skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've recently started playing Dota 2 with a few friends. I'm really enjoying the medium length bursts of strategy.

As well as that I've kindled a love for Paradox' various grand strategy, my favourite of which is Crusader Kings 2. It's a logical progression from Civ V and really scratches the itches that it misses, especially in multiplayer.
> So you would rather be locked into a single crappy platform with a crappy language that only works on that single crappy platform?

Please explain how you arrived at that conclusion.
Python eval really is dangerous
We both came up with nearly the same idea at nearly the same time (within one minute) - what are the odds of that?

My solution is slightly different - to avoid the Halting Problem, you can use a distributed approach. You have a very large (but finite) number of processors that you pass your programs to.
You're not alone! Whenever I'm bored, mentally altered, and staying in for the night... There's nothing better to fire up than a good game of civ 5. You just have to go into it knowing you'll be playing for the next five hours.
Is there a source for the Asus not being able to be unlocked?
Non-fiction: Antifragile by Nassim Taleb was very good. Reminded me of Hayek's deep insight into chaotic, organic systems (e.g. human interaction systems). Also helped me to find out what direction I should take after my own book (http://www.nationbydesign.com)

Fiction: re-read Milan Kundera's Immortality and The Book of Laughter and Forgetting. Still lifetime favourites after all these years.
Why has tumblr become such a cesspool of social justice warriors just aching to find something to be angry about?

How does the Tumblr owner feel about his platform being used by this toxic community?
It's pretty clear that the hydrogen bomb is, in the sense you give, "immoral".

Sure, you can come up with complex, hypothetical scenarios where it has value, but fundamentally it has but one purpose, which is to murder millions of people.

In most moral systems, murder of one person is immoral, never mind millions.
Modernism finished some time in the 80's (though I do wonder if Ballmer ever left that decade).
Seeing how badly people reacted on Twitter, I don't see any upside for anybody to say anything about this issue at all. Which probably won't help matters much…
Since you joined just 3 days ago, just want to let you know that this isn't Reddit. Comments like this^ will be downvoted by most people here.
It's just a fad in the US.
> The problem, Turkle argues, is that all of this [electronic] talk can come at the expense of conversation. We’re talking at each other rather than with each other.

-----------------------------

Electronics aside, is that new? If you read books like How To Make Friends and Influence People, it seems like most people were horribly self-centred even back then. If you've listened to Ira Glass' talk about creativity, one of the points he brings up is essentially that a lot of people lack interest in things other than themselves. He puts it a little more gently than that, but that's the core of it.

Heck, I remember the idea that we're all looking for the unconditional love we thought we deserved as children.

Now, I'm not saying that we're all like that, or that the majority of us are like that. But if you want to sing the praises of what we had before you have to paint a fairly rosy picture of humanity. Your null-hypothesis, so to speak, isn't electronic communication alone - that might just be making the pre-existing social dynamic easier to see.

If you want to make a strong argument, general rule, if you want to make a strong argument - to be persuasive to people who value no-BS, "just the facts please mam" - you have to either prove that you don't live in the situation where your argument would be really difficult to empathise with, or show that your argument still works even if you're in a situation where your argument would be really difficult to empathise with.

(Of course, for different people, different things are persuasive - one of the reasons this is written in the style of a story is that stories help us empathise with people and filter larger things through that empathy... I'd say there's too much of the reporter in this story for that to work as well as it should. But you can certainly get a lot of distance out of packaging up quite abstract thoughts into anecdotes. Even if, or perhaps especially, if they're not anecdotes about you. You may need a little bit of yourself in there as a hook but interesting people talk a bit about themselves and use that as a hook to talk about others - because they've got these interests in the world around them.)
The US had net deflation for most of its history (except during wars) from 1600-1910, and certainly there was plenty of growth.

And for all but the last 45 years of that 410-year period, the US also had the ability to obtain labor by force and without compensation. And even afterward, for many decades and well beyond the 1910 cutoff, the US had labor arrangements which only were not classified as slavery due to legal hair-splitting over the definition of the term.

Thus, we can just as easily argue that slavery is correlated with economic growth. Or that disregard for the intellectual-property laws of other countries is associated with growth (see the US in the 19th century, China in the 20th and early 21st). Or... well, lots of complicated factors that you seem to want to gloss over to make an argument in favor of one and only one factor.

(and that's without getting into the volatility of gold-backed currency, the boom/bust cycles, the fights over whether to have a single or bimetallic standard, etc. etc.)
I have read an article or two on NYC medallions, and obviously it's an aberration of a system. In Spain (for instance) you "just" need a license (either purchased second hand or new if there are new ones coming.) I think renting them is prohibited by law.
See also http://www.noisli.com
This kind of SEO hack seems hard to fix with an algo. One way might be to target "content" creators like Abby and Jennifer as they probably use Google+ (and probably other social networks) to promote their work. By targeting the writers and giving some penalty to everything they write as well as the site where the article is published, these sites will need to verify how good the writers are before accepting the guest post.

I believe avoiding targeting the big brands is for the better since giving bad reputation to the brand linked on these articles would backfire with false articles against competitors.
> It is the first time I saw Paul Graham appear on my Facebook

Amazing times we live in, isn't it? If this is how the average person finds out who someone like PG is, what hope is there for the world at large?

Please note that had PG been known through standard mass-media channels way earlier, there might have been even a fighting chance that more women (i.e. outsiders) had joined the tech world early on, since this way the news about YC wouldn't spread through what are predominantly male/engineering-graduate-heavy word-of-mouth channels, and we would have avoided this mess in the first place. Yet the press and the world at large is not even interested in the success of something like YC until the YC is big enough to throw rocks at because of some juicy inclusion/exclusion controversy. So what we have is a controversy that, like hundreds of others like it, is nearly "manufactured" by the press itself.

The moment you become big is the moment you become torn apart by the world.
Gawker was just looking for page views [1], as with the pg racism [2] claim a few months ago.

This is dangerous. If people are scared to speak openly and honestly about topics such as racism, homelessness and sexism because they don't want Valleywag to label them as racist, elitist or sexist, we'll all be forced to just go on pretending everything is great.

[1] http://pando.com/2013/12/26/look-whos-gawking-inside-nick-de...

[2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/major-fwd-us-donor-says-a-strong...
I disagree because Rackspace is the most logical disaster recovery (DR) solution for companies that primarily use AWS. Even if you have DR backups in other AWS data centers, you're not protected from bugs that could affect all data centers. I've seen this happen with Windows Azure, and it could happen to any cloud provider. Therefor, very conservative enterprises will want a second cloud provider and Rackspace complements AWS nicely. Considering that the most conservative firms are the last to adopt the cloud, I think this kind of consideration will gain traction and drive business to Rackspace.
Having the full interview behind a $400 paywall doesn't help anyone evaluate his words "in context."
I do nearly all my work on remote machines, writing code in Vim over SSH. Could chromeOS work for someone like me? Is there a decent terminal app for chromeOS? I don't want a PuTTY-like utility that allows me to open sessions; I'm looking for a tabbed terminal that allows me to run basic linux commands locally and ssh into remote machines...
We're creating an environment now in which it is practically impossible to discuss this topic in tech. Our general irrationality and desire to completely and utterly jump down the throat of anyone who even remotely touches on this topic means that in the future any gender topics are just going to get "no comment" responses.

That's sad and not without a touch of irony precisely because in stifling the discussion we're probably doing more harm than good.
pg will be writing a clarification soon.

https://twitter.com/paulg/status/416994260995416064
I'm absolutely certain that my brain is just fundamentally misreading your first sentence.
In case you're not aware: there is a BitCoin fork which seeks to compete with DNS, called NameCoin. Though the primary purpose is domain resolution, it's also a generic key-value storage system using the block chain.
Wait, are you referring to this article?
Do Your Homework in Python
Look at all the things you're sweeping under the rug in your defense of deflationary currency:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6977547
Was the ValleyWag article discussed on HN? I seem to have missed it.
> a regulated industry cannot compete with an unregulated one, but people are still better off with the regulated one.

Can you please give one example?
Most of that probably has more to do with horribly bad legacy systems at the banks than it does with what currency is used. A little bit of competition will do well in showing what is possible, but shouldn't automatically replace the reigning currencies.
Submit the solution using the contact button at the bottom (didn't signed up)?
I'm a statist, and I like Bitcoin.

In particular, I think a mixed economy half run by the state, half free markets works pretty well.

There is no contradiction between Bitcoin and the existence of a state. There are lots of ways of regulating and taxing. Sure, Bitcoin might change the details of them - that's just growing pains.

e.g. I would make it compulsory for any company granted limited liability to register the public keys of all Bitcoin wallets it has the private keys of with the tax office.

Or, if necessary later because that's too hard to track, tax either land or carbon emissions directly (rather than income or exchange of goods).
Optimistically. I'm awaiting more infrastructure before calling stage 3. We are still 2 years from that in my book. Still too much to learn.
Well they are all tools with trade-offs. It is good to have something like Datomic. The trick with Datomic (from a 10 minutes summary I listened to last year) is that because of immutability interesting things can happen in respect to caching. You can cache things locally and have smart clients. It simplifies and adds interesting performance properties.

Sometimes immutability is not right for you, sometimes it is.

He criticizes CouchDB as well. Yeah you need to have double the disk space. But CouchDB now has auto-compaction triggers based on fragmentation threshold or based on times of day. Immutability allows completely lock-less reading. Crash only stopping (can just kill the power or the service anytime without corrupting the database). Master to master replication lets you build custom cluster topologies. Well defined conflict models and explicit conflict handling is invaluable (as opposed to other databases that hide and paper over that, sometimes losing data in the process -- read Aphyr's blog http://aphyr.com/ for an thorough study on that). Do you need those features? Maybe you don't, maybe you do. It is good to be aware of it and have it your toolbox if you need it one day.
I've done some research here. To me, the opportunity is not in theme selling, but marketplace ownership. Theme forest charges a 20% commission on every sale, and it's basically an uncontested market place. If you can align the incentives correctly you can out compete them. Of course the obvious challenge is reaching critical mass, but with some creative thinking and early spending, it could be done. Find ways to incentivize people to submit a design to you and not themeforest, then send enough PPC traffic to them to convince them you're better than themeforest.

A lot of up front costs, but I definitely think the opportunity is there, especially as long as Themeforst charges 20% for a service with very few marginal costs.
Gawker is blocked (or at least heavily penalized), and nobody else really wrote about it.
It's already got a lot more political stories (though necessarily post-Snowden); HN feels pretty much like early reddit now. Though I do think Reddit morphed its community precisely to avoid just being another in this list (Digg exodus helped that too of course).
Damn, I'm sorry that happened. Thank you for sharing. I wish that young people heard your sort of story in school.
Did Astronomers Just Find the First Moon Outside Our Solar System?
I only took a year of Latin but I found it very useful in understanding my own language, English, as well as helping me in learning French (almost bilingual) and Spanish (competent). But the biggest benefit was that when I learned Russian, the whole idea of a case system was something that I was already used to, and the rest of Russian grammar (the verb) is incredibly simple in comparison to any other European language. Latin is an ideal stepping stone to fluency in Russian, and that is a very useful language to know in the modern world.
Wow the cufon font on that page is awfully blurry on a retina display.
Valleywag is a banned domain, so all submissions to the article were autokilled. (and there were many submissions)

Since the original article was under a paywall, those links were also killed.
This patent was originally owned by Certicom, now part of Blackberry. One of the inventors was Scott Vanstone who's excellent book, Handbook of Applied Cryptography lives on my desk.

The patent seems to indicate that Dual EC is known to be usable for escrow, something that the NSA surely knew. But given the pedigree of the authors, it must have been known by a bunch of other people well before the March 2013 publication date.

There's something odd going on here.
Doom RL best rogue like I've played.
> Correction: Haskell has them, Rust has a limited form of them, and Scala encodes them using a horrible hack.

Fun fact: The way Haskell encodes them is identical to the way Scala does.

> What you lose is compiler-enforced coherence. When you use type classes, certain functions come with the expectation that you will consistently pass the same dictionary around between calls.

Could you please show an example where this goes wrong?

> With actual type classes, this is a given: there can be at most one instance of a type class for a type (or tuple of types). With Scala's implicits, you can trick the compiler into passing different dictionaries between two calls that expect the same dictionary.

Limiting type classes to one instance per type ... that's what I would call completely pointless. With that kind of restriction, why have typeclasses in the first place? There is probably not much (anything?) which could be enabled by such a crippled feature compared to dynamic dispatch/OO/subtyping.

> I am aware that this is a tradeoff: Haskell's type classes are antimodular (because a global set of instances must be kept in order to guarantee instance uniqueness per type) and Scala's implicits can be used in potentially incoherent ways.

Can you provide an example?
It seems that this is an awful thing that google is doing, but I really couldn't get very far in the article before getting tired of the author's unintentional schtick - the following is where I stopped:

"They don’t buy links? They don’t bribe bloggers? They don’t sell links on MOZ? Yes, you’re reading right. SEOs sell links on MOZ. But we all know this. It is so obvious. But MOZ is not the topic of this article.

And this is not going to be an article; I would like to look at it as a report. We will make a report about huge companies (we will start with one company), ranking for tens of thousands of keywords using black hat tactics. "
I think there is a simple way to counter-act vote buying/coercion: if the voter has a mechanism to cheat the cheater. If I can accept a hundred bucks to vote A, then walk around the corner and change my vote to B in secret, it creates sufficient disincentive to buy or coerce votes.
> And [Chromebooks] simply can't replace a laptop as a primary

I now know two people with Chromebooks. Both also have an (older) desktop. By any reasonable measure, it's the Chromebooks which are the primary. It's almost as if the desktop provides an it's-there-if-I-really-need-it fallback in case any of the long-tail apps are needed, but both are finding them not needed. (Note that neither are office workers.)

Both knew going in that the device would not run their PC software, so I think perhaps the correct messaging is out there.

Still, two is a very small number, even in the personal anecdote space. So, we'll see.
So far, changes seem to happen fairly slowly. Things are discussed ahead of time. Some kinds of changes are proposed ahead of time in the form of a BIP (Bitcoin Improvement Proposal) -- https://github.com/bitcoin/bips. Even tiny changes, that seem entirely reasonable to me, can generate controversy. Core developers ask each other to acknowledge each pull request.

If the developers tried to push something through that many miners wouldn't like, I'm confident people would notice and it would cause a large outcry.

> Seemingly innocuous changes can indeed have unforseen consequences.

The core Bitcoin developers seem conservative, reasonable, skilled, and they test things quite heavily. That said, changes are risky, and they've caused problems in the past. Bitcoin is risky!
Racksapce has offered this service since the late 90s.
Bitcoin: A New Kind of Startup?
I was just thinking the same thing...
I'm not sure what you mean. If somebody isn't interested in either programming or being involved with tech startups (and the overwhelming majority of people in the world are not) then I don't see any particular reason to expect people to have heard of PG.

Experts in fields are typically widely unknown by the general public. I first learned of Andre Geim (A Nobel Prize winner in Physics; not my field) from a youtube video about beer and magnets. I don't think that suggests anything dreadful about society.
> One thing I wanted to do awhile back was create an interface that could only be implemented by a class that had already implemented certain other interfaces.

I think that's easily possible in Scala. I guess one wouldn't even need typeclasses for that.
But there is also no way for us the verify a valid and safe vote. Especially with our lively die bold machines. I'll take the thugs, give me a fair vote.
For what it's worth it IS a gawker media property and so I usually take these interviews with a few shipping containers worth of salt...
> Windows can run TurboxTax

So can pretty much every mobile/desktop OS, including ChromeOS, now that Turbo Tax has web-based "Turbo Tax Online" editions.

The "I need Windows to run X" factor is getting weaker over time.
That's fine, too--we'll have your code, but you may not (after you change browser sessions). Well, until we reply to your email.
So perhaps they've adopted the voice that you have to when you're constantly speaking in front of an audience full of all your friends, family, co-workers, and even bosses.

Interesting insight. Would not be surprising if message boards like this and some mailing lists socialize us in a way to say things that are relatively anodyne, given the strong bias against trolling and off-topic, ill-considered remarks. Also, we come to learn that we're writing for an audience composed of anyone who might be on the Internet (!).

About this second point, I actually think that's a great thing. Because of it we're motivated to avoid writing to a select audience, saying things that would be hurtful to others if they were listening in on the conversation. It helps us to consider our comments within a larger context.

The part about anodyne comments can't be overgeneralized -- think of the types of threads on reddit and 4chan. It might have something to do with being exposed to venues that are moderated or in which there is a reputation system.
Note that the worst content farms either evolved from or bought second and third tier search engines (About.com, AOL) because they could sue Google in an antitrust lawsuit if they ever got burned for their crappy content and linking schemes.
Some assorted points:

- He is accused by people of being, at best, oblivious and at worst, sexist. I've never sat down with the guy, so I can't speak to that, but I'm tired of hearing about the same voices over and over again when I'm not even sure they're relevant. Regardless of your thoughts on Graham, it seems pretty obvious that the founder + showrunner of one of the largest (largest? I don't know accelerators too well) VC accelerators in the world would have a relevant place when talking about startups and programming.

- Every time he opens his mouth about founder diversity, he seems completely out of his league to address the topic. I want to hear Paul Graham's thoughts on gender equality and inclusive participation in the Valley as much as I want to hearCharlton Heston's thoughts on gun control. You're literally criticizing someone for answering an interview question.

- Clearly he's never heard of littlebits, GoldieBlox, Roominate, or Hopscotch--not to mention Codecademy orMakerbot. Charlie knows Codecademy is YC-backed, right?

I agree with the second half of Charlie's post -- that VC and entrepreneurship in general should be about inclusiveness and equality, and that capitalism has historically rewarded those traits -- but it comes from a place of such bizarre vitriol.

(And, as a snarky aside, someone who unironically uses the phrase 'my brand' should rarely be fighting for a position of moral authority.)
You could rank #1 for Viagra in Bing and get maybe two visits a day.
Why should the tech world be any different than every other industry which forbids meaningful discussions as a matter of course?