unless we run the experiment.
Congratulations, you found a semantic exception but missed the entire point. The point is that it's not just some people hordeing money. The fact that ratio of spending has not grown proportionately with BTC value suggests that recent demand for BTC is almost entirely speculative.

Sorry if this is kind of a nasty reply, but I'm really tired of people with no comprehension of how money functions being in denial about their pet technology.
And by most historic interpretations, that centralization actually caused it.
Thanks for the comment!

I never want to leave the learning phase, it is way too much fun! :-)
Elasticsearch: Change in routing value resulting in duplicate documents
My suggestion is four tens or four thirteens or whatever and three day weekends every weekend. Zero commute time has its privileges. Hard to burn out with zero commute and three days off. Heck, four sixteens and three days off.

(Follow up edit... I think I would personally drift into something like one day on, one day off)
Interesting point, and you're right: I was only considering printed money!
Yeah, the actual definition relies solely upon whether prices rise or fall in aggregate, for reasons that can be solely attributed to monetary factors. Which is a bitch to figure out, because you have all these libertarians screaming about how gasoline and groceries are more expensive, therefore inflation, when really it's because petroleum is expensive.
Doubt it, Russia isn't the enemy anymore, it is a country in disarray, trying to pick up the pieces after communism.
In the USA i can think about a lot of very expensive cities (eg nyc, sf, etc).

But i don't know even one i would consider "wealthy".

In europe a few would come to mind instantly.
Eg. Zurich, Frankfurt, Vienna, Munich, etc
That's assuming all the initiatives Google are working on are public.
That sounds illegal. In same article:

>Wiretap tips forwarded by the SOD usually come from foreign governments, U.S. intelligence agencies or court-authorized domestic phone recordings. Because warrantless eavesdropping on Americans is illegal, tips from intelligence agencies are generally not forwarded to the SOD until a caller's citizenship can be verified, according to one senior law enforcement official and one former U.S. military intelligence analyst.

"Generally" should be always.
Of course you are allowed a different opinion to mine. It doesn't mean that I won't think it's stupid though.
Thanks so much for the comment Paul, this isn't something I have experienced yet but I had a feeling that it might be an issue so I have already researched co-working spaces I could invest in should this become an issue.
That 30% price change in a year was an anomaly, and it was in 1980, during a severe global recession. Bitcoin, meanwhile, just gained value approximately eightfold over several weeks ago, and it's relatively unusual that it isn't highly volatile, especially lately.
How does your app compare to Soulver?
But Google is (historically) a software company, so we should compare its contributions in the software field at the moment.

Here's a random list:

Page Rank

Map/Reduce

Statistical Language Translation

Unsupervised image feature extraction[1]

Go

Dart

Large scale software defined networking.

The list could go on..

[1] http://arxiv.org/abs/1112.6209
It's fascinating how successful Google has been at marketing itself to geeks - it doesn't matter that none of the really cool stuff has actually shipped (and perhaps will never ship). The dream is there, and that's enough to get the kids in to work on improving advertising (while dreaming of changing the world).

Is that cynical? Probably, don't mind me. It's just reading these comments you'd think self-driving cars, say, were a done deal, and yet when I read things like this they seem an awfully long way away:

>The Google car has now driven more than half a million miles without causing an accident—about twice as far as the average American driver goes before crashing. Of course, the computer has always had a human driver to take over in tight spots. Left to its own devices, Thrun says, it could go only about fifty thousand miles on freeways without a major mistake. Google calls this the dog-food stage: not quite fit for human consumption. “The risk is too high,” Thrun says. “You would never accept it.” The car has trouble in the rain, for instance, when its lasers bounce off shiny surfaces. (The first drops call forth a small icon of a cloud onscreen and a voice warning that auto-drive will soon disengage.) It can’t tell wet concrete from dry or fresh asphalt from firm. It can’t hear a traffic cop’s whistle or follow hand signals.

http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2013/11/25/131125fa_fact_...
Upgrading from any Debian 7 upgrade should just be:

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade
Is it sad that they would believe those sentences, or sad that those sentences are even necessary? I can't tell whether you agree with it or not.
Just doing apt-get update && apt-get upgrade && apt-get dist-upgrade should be enough. You have to be careful, do backups and all that, but that's basically all you need to do.
There is a shared understanding of what socialism means, the parent you responded to pointed out one of the many accepted definitions and cited Wikipedia. Just because you would like it to mean something else does not mean that is does, I really struggle to understand the issue you have with that.

Fair enough you want to label the current system of economic distribution in the USA, but you can't co-opt an existing term. For one it attempts to subvert a well understood concept, and tries to make it mean something else. There is no way that you can call the current system in the US socialist, unless you do not understand what socialism is, and how it works. And state controlled business is wildly different from taxed private business in a whole range of ways.
How can you defend a program in a public way like this without having the most basic understanding of what we know about it? Parallel construction is one of the basic story lines that has come out of the Snowden leaks.

They painted fascism with an American flag, and you ran it up the pole.

In a way its' embarrassing for the NSA to get a defence that is written by such a rube. But at the same time, the general public doesn't seem to be concerned, so perhaps it was unnecessary in the first place.

I could be wrong, but I think there is a bit of cognitive dissonance in your statement. I think you are slowly coming to realize that your actions were wrong; that you do need to defend them. The bad news is that you you fucked up, and you owe the Americans you pretend to care about an apology.
Stockholm syndrome?

This guy is essentially validating the actions of the NSA because he calls himself a patriot and even admits he doesn't care about other countries other than his own: The United States of America. As an Australian I find this kind of attitude disgusting and I think it highlights a massive problem within the agency itself.

While I am somewhat more lucky than others being in a country that is part of the Five Eyes agreement, what about those not in a country that has signed the agreement? It doesn't make me feel any safer because it seems the concept of borders and rules in the intelligence game do not exist.

There is a lot of downplaying, "but your data is in a big database and nobody will most likely ever look at it", "only the NSA can see this data" — while this might be the case, if for whatever reason I found myself in a position of power, this kind of harvested information could be used to blackmail or destroy me. Just because it's not being used now doesn't mean it won't be used later.

While this is probably the only validation of the NSA's actions I can find that is somewhat backed by someone with experience working for the agency, it honestly sounds a little too safe and doesn't really address any of the concerns people have.
Ask HN: SEEKING WORK - NYC or Remote
We are a startup of 3 full-stack & iOS devs. Our mobile app has been featured in the App Store for 3+ months. We also do freelance on the side, developing mobile apps, to keep the wheels turning in our own startup.

We are Stanford grads and have years of experience working at other startups and larger tech companies.

Skills: MongoDB/Mysql & Python RESTful APIs, iOS, Webapps using JS/CSS/HTML with MVC frameworks like Backbone.

Interest: Mainly interested in building iOS apps from start to finish, but if needed could build the required backend as well.

Github: https://github.com/daniyalzade

Email: eytan85 at gmail.com
This sounds like a bit of an anti-feature to me. It might encourage a practice that makes it very difficult to tell what styles will be applied to an element without inspecting it in the DOM. I've been thinking about how to code for maximum grepability recently and this is at odds with that.
For all X, most X consultants see X as a solution for your problem, almost without regard to the problem.

That isn't an Agile problem, except to the extent that Agile is the flavor of the moment. It's a problem with the industry. And really, with people in general.

Many people want to buy magic beans. Some people will sell magic beans, either because they are cynical jerks (which is rare) or because they don't understand beans all that well (which is common). That doesn't make beans bad.
Try Heavea: http://hevea.inria.fr/.

For my current book project, I've decided to go with LyX as my editor instead, and it comes with Elyxir, which converts LaTeX to HTML
"Move forward"? Don't you think their sales figures demonstrate better forward motion than they'd manage by "going back" (your words) to selling stuff for people who materially care about operating systems?

(There's no better way to stay solvent than to chase tiny niches occupied by hypercritical people who'll drop your stuff for reasons nobody else cares about, right?)
A compute cycle has fallen in price faster than anything else in the world except perhaps shares of the East India Company or Dutch tulips. People still buy computers. And TVs and cell phones and flash drives and etc, etc, etc.

Surely if the falling price of a good with respect to the currency it's purchased in would prompt people not to buy then nobody would purchase computers. And yet it's a thriving industry.

Please help me reconcile this fact with the author's statement that would indicate that precisely the opposite should be happening.
If prices have been barely protected from falling like the author is claiming, I'd like to know why the price of owning a piece of just about any sector of the stock market has just about tripled in 4-5 years.
Ironically, anyone who doesn't understand how economies can function with multiple currencies which have different characteristics has little to no comprehension of how money works.

Or much of economic history, for that matter.
And in astronomy, to possibilities beyond the geocentric universe.

Alternative theories can be wrong or right. Don't oppose them because they're alternative: oppose them where the evidence compels you to.
Before the Web, Hearts Grew Silent
They're not the only options, passphrase encrypted local password storage is an option. That's no false sense of security.
If the author is indeed the patriot he claims he is, would he be so kind to explain why the Bill of Rights thought it necessary to have this:

"The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized."

What makes the NSA different from the police or other law enforcement agencies? And why should we trust them? There is a reason restrictions exist on the power they have. This article is nothing more than propaganda.
nas-central.org is full of useful information about hacking with different NAS hardware. It helped me install debian with a custom kernel on my Lacie NAS without even opening it up.
Thanks for the comment!

I have worked 10-16 hour days before and I can say for myself anyway plenty of time during those days is not as productive as it should be - I don't think many people could be productive for that length of time with any regularity.

Have you tried this yourself? Would be interested to hear if this works well for some folk!
apt-get update && apt-get upgrade

There's nothing special about upgrading Debian between point releases.
But that means installing the whole sdk plus my code on the production server. Since it's a cloud environment, and i want to be able to deploy on various cloud, i would need to include go compiler source into my (already too big) deployment process.

That's precisely the thing i wanted to avoid in the first place.
It would be great to see a cheerful launch page for a satirical startup that automatically generated smear campaigns for governments against persons of interest. "We use of the expanded information capabilities of our client agencies to maximize the plausibility of our allegations!"

Pricing!

$8,000: General fear, uncertainty, and doubt (duration: 2 months)

$15,000: Complete discrediting (duration: 6 months -- best value!)

$50,000: Overturn their life with "Anonymous"-style harassment (e.g. triggered by c pornography "revelations" -- duration: two years)
Apple shuttered the Advanced Technology Group, its research division, as a part of Jobs' consolidation and refocusing in the late '90s, and, as I understand it, research as an activity separate from product development hasn't really been part of the corporate culture since then. This does not mean lots of product-focused R&D doesn't go on throughout Apple, of course.
On the Internet we foreigners are colonies and the Americans are our Masters.
Interesting point of view, I posted something similar in a HN discussion months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4136034
thanks, i didn't know homebrew would facilitate the process. It's always good to know.
If there is anything to learn here, it is that a specific enemy is not necessary. You could get back-roomed for having said "I like Froot Loops" in a private email a decade ago. It could be /arbitrary/.
Don't forget, programmers only care about code quality when they deal with code maintenance. Most outsourced work never deals with code maintenance, so almost nobody learns to care about it.
Google is Bell Labs; William Bell's Labs (Massive Dynamic) from Fringe (http://fringepedia.net/wiki/William_Bell)
If I run a program to look at communications and it decides that I may have done something of interest, would you look at my file then? Where is the separation between collecting and "looking" when various pieces of code automatically determine interest and connections?
I was in a similar situation as you, isolated from everyone. You need to get out and socialize. Try Rejection Therapy. It's a serendipity generator. It will get you out of your comfort zone.

Also consider the possibility you are entering a midlife crisis. Don't laugh. It can really mess with your head.
It's telling that none of those indicators relate to the value of the goods that are being purchased with Bitcoin. That's probably the most interesting metric.
Man, I'd forgotten about that. I really have to update the old entries so they're easy to find and contain responses and are validated for Mavericks.
I agree with the article and think Python is great for a first language.

I asked my daughter's AP comp sci teacher: Why Java?
A: because that's what the test uses.
And the Greeks, Italians, and Czechs are so perfect that there is no room for the concept of ADHD in their societies? I had a close European friend whose existing psychiatric treatment could have greatly benefitted from an ADHD awareness. The doubting of ADHD (caused by anti-Americanism) has a negative impact on European society.
Speaking of Light Table, did you know LT actually uses CodeMirror under the hood?
You're criticizing The Atlantic (which happens to be a print publication as well, not just online) for an article stating that Bitcoin won't become an everyday currency, but saying "it doesn't have to fit [that] role." The article never said it did have to fit that role. The journalism is perfectly fine here, quit being defensive and make an actual argument.
As others have mentioned:

$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get upgrade

In this particular case, from 7.1 to 7.3, "dist-upgrade" is not needed (you aren't upgrading from one distribution to another (e.g. from 6 to 7)).
How flexible is that arrangement? If Bitcoin undergoes a sudden downturn, can you ask for dollars next month?
will this work on adium?
If you're already on a 7.x install (codename 'wheezy') then per http://www.debian.org/News/2013/20131214 it suffices to enable the updates repository (which I believe is the default) and run `apt-get upgrade`.

The release notes you linked to are for the original 7.0 release. I think that most people will pretty much ignore that there's a point release and continue to update their systems regularly -- unless you're installing a large number of systems or have particular requirements there seems little point in paying it specific attention.
I tried to find a library to take HTML and output a PDF report, but the only thing that's worked for me is LaTeX...
I did not see any version numbers or if we are discussing BSD grep or GNU grep. The grep in OSX is ridiculously slow. Whenever anyone says grep is slow the first thing I ask is if they are using OSX, the answer is almost always yes. GNU grep is a lot faster.

That being said there was a bug with grep and UTF a little while back. Debian lists the bug as present in 2.6 and fixed in 2.8:

"grep ." pathologically slow in UTF-8 locales -- http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=604408
I rode the light rail in Houston once and a homeless man got aboard. His stench was so strong that my only conclusion was that he had been defecating in his pants for at least a few weeks without ever changing clothes or cleaning up at all. Everybody on the metro got up and moved as far away from him as they could until he was the sole occupant of his end of the train.

I felt extremely sorry for the man. I also couldn't blame the people moving away as the smell was so bad.

I think non-homeless people in general just don't know how to respond to homeless people. I'm no exception. But I really don't think "hatred" for the homeless is any more prevalent in Silicon Valley than elsewhere; San Francisco simply has an unusually prominent homeless population.
Is the problem that people are homeless? Or that they are in your back yard?
Kevin Rose's new web idea prototype
It seems he perhaps has a grudge against the West Coast and/ or the US in general - http://www.thewhatnoise.com/2013/05/500-startups-and-not-goo...

On behalf of an embarrassed island on the other side of the Atlantic, I offer my sincerest apologies. We try to confine self-righteous bores to north London, but with the advent of the Internet, they've taken up jobs in social media, enabling them to amplify their boorish dinner party cockwafflery.
Too bad it hasn't happened to AT&T (and other carriers), too. AT&T especially has been pretty dismissive to shareholders caring about its relationship with the NSA:

http://www.techdirt.com/articles/20131208/00473825498/att-te...
Slowly but surely, we got our wish. Los Angeles came to us. New York came to us.

Los Angeles never struck me as a place to elevate, and I like the real New York better.

Silicon Valley was better when it was a place the MBA-culture carpetbaggers and thugs considered an outpost and avoided as much as they could. The weather and the scenery were just as good or better (due to less buildup) and people were able to focus on building things, not having to listen to endless conversations about Y Combinator and vesting schedules and Mark Pincus.
I used LaTeX when writing my programming book (C# Smorgasbord) and I am really glad I didn't use HTML for it. There was just so much out there to make the whole process good and I could really focus on the content with minimal markup. Except all the stuff you need in your preamble that is.

When I had written the book, I just used tex4ht and it spit out HTML that was decent, I could just apply a minimal amount of work and apply some CSS and then I had the epub and mobi.

I'm happy with LaTeX but I'm probably never writing another book (or I might..)!
Even up to the original Mac they had volumes and volumes on the hardware—friend of mine (Sean O'Brien) just made a tiny circuit board that lets you hook up an original mouse and keyboard to modern Macs, based on Inside Mac specs.
What bothers me most about the NSA stories is that all the damage control seems to be revolving around not pissing the US citizens off because their data is collected.

What about the rest of the world? They just have a carte blanche to tap everything from everyone 'regular joe' from outside of the US can't do Jack Shit about it, other than help invent newer and stronger encryption methods, since all our governments have their arms up the US's ass.
There is htmltex (i.e. almost full stack emitting HTML), it is called latexml. There is also a lot converters, most notably Pandoc.

Still I 100% agree that even HTML is too primitive and too inconsistently implemented for scientific writing.
Thanks cypherpunks01.

I flagged it for my to-read list for after work. I'm an idiot and didn't RTFA.
The conversion power of Mere Christianity
Hi Ricardo!

Thanks so much for taking the time to comment.

Very interesting about working Sundays, I guess the reason why I had included Sunday was because I normally spend at least a few hours coding at the weekend so it wouldn't be a big transition for me.
Um, 'cause they're dicks?

Would've been the shortest article EVER. ;)
I agree with that. I was just remembering the first OO stuff I was taught. I think it was a person object which we then had to use to create "Bill", "Jane", etc. Constructor set stuff like eye colour, height, etc.

Then we went on to create a dating app where it would retrieve things like "all the people with brown eyes"
What do ATT, Google, Xerox, and the old HP have on common? - They wer innovative market leaders of there time. They invested further in monetizing their successful business models. ATT&T has managed to continue to be a big player in telecoms and Google, much younger than the others is still incredibly relevant. But being a monopoly does not encourage innovation, although it can provide the financing. being a monopoly instead incentives protectionist behaviour to maintain the status quo 'cash cow'. Eventually however, unless protected by government intervention, monopolies fall or shift to new entrants. The only way to combat that is to look to the future and try and ride the next wave. Google's support of investing in 'moonshots' is really necessary to ensure they stay relevant, otherwise at some point they will become irrelevant.