skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How would the HN community react if any of the ideas suggested in this thread were implemented by PG?

Non-redditors need to understand the overwhelming revolt against any sort of advertisement in the reddit community. Yishan Wong (CEO) had to respond to one of the "top" comments when this article was posted in r/technology[1].

While reddit "fans" will support the company through "Reddit Gold"[2], advertisements in the form of "sponsored links" or "feed ads" doesn't seem to work under the beloved format [ex: 3]. If you're interested in learning about Condé Nast and other investors , I found a "myth busters" blog post [4].

[1]http://www.reddit.com/r/technology/comments/1tvfze/reddit_is...

[2]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/10/thanks-for-gold.html

[3]http://www.reddit.com/comments/1o6f63/now_you_can_fly_histor...

[4]http://blog.reddit.com/2013/08/reddit-myth-busters_6.html
Akin: One top-tier resource (i.e. that particular book on a topic that is clear, explicative, and authoritative) can be worth 10 second or third tier resources.

Someone new to a field or topic will benefit greatly by direction to those best resources (and away from the confusion and time-sink of others).

----

Similarly, if you are at school and taking classes. It's worth a lot of effort to get into classes taught by those professors who, big name or not, really care and know how to teach. Even if their class is "more difficult". What the hell are you paying all that money for, if not to be suitably challenged to learn and achieve more (with good explanations and choice of materials)?
In Factor:

2 days hence

4 weeks ago

etc.
http://docs.factorcode.org/content/article-calendar.html
I would be happy if I was able to submit C++ or Python. I am very familiar with the data structures in their standard libraries, and implementing this in JavaScript is very tedious in comparison.
>it allows extortion/coercion. Suppose I am a mob boss and I wish to become (insert position here). I send my goons to inform you that voting for me is a wise decision because I can offer you protection from the vicious thugs in the area. It would be a shame if the vicious thugs burned your house down, wouldn't it?

How is this different than what currently happens?
In case the site has any issues (it was super slow grabbing the torrent file for me):

magnet:?xt=urn:btih:10601255319a14497812ce76b383a5b9e446ad9c&dn=MAME%5F0.151%5FROMs
>Chomsky certainly never left academic work for politics.

Neither did Krugman.
I was wondering if the copyright of this ROM expired since they are now stored on Archive.org.

Anyone have an answer to this? Can we rip the sprites from MAME roms and use them in our own commercial games?
Thanks for the feedback!

Wind would be a great addition I agree. I've had a hard time finding good audio that has the right feel, but it'll be added at some point.

White noise is on the todo list. What I really need to do is make the audio loading more modular. At the moment it's very naive and everything buffers at once. I want to create a system where there's a core set of sounds that load by default, and then a menu of sounds that expand and load when selected. This would mean I could support a lot more sounds. At present, to add another sample I'd have to remove something already there, because performance is a little flaky even with just the six current samples.
I believe there is something called forking. Instead of complaining , fix the tools yourself and make a pull request.

The current state of the industry is a lot of people are complaining about the freebies they get without contributing back to the open source.
Could you please point me towards an example or a resource that explains how, if possible? I'm very new to javascript.
Oh, but we can expand on that ...

scala> 2.days + 10.minutes
res: FiniteDuration = 2890 minutes

I just don't get it. So a literal like "0.2f" to denote a Float (and not a Long) is acceptable. A literal like "300.5m" to denote a decimal and not a floating-point is acceptable.

But somehow other kinds of literals for other units of measurement are not, because Dear God, magic, magic!!!
I know this is a little nitpicky, but your Python example has way more brackets than are strictly necessary.

if post.created_at < datetime.now() - timedelta(minutes=5):

I agree with your argument in principle though. Just wanted to point out if you're trying to make a point about readability / ease of use with code examples, you should try as hard as possible to make each example optimized to avoid accidentally creating a straw man.

Also, one criticism of the Ruby version is the invisibility of the types involved. What type is returned by 5.minutes vs 5.minutes.ago? How do I know I can compare the second to a date attribute from ActiveRecord? The Python version is more verbose, but I think it's more clear that I'm using two datetime's and a timedelta.
Nearly 100% of the attractiveness of bitcoin is the promise of infinite rewards to the early investors in the Ponzi scheme.

Bitcoin couldn't and wouldn't exist at all without that promise. So a simple system based on allocating 100 coins to everyone just wouldn't do at all.
It boggles my mind that Krugman continues to fail to see the point. I am not the only one who has noticed his blindness [4]. Or is he deliberately avoiding discussing certain aspects of Bitcoin (notably as a payment processing platform)?

"Underpinning the value of gold is that if all else fails you can use it to make pretty things."

This is a very weak and in fact invalid argument. I can't believe Krugman is quoting this! "If all else fail" then gold would lose 90%+ of its value overnight. Look: roughly 45% of the world's gold production is used for financial speculation, 45% for jewelry, and 10% for industrial purposes [1]. In other words, 90% of gold buyers are buying mostly because they believe gold will preserve its value. And "if all else fail" (if speculators exit the gold market), prices will drop, and jewelry buyers will redirect their desire to other precious metals [2], leaving only industrial demand as buyers. Suddenly the world would be producing 10 times more gold than the demand, leaving the prices depressed.

And again, Krugman completely misses the point of Bitcoin having value not as a currency, but as a payment processing platform. Overstock CEO Byrne said it beautifully:

*"You’re getting rid of the interchange fees. We’re paying credit card companies around 2%. For a company whose margin is 1%, picking up 2% on that is quite attractive." [3]

[1] http://www.gold.org/investment/statistics/demand_and_supply_...

[2] For the same reason people prefer expensive diamond over cheap cubic zirconia, even though both are practically indistinguishable to the naked eye. Yes they CZ is less hard, but most jewelry buyers don't care about hardness. They buy diamonds because they are expensive, that is all.

[3] http://www.coindesk.com/overstock-unveils-more-details-bitco...

[4] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/the-switch/wp/2013/12/23...
Spinning disks have enough rotational momentum to keep spinning (which keeps the heads floating) for long enough to park the heads via a weak spring, with zero electricity. A head crash doesn't corrupt a few sectors so much as cause catastrphic damage - that disk would likely never read another sector again. Properly-functionioning spinning disks haven't had issues with random data loss on power failure for at least a decade now.

And your impression of cheap SSDs is dead, flat wrong. They're cheap - every unnecessary part is left off to save money. And we've all (all of us who pay attention) known for years that SSDs (even some with power fail protection) will lose data (even bits which it has reported to have sync'd) on power loss.

A UPS is not enough, if you need to have your data, you need multiple layers of backup, and an SSD must have some method of writing out voltatile data (mostly internal metadata, not cache) before it shuts down.
There are many "real competitors" to C++. The biggest one is C. Many things were written in C in recent years: the Postgres database, networkmanager, pulseaudio, the Linux, BSD, and Mach kernels, zeroMQ, sshd, Xfce, Gnome 2 and 3, the list goes on and on. You may not like it, but people chose to write these things in C when C++ was available. Similarly, Apple chose to base most of MacOS on another non-memory-safe, (usually) non-garbage collected systems programming language: Objective-C. We can debate the merits of these choices, but to deny that they exist is just prima facie incorrect.
Every article, huh? Krugman has much insight to offer about the world of economics, although I know it's hip to rip on him nowadays. Oh well, stay ignorant.
Uber now has to wait 15 minutes before picking you up in France
Terrible science = small, restricted subject population, from which an ironclad blanket conclusion is made, that covers the entire population.

One of the restrictions is price, which makes little sense in concluding so strongly for a measure involving quality. Not to mention that only a single specimen of a single model of each brand was tested. The top-voted comment in the thread points out some Intel models that don't have supercapacitors in them.

Already the article is updated with a couple of other drives to test. I guess that wasn't "End of discussion" after all...
We could just create a crypto currency where we just hand out 100 units to every person.

Not without a trusted central party you couldn't. The work that goes into bitcoin mining is the 'distributed engine' that prevents double spending or forging of bitcoins. Bitcoin mining is not just a way of handing out new coins, its the very engine of the whole system. The only known way to break that engine is to control a bigger engine of the same spec (the >50% attack), and thats looking increasingly unachievable by anyone.
Oh, okay. I thought I had a performance improvement at hand, so I was excited! Thanks for digging into that.
CodeCombat is just acting like a recruiter here. Do they have any advantage over traditional recruiters that may be more highly connected?

Beat this level, and we'll send your resume to some companies that are hiring. And those companies will pay us a hefty commission.
Mike McMahon: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mike_McMahon_(computer_scientis...
i don't think you properly understand the objection. the mob boss may threaten but cannot legally know what you vote
Someone will mention Jeffrey Dean of Google.
I'm in the market of cross-platform desktop application as well and I've been monitoring Mono/Ximian for a while until last night when I was searching for a .NET Oauth 2.0 library and came across of a project called DotNetOAuth which after further digging does not work on Mono.

I'm a Java developer and I would write the software using Java if only Java isn't stigmatized by "bad software" in the desktop market. It's too bad because so far only Java that provide some of the solutions for me in a few areas to tackle in the cross-platform desktop market, namely: dealing with dependencies, rich 3rd-party libraries (and most of them are FOSS) and a packaging tool for Mac App-Store!.

I wouldn't mind writing 3 different UI code as long as I can share the back-end part and that shareable code works consistently across platform (i.e.: something that communicate with an embedded database like SQLite).

Can anyone share their experience using Mono for cross-platform desktop application that requires DB connection and potentially deal with Service API (i.e.: Twitter, Dropbox, etc)?

My requirements are as follow:

1. Installer/Packager

Something that can help me to generate installer for Windows 7, Mac AppStore, Ubuntu software center (or .deb). RPM would be nice but I can live with writing shell script.

2. Build+Dependency management (don't know if NuGet works flawlessly or not in Linux/Mac)

Maven spoiled me (people who dislike Maven please close your eyes...). I've read that Mono has xbuild but the documentation seems... lacking.

3. Unit-testing

Something where I can run unit-tests through the IDE so I can debug directly from my unit-tests when bugs are found.

4. Good enough 3rd-party libraries

I'm down writing missing libraries if needed but my first priority is the app itself.
Ask HN: What are the pros and cons of releasing your app with a beta phase?
Hey guys,

I've been Googling for articles that talk about rolling out with a beta phase and I haven't found many. What apps should you release with a beta phase first, or should you release all apps with one? In what cases would you not want to have a beta phase? Doesn't a beta phase hurt the chances of an app going viral?

I thought these questions would be perfect for the HN community.

Happy holidays!
The day I visited the New York church of Scientology
Our current voting system has an emphasis on the secret ballot.

There are records of which polling place a person voted at,
and whether they showed up to vote, but (in theory) there's no way to tell which of the thousands of ballots from that polling place match to which individual voter.
Yes it is. The intrinsic value of food is that you can eat it; the intrinsic value of art objects is that you like them. All "intrinsic" value refers to is the use you can make of something without exchanging it for something else. If you were the only person in the world, and you appreciated the appearance of gold, than gold would be intrinsically valuable to you.
Someone with 'space on a desk for an apple product' is not really a 'computer enthusiast' just like someone with a mobile phone is not a 'radio amateur'. Yes, the phone contains an advanced radio system, enabling the user to communicate with whomever they want at the flick of a finger. In contrast to a radio amateur the user usually does not know how the thing works other than which buttons to press. The apple user usually knows which buttons to press but show them the nitty-gritty details of how that button press is translated into action on the hardware and their eyes glaze over. A serious computer enthusiast is better off with that wall of hardware, better off with Linux or *BSD than with a closed system, if it is OSX they want to run they're better of with a hackintosh.
For your qualms about non-semantic HTML, I'd check out Neat (http://neat.bourbon.io/). I've used it a few times and it provides pretty much everything you ask for.
See this ladies and gentlemen?

This is why you don't patent stuff that's supposed to be secret, regardless of what other people think
How about configuring and sending them an instance of TightVNC or UltraVNC (one or the other or both of those -- I forget), and then just using that channel to remote to their system? Downside (maybe): They can only talk with you, and there may not be a convenient mechanism for always-on and notifications.

(Or, doesn't the Chrome browser come with some sort of remote-enabling plug-in, these days?)

Otherwise, possibly configure your own server intermediary and use Jitsi or similar? Downside: They'll only be able to talk with people similarly configured (although you could set up several people this way).

The later is what I mean to move towards, Real Soon Now... :-/

P.S. It occurs to me now that you could use the remote access to get them configured for something else, as opposed to just to push a verbal-visual/"talk" communications channel over.
The problem isn't being cold; I have good clothing and don't mind 40F in the slightest. The issue is I haven't really discovered reasons to even be outside- good activities I can safely enjoy among the ice & snow and in the extra-dark of winter
Over the last few days, I was looking at building an IDE as a Chrome Packaged App, but went with node-webkit due to the file I/O limitations of Chrome. However, for many apps, the combination of ease of building a Chrome Packaged App and the automatic cross-platform capabilities (anything that runs Chrome) will further strengthen the Chromebook market.

The one thing I think is missing is more drool-worthy mid-priced machines. There are some very nice Windows 8 devices in the sub-$1000, and it seems Chromebooks jump from $400 right to the Pixel $1200+, which is a large gap in the market.
Looks great (and has a great name to boot). Why Hugs though?
The typical US voting system allows coercion? When I voted, I went into a publicly visible booth, recorded my vote, pressed submit, and went about my business. I suppose I could have been forced to take a picture with a cellphone, but I could have just selected the option they wanted, taken the picture, and then swapped back to the candidate I wanted. Is there something I'm missing here? Any way you slice it, even if the current system allows coercion, if we're talking about cryptographic voting systems, we might as well use ones that don't suffer the same issue.

> your scenario is not observed in the wild, since it is illegal.

I don't mean to be snide, but I've witnessed a great deal of illegal things, so "since it is illegal" is not that convincing.

Even if you discount the threat of violence because of the possibility of police intervention (e.g. you report being threatened), consider the notion of vote buying: a rich person just says they'll pay you lots of money to vote for them. This isn't necessarily something people would want to report, given the possibility of financial benefit, especially if the person is down on their luck.

At any rate, if electoral fraud is something that is "not observed in the wild", people sure do make a big fuss over it (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electoral_fraud for some references).
I left Paris for the Caribbean almost a year ago. First I've been in Martinique, and now I'm in Guadeloupe.
Martinique has been an ideal place to work on my side project.

If you don't speak french, I would recommend Saint-Lucia :

-the people are kind and welcoming

-life is cheap

-you can rent some remote house on a hill where no one will bother you.

-activities are within the usual island-vacation-pack : beach sports, volcano trek, museum, golf
My favorite line: "as anyone who knows anything at all about computer science knows, recursion is always good and cool."
Godel, Escher, Bach - [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G%C3%B6del,_Escher,_Bach](http:...

Made me view, and think about every day to day problem or decision making in a completely new light.
All currencies rely on belief (like those flats in Monty Python). It is possible that gold could lose global belief, but unlikely, given the long history of belief. The US dollar too could lose faith, but again, a pretty good history of trust. Bitcoin? I think belief and trust battle novelty a bit. Will enough people believe, in 20 years, to power the computations necessary at that point? Or will a more novel and exciting currency emerge?
Page views != profitable
I think "The Kingdom of God is Within You" by Tolstoy was the most life changing book I read this year.

It made me start thinking about the idea of sin, which I haven't given much thought about before since I was not raised as a Christian and do not identify myself as one. But sin is such a powerful concept for understanding my own weakness and shortcomings and the evils that come about when I let them control my life.

It is also a very powerful message against the corruption of Church and State and the necessity of peaceful rebellion against these corruptions if they do not allow the living of a Christian life.
I'm sorry if I offended you in some way. "Welfare state" is a widely accepted academic term, and I was using it in that context. I could just as easily have said "states with very progressive tax systems that offer substantial benefits to all citizens, rather than only those who pay." It would have gone over better with those of us who feel strongly about a US transfer payment system ("welfare"), but it didn't really roll off the tongue.

Can we talk about the merits of the policy now?
You're ignoring transactions where Bitcoin is exchanged for actual goods or services, or for non-monetary financial instruments like stocks. In such transactions Bitcoin doesn't have to be a store of value; it only has to be a medium of exchange. The same applies to traditional forms of money, which was my point.

It's true that there aren't many ways to exchange Bitcoin for actual goods or services or non-monetary financial instruments right now, but that's not due to any inherent inferiority of Bitcoin: it's due to the fact that governments and central banks have a huge incentive to either outlaw exchanges of Bitcoin for goods, services, or financial instruments like stocks, or at least impose artificial costs on such transactions that are high enough to discourage most people from making them. In other words, Bitcoin is not competing on a level playing field with other forms of money.
This extension works really well.

Feature request: I would like to be able to use some kind of wildcard/regex system to select which websites or domains it works on.
Even if he's slightly off I still think Krugman is right in identifying Bitcoin's main weakness: it's the world's "hardest" currency ever - much "harder" than gold - and that will make it very volatile, which in turn will make it difficult to use as a store of value or (independent) medium of exchange.

What I mean by "hard" in this context is that its supply is constrained. If you look a fiat currency it can (and is) produced in whatever volume necessary by the central bank, in order to avoid a fall in prices. Gold has a similar (but distributed) mechanism: when the gold price goes up people mine more gold, increasing the money supply.

Note that that property of gold works even if it's the primary medium of exchange: if there is too much deflation then an ounce of gold will buy you more goods and services, making it more worthwhile to mine it - which in turn increases the money supply and acts as a counterforce to price deflation.

But this is obviously a flaw in the design of Bitcoin, not in crypto currencies generally. It should be possible to create one with potentially infinite supply, but where the cost of mining a coin remains relatively stable over time. Such a crypto currency would be usable as a store of value and as a (primary) medium of exchange.

I'd love to see that "infinite supply crypto coin", but unfortunately I'm much less optimistic that it would become as popular as Bitcoin. It wouldn't be usable as an investment/speculation vehicle, and that's probably the main use of Bitcoin right now.
(Just one data point, so take it how you like)

I'm a customer for 1/3 to 1/2 the price. I would sacrifice quality along with a lower price. My profile is:

-wants plants

-knows nothing about plants

-doesn't have any plants

-values having any plants much more highly than having the right plants
I don't see how it is not the case that mining Bitcoins is throwing away energy.

The 'work' is actually the verification of transactions on the blockchain - the reward from mining is just an incentive to do this (mining & verification are tied up in the same process).

The energy expended in mining is necessary to validate transactions in the network.

You might be able to make it more energy efficient but you can't remove the energy expenditure.