skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"most people underestimate the impact of transaction costs"

I think most companies underestimate the impact of transaction costs, but most managers overestimate them. Both problems result from a failure to see the issue played out over the long term. In both cases, people or entities only consider the immediate to near-term impact of the delegation.

A company will look at the present value of outsourcing, which is often highly positive, but underestimate the opportunity costs over a longer horizon (lost institutional knowledge, higher marginal transaction costs, commodification, etc.).

A manager/individual will be hesitant to delegate because he or she only looks at the immediate hassle of having to train someone and get them up to speed. "It'll take Bob six months to really understand this track of work. It'll just be quicker if I get this done." In this case, the manager fails to understand that delegation has high short-term costs but low long-term costs. The learning "curve" is more of a step function. Once Bob is fully competent at Task X, delegating Task X to Bob will create efficiencies for his manager. It's starting Bob off on the task that's the hard part. His manager basically has to invest efficiency: "spending" some efficiency now in order to realize a net gain in efficiency later on.
"The Drug War is Evil" is actually just as bad of a title as "Cocaine is Evil." This article is about how buyers of cocaine support a system that has caused (according to the author) millions of deaths, not about government policy's role. The title "The Drug War is Evil" is appealing because it's 1) correct and 2) somewhat relevant, but it's not actually what the article's about.
Every morning I go for a two hour walk in the city. It’s by far the most creative activity I’ve ever done. In some miraculous way walking manages to clear my head, help me solve problems, make better decisions and overall refresh me in so many ways. The downside of it is that walking in the city vs walking in nature isn’t that healthy but I get to see many interesting things. The time I enjoy most walking is at early dawn. To watch the city waking up and the sun rising creates very positive feelings. Then I return home and feel an urge to create things.
There are a couple of points that come to mind. First, management needs to be judicious about how problems get solved. Does it require committee? Or a lone actor? Which department should own it or should the CEO take it on personally?
Second, there is no doubt that an organizational approach to problem solving is going to change as a company scales. The path the information took in this parable likely was from customer service to upper management to engineering. A CEO that will accept an $8M solution to such a problem is probably running a multi-billion dollar company. If this had been a $50 million company, no way he would have felt satisfied that it was money well spent.
This board has the top computer scientists, mathematicians, and engineers from the best universities in the world.

Furthermore, I said that the majority of people that have really dug into how bitcoin works and what it would mean, tilt pro-bitcoin.

That doesn't mean that the people who are pro-bitcoin are smart.

That doesn't mean that there arn't people that have dug into it and are against it.

All it means is that generally when we see Krugman's simplistic objections we roll our eyes like you would roll your eyes at Oprah explaining credit default swaps to her audience. We've responded to his claims over and over. It is getting boring and old.
> you have to own up to the fact that the two dimensions of "bigness" are unrelated

You're mistaken - they have much in common. In order to be a successful political party, what you have to do is find issues that (a) a lot of people deeply believe in on an emotional level and (b) can be addressed in such a way that you can redirect large sums of money into the pockets of 3rd parties in the process, who will then support the election campaigns of your politicians.

Whether this happens through providing obscenely overpriced healthcare to Americans or through buying/using drones to extrajudicially murder and terrorize Yemeni wedding-goers is just a detail. We could debate until the end of time how much value either of these initiatives actually provides to the American citizenry, but that's a completely separate issue (and not one that the vast majority of politicians give a rat's ass about).
By that definition, basically all software is vaporware.
Wow, those are some interesting reads.
> Somebody having an advantage does not mean you have a disadvantage

Since the kind of advantage/disadvantage we are talking is relative, not absolute, yes, it does.
My goal is to make 1 app. On all Windows 8, iOS, and Android. One that makes some revenue!
Obama can’t prove NSA call records prevented a terrorist attack
Nice! At 15 I was just learning what a computer was :o (15 years ago)
Visualizing sorts with Hungarian dancing, animated robots and cards
What do you want to do and where do you want to be in 10 years? I work for consulting firm and work with a lot of foreign born programmers. To get work visas most of them have masters degrees.

The majority of college what you are doing has little to no correlation with real life.

Unless you have a great job already lined up I would say stay in school and continue to learn on your own. Having a degree puts you ahead of people who don't.
This. While there are many wonderful features in Py3 (I use it 100% in production at work) it still needs a killer feature to really inspire people to move over. Python's lack of solid asynchronous I/O is definitely one of those features I think.
EDIT: You can run /sbin/init as the command for the Docker instance. This will start a container that doesn't die.

It's "inelegant" in that it's still a command that never ends. But that's how all Unix systems work anyway :)
Glenn Greenwald #30c3 #CCCen keynote speech (ft. Thamsanqa Jantjie)
I reason you could email YC about it. Though this is something that might get better results if you promote it directly for a month or two before contacting YC.

My question is: Do you happen to know anyone selling their apps? If so, have them post in the thread.
The NSA seems to really enjoy exploiting high profile tech companies
So Ruby objects occupy 40 bytes each, inside pages on the eden heap.

That's pretty huge. That's several times larger than some other dynamic languages -- languages that have essentially the same features as Ruby.
There is no commercial perspective that does not include humans somewhere. The economy IS humans. Manned missions to other planets are exciting. Robot missions to anywhere are slightly more emotionally engaging than watching your Roomba sweep your kitchen floor.

Star Trek succeeded as a television show because it had human actors telling a story, to the point that this fiction is more popular as an entertainment franchise than actual space exploration? Why? Actual space exploration has only produced a handful of biplanetary pedestrians, and only John Glenn has made any kind of a big deal about it.

In my view, the end goal of space exploration is to transplant Earth-origin life to other planets--not just humans, but (at minimum) thousands of species. That goal is not served by ignoring the transporting-the-biologicals portion of space exploration. That means I am completely unwilling to fund with my dollars any scheme that allows other people to fritter away money on pure science that will never become applied science, specifically science applied to my personal lifestyle. Multiply me by the six billion people who will likewise never escape our gravity well, and you had darned well better start thinking about the politics and the economics along with the science.

In short, I don't give a fig about whether it would make the boffins happier to do something else. Humans in space is what I am willing to pay for. If they don't want to play along with my non-optimal prejudices, I'd prefer that they be cut off from tax-derived funds entirely, and go with exclusively private funding. Ask for public money; act in the public's interest. The public is interested in seeing people in space.

It IS stupid, and doesn't make sense. What else would make it a uniquely human endeavor?
What is needed is a very high quality Python 2.x to 3.x migration or conversion tool to make library conversions trivial. If developers knew they could convert any 2.x code to 3.x code with no effort at all and with absolute certainty of proper operation they would probably migrate to the latest 3.x release en-masse.

How difficult would something like this be?

This might be really naive on my part. I haven't really taken the time to study the differences between 2 and 3. I have avoided 3.x out of entirely selfish reasons: I simply don't have the clock cycles to run into roadblocks.

These days languages are only as valuable as the breath and quality of the libraries around them. The issue with 3.x is that it created fear of not having access to small and large libraries developers leverage every day to be able to focus on their problem and not the problem addressed by the library. In that regard it is easy to be inclined to criticize Python leadership for approaching the transition with what might be perceived as a lack of consideration and understanding of the factors that might hinder it.

EDIT:

Just learned about 2to3:

http://docs.python.org/2/library/2to3.html

Not sure how good it is. A quick look at the page gave me the sense that it might be somewhat involved. A true converter would be something that is as easy to use as the the import statement. Something like:

import2to3 <some_module>, <some_destination_directory>

It should not require any more thought than that and it should be 100% reliable.
You didn't merely make the bald-faced assertion, you were very rude about it with your snide "ftfy".

I've studied this stuff for years. I understand your status quo view, that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor. Your view doesn't stand up to rational scrutiny, and it's holding all of mankind back.
> You can stage the changes you want to commit, and stash the unstaged changes.

Yes, I have acknowledged that this is a solution to the problem (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6986000). It seems a bit roundabout and clumsy to me though, in the sense that it requires vigilance to do the right thing. Things that require vigilance are easy to forget or do incorrectly.

I haven't looked at Gitless yet, but I hope that it makes this a bit more streamlined.

> squelch a series of smaller commits into a bigger one

I think you mean "squash."
Alexandria, VA: DIY Meetup, January
To be precise, the Republic of China was a republic government under martial law until the eighties. Today, it is as democratic a nation as the United States. More specific to your point, today, ROC has a free market economy like the U.S.
See also ECMAScript, as much as people like to bash on it.
Cuckoo Filter: Better than Bloom [pdf]
May you please link to any of your projects? Were any built without using any third party tools or libraries?
The implication, stated or not (usually not)...

You missed the parent's point so entirely, it's as if you are an MRA bot posting the same old scripted comments no matter what actual discussion is taking place. He said that we could "have a conversation about diversity in hiring without ever introducing the subject of guilt" and that we don't need to "frame the whole thing in terms of accusations" and your immediate knee-jerk response is to list all these imaginary accusations that are being "implied". Can you just keep an open mind and consider the possibility that, as the parent says, none of these accusations are actually being made? (If you don't find the parent comment convincing enough, perhaps look at your own "not usually stated" qualifier).
> new async framework landing in 3.4 is very exciting

this is the killer feature that would move me to python 3. alas, not released yet. And I took a rails job :(
> but is there a significant difference between a language that's vaporware[1] and one that nobody uses?

There's a significant difference between a language for which a complete implementation does not exist such that you cannot use it, and one for which an implementation exists but few people currently choose to use it because there is a closely-related predecessor language that still has a stronger ecosystem.

As an stage in the development of a language out of an existing, widely-used predecessor, the "vaporware" stage tends to precede the "available but not popular due to predecessors ecosystem advantage" stage, which tends to precede the "displaces predecessor" stage.

Its obviously possible for a language to stop progressing at any of the earlier stages before reaching the last stage.
So, if it does that, why doesn't it keep doing that, or it keeps working as if brand new?

And it's "Your", not "You're"
Cool, but unfortunately also a great example of when excessive commenting actually makes the code less digestible.
Free Marketing Ideas part 16
Same here! So much more convenient in a quick interactive session.
I doubt I had even 30 ideas this year :P
An example would be a Web request in a concurrent app server: if one request has an error accessing the database, maybe it can't continue, but the server process should keep handling other requests.

Generally, I think a "component" would be a piece such that if there's an unplanned-for, fatal failure in it, other components need to continue running.
I'm pretty sure they'll never be doing that again though due to the mess it caused.
DO released a blog post on the issue[0]

[0] https://www.digitalocean.com/blog_posts/transparency-regardi...
> have there ever been a successful language rewrite, post critical pass, in the history of computer languages?

Does K&R C to C89 count?

> If so, what lessons can be brought to the current Python 2/3 situation?

C89 programs could use K&R libraries [1], and C89 compilers could compile K&R code.

[1] Well, so could Pascal or Fortran programs for that matter. Where K&R-->C89 fails as an analogy to py2-->py3 may be important aspects of what's so difficult with py2-->py3. (EDIT: added this footnote.)
97. I was 14 at the time. I was installing Linux on old workstations on bread racks in my father's basement (where I also lived) and running distributed.net's distributed computing client to break 3DES and RC5. I've never looked back (31 now, VP of Ops).
Legaal online gamen in België
I'm surprised nobody's gone after them for entrapment. IANAL, but my understanding is that the definition of entrapment is inducing someone to commit a crime that he wouldn't have been likely to commit otherwise. In the case of convincing a mentally disabled teenager to run drugs and guns, the shoe seems to fit.
> Please don't submit comments complaining that a submission is inappropriate
> for the site. If you think something is spam or offtopic, flag it by going to
> its page and clicking on the "flag" link. (Not all users see this; there
> is a karma threshold.) If you flag something, please don't also comment
> that you did.

http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
Cats and dogs living together, mass hysteria, P=NP!
"best person" isnt required. Best applicant is. Some google engineer maybe the best person for the job, but they're not applying.
Ask HN: How to deal with competitors?
There is another service in our space. We thought the way to compete was to be better than they are. However, we have gone far above and beyond that - our offering is so much better than theirs that any informed user choosing our competetion would be absurd, and still users swear by the competing service, and it grows more popular each day.

What should we do?
It's a trade-off, because it's convenient to not have to check that objects are non-nil when you send messages to them. With experience, you learn to deal with code that requires non-nil objects via assertions:

NSAssert(array, @"Array can't be nil.");
> People aren't using Python 3 enough because it's not the default in Debian/Ubuntu. That's about to change with Ubuntu 14.04. I expect that to tip the scales.

I doubt it will tip that much. The enterprise customers we develop for still ship on CentOS and have auditing departments that have to scour each library and package a system depends on. Adding a dependency hurts in this environment. These institutions only upgrade their interpreters once every 5 - 8 years if you're lucky.
The way of the editor: a gentle introduction to vi and emacs
Decision Fatigue in Physicians and Medicine
Death - Book For Kids
Mapping the US Banking System with D3.js
> Why should we measure medical technology at the rate of new drugs developed?

Well, I'd stand behind the assertion that it is a reasonable approximation to our ability to understand and modify a biological system. But, I'll happily concede that this is not the only game in town. Your point about tissue engineering is well made, this is highly exciting and should provide some real benefits. But there is a awful lot of hard biology to master here; so while I really hope that we see some rapid initial progress, long term exponential growth here is going to be just as difficult as it is elsewhere in biology.
Rails is in downward trending, where Django is steady and slowly increasing over the years: http://www.google.com/trends/explore#q=Ruby%20Rails%2C%20Pyt...
> With regards to the "spraying of bills", the bills themselves are usually in a safe, which is separated from the electronics (computer & peripherals).

I used to work in a supermarket with the 'self service' checkouts. The cash dispenser internals looks to be exactly the same as that in basic ATMs [0]. Without going into too many details, in our case the security was minimal and there was no tamper proofing. If you really wanted to get inside it wouldn't have been particularly hard. ATMs may by different as they are slightly more portable than a checkout though :)

[0] http://gadgets.boingboing.net/2009/05/11/this-picture-of-an-...
I'm pretty sure asking for references from provided references and contacting them without getting permission from the applicant is illegal. Also most people would feel there was a serious invasion of privacy I think.
>that thinks that good intentions are a substitute for philosophic rigor.

On the contrary, I think that scientific rigor is a good substitute for the free market when it comes to profiting from scientific advances. You can argue that the system in place is flawed and politically biased and perhaps it is, but the alternative is to treat cancer treatments and heart medication the same as vitamins and crystal therapy.

What profound innovations are being held back because of people like myself who demand that certain claims meet a standard of proof before hitting the market?
I flew on a plane without going through security. It was amazing and no one died
Shorter than a pro football quarterback? Let's compare Rob Pike and Brett Favre.

Ageism in CS seems to be real and a huge issue, but let's try to be accurate about the extent of it.
This seems to be a paradigm case of entrapment. This should thus be easily sorted out in the courts. Am I wrong?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Entrapment
The minecraft-themed jump game has potential. I would skin it with more minecraft looking assets and include monsters. Maybe a creeper that explodes and takes away all surrounding blocks when you jump nearby? Or a skeleton that shoots arrows and nudges the player to the side (making it harder to control)?
You may also vary the level by using the different biome textures from the original.
Vim-anywhere - use Vim everywhere you've always wanted to
If anyone is interested in the logistics of the cocaine trade I recommend the Dark Alliance book [1]. The book argues that when cocaine first appeared in the US it was not considered so dangerous or addictive and the authorities did not respond to it as a serious threat (at the time it was PCP that was being demonised).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Dark-Alliance-Contras-Cocaine-Explosio...
Is there a particular reason for that? I can understand not wanting to ship GPLv3 code if it is embedded sufficiently deeply into the hardware, but it shouldn’t be a problem to ship GPLv3 Bash, as the user can change the binary delivered on the harddrive at any time?
It depends what encoding is used. If the edge costs are integers, this is true. Also such bounds are possible for rational costs (but you have to pay more attention). It gets a lot more difficult if non-rational edge weights are allowed.
That's interesting. Is your issue with the for-profit criminal justice system that it's for-profit, or is it with the laws it upholds to bring the profits? In other words, would this still be a problem if all laws upheld were, to your mind, reasonable?
"when in fact it benefits DO"

I could argue that it benefits the customer as well.

If it costs DO more (because of disk wearout) then in theory they would have to raise prices in order pay for their higher costs. And those higher costs could then disrupt the balance in pricing that makes them attractive.

My point is that forgetting the numbers you can't say it only benefits them. Being able to offer lower prices (because your expenses are lower) also benefits the customer as well.
But were the changes between 1.8 and 1.9 in Ruby as significant as 2 to 3 to Python? Or even 1.8 to 2.0?

I know in Ruby 1.8.x to 1.9, some major changes in my day-to-day coding involved Hash (elimination of hash-rocket, and ordered key-value pairs by default)...but I can't think of anything off hand that required me to rewrite my own libraries. And between 1.9 and 2.0...I've been switching between machines that have 1.9.3x and 2.0x and can't even tell a difference. Obviously, I'm not doing any legacy-maintenance in this situation, but it seemed that Python's changes, while breaking, were also significant improvements and changes to the API that mandated changes in implementation?

Speaking as a non-Python-dev...I've been wanting to get more into Python, at least to write routines that take advantage of scipy and numpy and all that goodness...but the process of deciding between 2.x and 3.x and keeping the steps/compromises in order can be beguiling.
The resources you consume, versus the reproductive edge your provide to your offspring. Specifically, if you're competing for resources they could have used in their own reproduction.

The most successful DNA will be when a group of people launch their descendants off into the galaxy to avoid the Red Giant death in our solar system. We're all rats on one slowly sinking ship, right now.
If Guido had just left division the way it worked in 2.7 we'd all have moved by now. Everything else the community is fine with, but it is enough of a sticking point for some people that they can't be bothered to make the switch.
Transparency Regarding Data Security
yes i see what you're saying. thank you for the intro to freenode! it's real-time (well, the time it takes for someone to return to computer & read your question) IRC q/a for Lisp? very cool.

upload the logs & i bet it would be pretty parallel in function to SO. lol, i feel like their moderation usually only hurts the quality of posts if anything... if i ask a question that begs any thought or is open-ended in anyway it is immediately shutdown as an opinionated "asking for favorite library" question even if the functionality i'm looking for is clearly delineated -- which is what the real strength of a q/a community should be!!

"I want to do x thing that's never been done before. Based on the existing libs that do tangentially related things or offer partial functionality, how should I proceed?" > "My RoR form is giving me an error does anyone know why?" (usually a typo or outdated syntax because older version docs are no longer available in the gem community)
> Rename it as something else. Call it Cobra or something.

More likely, if there indeed is never a 2.8, is that Python 2 would eventually be forked and renamed. "Rattler" would make a better pun.
The State of Payments 2013