skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't think the question "Why buy today what can be bought tomorrow cheaper?" fully explains the behavior of people in the face of increasing purchasing power; there seems to be something else going on. Any thoughts?

The problem is that the economic theories often cited by Bitcoin supporters presume certain fanciful behaviors.

For example, in economic-theorist world, a frictionless spherical perfectly-informed perfectly-rational actor does not buy a six-pack of beer. Instead, the actor makes decisions:

* I will buy one beer at this unit price. Will I buy two?

* I will buy two beers at this unit price. Will I buy three?

* I will buy three beers at this unit price. Will I buy four?

* I will buy four beers at this unit price. Will I buy five?

* I will buy five beers at this unit price. Will I buy six?

* I will buy six beers at this unit price. Will I buy seven?

* I will not buy seven beers at this unit price.

* Therefore I will buy six beers.

I've long assumed that all the people who actually make decisions in this way are locked up in the laboratories of mad economists, who observe their behaviors in the way a biologist might observe a terrarium.
Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more Vallewag)? I know, freedom of speech, etc, but they time and time again publish the most incendiary articles based on the wildest of intentional misinterpretations. It is the farthest thing from "hard-hitting" or "raw" journalism, and at times borders libelous.
The only good part about Macs is the UI. There used to be Mac clones made with commodity hardware, but they sold so well they threatened Apple's ridiculously inefficient margins.

Apple's supply chain isn't as bad now, but if all you want is a browser there's no reason to get it from them.
The ones who walk towards Acre
In the two cases I know of, nothing replaces Office-type docs (as in, they don't use them), and Facebook replaces an over-loaded SD card that never leaves the camera for photo management.

(Note, I'm not the GP.)
It's very unfortunate. I am too scared to voice opinions on these subjects on public forums due to the potential outrage people would react with, which may effect my career.

I really think that people secretly enjoy being outraged.
So another way to figure out which of our taboos future generations will laugh at is to start with the labels. Take a label-- "sexist", for example-- and try to think of some ideas that would be called that. Then for each ask, might this be true?

One of my favourite essays.

http://paulgraham.com/say.html
Technical jobs are 90%+ male, but our customer base is generally much closer to 50/50. Don't you think it's pretty plausible that having a woman working with you might add a useful perspective when making your product? I've worked at 3 startups(2 as a dev) and interviewed a couple hundred programmers over that time, and don't think I've yet even had a resume from a female programmer, and honestly that really disappoints me - I'd love to work in a coed environment, just to get more opinions and life experiences informing our discussions.

From a purely selfish standpoint, theres a lot of money to be made and a lot less competition in female-customer-oriented startup spaces - take the phenomenal success of Pinterest for an easy example - unless you're only building for yourself, why would you be opposed to adding a perspective that could potentially double your market size.

*I'm personally bothered by the gender gap for a plethora of reasons that go far beyond purely economic, but women control something like 70% of household spending in the USA, and there's a lot of compelling opportunities there even leaving aside any larger equitable society issues.
Unfortunately for this all female team, feminists will accuse them of working to support the patriarchy just as much as the evil men. Sadly, this is actually what prominent feminists in technology believe: https://medium.com/about-work/e82b7ca7de03 (Ctrl-F "support the patriarchy").

For these feminists, women who fail are obvious evidence of patriarchy, and women who succeed are obviously just working alongside the patriarchy. I firmly believe that if next year the tech industry was 55% female and females received 55% of funding and salaries, feminists would point to that as evidence that the patriarchy is purposefully giving things to women to hide the fact that they're all misogynist pigs. This prominent tech feminism is, according to their own terms, completely unfalsifiable.
I'd appreciate if the sounds mixture could slowly but constantly change, going from the "it's going to rain soon" mix to the "it's pouring rain" mix to the "sunny with hints of birds" mix.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tragedy_of_the_commons#Applicat...
What you should know about Facebook Audio Comments.
Google Docs let me down when it mattered most.

I really wanted to go all in on Google Apps and have been using them exclusively for the last year, but at the start of december I started negotiating a large contract and I had a solicitor drawing up some documents for me.

Both the solicitor and the large company I was negotiating with were sending me .docx files and Google docs was failing to number the paragraph correctly.

This let to quite a bit of embarrassment and was forced to go out and buy Office for mac. If I was using a Cromebook I would have to buy a whole other laptop.
We should stop taking such predictions seriously because it is more focused on investors rather than the company's actually ability to create value.

I have worked with Rackspace since the dot com boom, they were one of the rare companies which actually grew when the bubble burst [citation needed]. It is unlikely that Rackspace will beat AWS or Google in short term but I dont think it is a dooms day either. Any large company will not make the mistake of relying on just one cloud service provider such as AWS (and I dont see why anyone would chose Google for a serious business). I have used rackspace for many reasons and spending around 20% of my infra cost on Rackspace (20% softlayer 40% Aws 20% Mixpanel).
> socialize us in a way to say things that are relatively anodyne,

I freaking wish. Have you read some of the vile nonsense spewed out on HN every day?

More seriously, people have a variety of fora, and so here they might be professional but they keep a different name for Reddit to post to the trolling subredits.
"If entities are made of related facts, and some facts are updated but others aren’t, then as the database grows and new facts are recorded, an entity ends up being scattered widely over a lot of storage."

As far as I understand this isn't so. All data in Datomic is stored in the indices, so the facts associated with an entity should be stored together.
Its probably worth mentioning that it is technically impossible to have a discussion about this (on hacker news) because virtually every submission about the topic is killed, as it is with previous times this comes up (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6824157).

Fully agree that stifling / censoring is causing a lot more harm than good (as is apparent by a lot of the reactions here)
For a modern day look at that competition, Heineken gave it a try earlier this year: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2NyVO5fP8-0
I almost stopped there, but the examples afterwards are pretty much spot on
My Dell Venue 8 Pro is pretty fantastic at near that price point and is a full desktop OS. Granted its a tablet and not a full Laptop but its a great piece of hardware and Windows 8 really shines on it.
I'm a mongrel2 developer, and we don't use bare char pointers for strings either, in favor of the bstring library. Zed was off the opinion that it is superior to the c++ std:: string.
40? That doesn't even seem to be a challenge. Are you sure you want to recommend people that can't get the optimal solution?
Can anyone please explain what this means for someone who doesn't understand crypto?
As someone who owns some Yahoo stock (which makes me a Tumblr owner (admittedly 9.9009901e-7 percent)) I feel pretty good about it.
What's the carbon footprint of the election infrastructure?
I would have played in Python, Ruby, or C++. I almost played in CoffeeScript by compiling it myself.

I don't know Haskell, but I would have considered learning it if it was offered. ;)
If you're going to call me "crazy", I'd appreciate it if you had the courtesy to address their arguments I actually made, rather than ones I didn't...

Obviously if I thought wealthy people actually did hoard their wealth in dollars I wouldn't have made the point about inflation inducing people not to hold their wealth in dollars. Wealthy people could, would, and probably should hoard large portions of their wealth in dollars in the absence of inflation though.

I didn't making any points about people not wanting to consume if the money is deflationary, because obviously there are limits to how far one would want to defer consumption. Consumption /= investment. Investment is based around getting returns, and if average return is zero then there's very little incentive to invest instead of hoarding coins for those neither certain of beating the market nor particularly enthralled by taking risks. US prices oscillated wildly between 1600-1910 so it was hardly a sustained deflation in which burying dollars in the ground was the most reliable way of ensuring continued purchasing power in a couple of years time, but it's worth noting that growth was a bit more impressive after 1910...

Three. The whole point of the "sticky wages" argument for inflation - one I didn't actually make - is that as relative prices in an economy shift, the real value of some workers' contribution falls, but they still have bargaining power sufficient to ensure this subset of the labour force doesn't accept wage cuts (they take job losses instead). A corollary of this is that productive workers in growing industries can and do have sufficient power to demand higher annual wage escalators, and inflationary increases to payscales are commonplace in normal economic climates. Nothing about the sticky wages problem implies that wages relative to labour productivity of a segment of the economy can't catch up with inflation, in which case the median worker can ask for and get accept their annual inflationary pay rise.
But I haven't mentioned the sticky wages argument. Actually I went out of my way not to mention the sticky wages argument, by giving a theoretical examples where wages were all indexed, and emphasising the importance of inflation in providing investment stimulus was far more significant than its distributional effects.

As for point four, I'm honestly not sure whether you're deliberately misunderstanding me to make a rhetorical attack or genuinely don't understand that "investment strategy" and "encouraging people to ... spend more money on stuff they don't need" are not the same thing, and the poor generally benefit a lot more from the rich investing in job creation than the rich buying nice little cabinets full of gold.
Probably the clearest example: If one company is required to clean up its waste responsibly and the other one is allowed to do whatever it wants with its waste, the unregulated company will destroy the other one (perhaps literally by burying it under a mountain of waste).
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)

I am sympathetic to both claims, given that it's possible that economic growth in the modern era is only made possible by massive credit expansion (voluntary, fractional slavery.

boom/bust cycles are normal, what's so bad about them? If the claim is that people get hurt then the question we have to ask is why aren't we stepping forward to help them? As for single or bimetallic standard, those are of course political issues, I'm not as well versed to the reasons for them but it appears to me to basically be a pre-hashing (if you will) of the same arguments we're having now about inflationary vs. deflationary currency, except with more of granularity concern (not an issue with bitcoins).
I remember reading this article... in 2012.
Did you try LibreOffice? It's somewhere between Google docs and MS Office.
>I am not about to take out a loan in a hard currency when perfectly good inflationary currencies are easily at hand.

Sadly it is not so easy to make money this way, the forward exchange rates will cancel out any gain from the interest earned in the inflationary currency. Otherwise everyone would do this.

You can make money doing this but really you are just taking a bet on exchange rates, you can easily lose money as well if the fx goes the wrong way during your investment period.

There are very few risk free ways to make more money than investing in US Treasuries.
Why not grab VMware?

I got the hexxeh build running fine on VMWare (Workstation, but it should work fine in Player) a couple of days ago.

All I had to do was change ethernet config in the .vmx file as it wasn't picking up the virtual adapter.
> Misogyny is alive and well, from Hacker News devolving into a disgusting sea of victim blaming after a female poster discussed being sexually assaulted at a tech conference, to the HR-free world of venture capital (ask any female founder who has dealt with investors - 9 times out of 10, that investor has used his power to sexually harass the founder).

In my mind that last parenthesised bit stands out like I don't know what... What the f*...?!? :(
we just cut a release candidate a month ago. I have lots of docs to update and it's the holidays so it hasn't happened yet
haha yeah. I'm not sold on that yet, it was a design decision I made so that I personally could do some crazy things with column names. The lack of safety would only come if you had a string that was somehow modifiable by a user and that was to be used as a column name. So the $$ just means make the name use ANSI quotes, instead of an unquoted identified (column name). The single $ lets users implement whatever they want for a column name, which is useful if you want to keep a tiny library and not worry about database specific features like functions, etc...
It's a shame you're getting downvoted. I happen to agree. But I think the volatility of this issue makes it difficult to discuss accurately.

"You have all the same opportunities men do, at least in this space."

I also agree with you. But I'm open to being proven wrong. And I think that's the sticking point here. Some audiences (male or female, doesn't matter) believe that women do not have the same opportunities as men.

In my experience, technology is one of the most meritocratic fields. With or without an education, come in with working code and you have a job. Now, if you're going to move goal posts and say, "well the more well off have more opportunities to write code", that is a different, much more complicated discussion. But as for the primary metric here, raw performance, working code, a running portfolio, I don't see how it is a function of genitalia or gender expression.

In other aspects of life I'm a triple minority. And yet here I am, a working engineer. Where are my handouts? Where are my support groups? Where is my encouragement?

So yeah, I totally agree with you.

"Women are so entitled nowadays."

I wouldn't say that. I would say the people making the most noise are entitled. Everyone else is too busy doing actual work.

(Am I calling social justice not real work? Of course not. It's just ... it feels misguided/trolly at times, when it isn't presented in a rational manner.)
Why would Amazon give away laptops for free? You can verify the claim in the link by just going to Amazon and looking at the best sellers in the laptop category.
I find the numbers hard to believe and looks like PR more than anything else. Am on my phone right now, so can't check the numbers. What's the catch?
I'm conflicted here. Handling MS Office formats correctly is so essential to so many people that Google Docs really needs to do better here.

On the other hand it's such a shitty format that getting it right is a gargantuan task. LibreOffice doesn't get much credit here either and I'm not aware of any other 3rd party clients that do much better (correct me if I'm wrong).
Gawker is horrible, but if you read the original article in The Information that they're quoting from, it's not that distorted. Graham is asked whether YC discriminates against women. Graham is aware that when he's asked this, the subtext is that there is a marked gender imbalance among YC founders. Graham could answer "no, we don't discriminate, and I don't know why the imbalance exists or exactly what we should do to fix it". But Graham doesn't leave it at that: instead, he writes a small essay about gender imbalance in the industry on the fly, and a lot of what he says is both discouraging and, to my ears, incorrect.

I think Paul Graham is a good, interesting person with a lot of interesting and valuable insight that comes from experience I will never have. But he is not infallible, and I think this is a huge blind spot for him.

Valleywag probably wants to see him burned at the stake, then drawn and quartered by four Uber SUVs. Think of the pageviews!
Why can't someone make a test account first, and then replay the best answer much more quickly with their real account?
I understand you and I fully agree. I actually work with a majority of women. I'm in the corporate sector, and there are more women then men from what I'm seeing.

I still don't get the movement. Everyone knows Computer Science exists. It's just not an interesting or attractive field for everyone. Let's be honest, when you have prospective high school grads you can't make CS more interesting than say, Physics, Bio, Chemistry. A majority of women flock to those fields and humanities. It's not sexism, it's not the patriarchy, it's just statistics.

It just seems like a lot of women just aren't interested in CS, and I get that. It's a fascinating field, but I can totally see why it's not populated with women.

Anyways, all I'm trying to say is when it comes down to it, and I see a good female candidate, I will hire her. I really don't care about the gender, just I get way fewer females candidates. It is what it is.

Why not host more women friendly CS/Info tech workshops to spread interest?

These kinds of blog posts are just hot wind without any real foundation. Affirmative action isn't the way to go about it, spreading interest in the field at an early stage, however, is.

Example: CS classes in high school don't hold a candle to the sciences and are very very poorly taught for the most part. Other sciences are exciting, they out number CS classes like 20 to 1.
You said:

> Women are so entitled nowadays.

I don't know if you're just incredibly tone deaf, callous to what your words mean, or are trying to be funny.

If you think that women have equal ability to men (by your comment, maybe you don't), and you think that people should hold jobs equal to their abilities, then you should wonder why 50% of your colleagues aren't women...
People love being outraged. And, even without being outraged, having something to criticize makes writing easier and more enjoyable; it's a quick, cheap path to "flow".
So you're conflating your technical groups with your product groups? And you're saying that your product is a function of gender?
Why not ClojureScript instead?

Could be fun.
Despite its discouraging content, what do you feel is incorrect about it?
I'm sure it is but how will it run after 6 months of use by a non-technical user. The 'Windows half-life' kicks in and most Windows PC's I've ever seen have been almost unusable after a year or so of such usage.
After finishing with a statement so women-hating and/or trolling as "Women are so entitled nowadays.", there really can't be a sensible discussion. Downvoting is, I believe, the only reasonable option.
Is there something that can collectively be done about Gawker (more Vallewag)?

Sure: don't talk to their writers.
Separate from the merits of the discussion, Twitter is in a phase where it LOVES to get outraged about things.

It's very mobbish right now. It's really a turn-off.

But I do think it's a fad that will self-correct. Once it goes too far people will lose followers for joining the mob-du-jour and will adjust accordingly.
> was the subject of massive fraud in Italy due to its recent decision to accept (only) Bitcoins

Can you elaborate please? What's the fraud angle?
I do a lot of remote work with my chromebook, their basic terminal "app" is pretty nice, but I installed crouton (ubuntu) along side chromeOS and it works beautifully for me.
This. The Chrome store is ridden with lame and/or spammy apps that haven't met the bar I was expecting, and therefore you pretty much _have_ to use Google Apps for everything. For most individual use cases it seems ok, but enterprise-level adoption requires good substitutes for apps like Powerpoint, Word, and Excel. (Hell even as a contractor I wouldn't trust my work in Google Apps, as I've been burned before as well.)
I got 29 with first algorithm I came up with. Was really fun, but surprised they say their current code gets 33. Maybe it handles other cases better?
I wrote a mammoth comment about it on this thread already.
I manage a top tier development team at the worlds largest bank. I go through 100's of resumes.

The percentage of women applying for pure CS related jobs (not business jobs, but specifically tech) is very little.

It's not my problem that a small part of the resumes I get are women. It's not sexism. It's just statistics.

I work a majority of women actually, they out number us very very hard.

I've yet to find a substantial argument for the men against women in tech movement. Did someone yell into your face "get out of my office you fucking WHORE", or is there some VC that subscribes purely to "I ONLY EVER HIRE MEN". Is there some CEO that raped his co workers?

All I'm seeing is a few nancies getting offended at:

a) they didn't get hired likely because they were not good enough, not because they are women

b) women that feel they are entitled to get offended at any little off putting remark/joke/jab.

Downvote me, I really don't care.
the problem now is that "merely profitable" companies need to be viciously attacked by companies like Google and Amazon that have flying STOCKS but post no PROFITS. Just "doing their job" and having happy customers isn't good enough if a Wall Street giant needs your business added to it's marketshare so they can avoid some taxes next year.
I wonder if this was as much work as I suspect it was.
It should also be noted that Afilias, which manages .org, .info, .mobi (and more), uses PostgreSQL.

So PostgreSQL is pretty heavily involved in internet infrastructure right now.
Ahh, actually it's because of evolution that this happens. The idea is that some of the goats will stay behind so the rest of the herd (herd of goats?) can get away.
My bad. Also, in my experience, strong libertarians believe that the way things are is the way they ought to be -- if you're poor, it's your fault.
Pollution regulations are an obvious example. Car emission regulations seem to be a pretty good thing, what with the distinct lack of smog in major US cities these days. Yet, if given the choice to opt in or opt out of the regulations, people would generally opt out, as it's cheaper for them personally. The result would be the return of car-related smog.
After finishing with a statement so women-hating and/or trolling as "Women are so entitled nowadays.", there really can't be a sensible discussion.

Check your sensitivity. That's how I feel from my own experience dealing with women. A lot of them feel that they are being crushed by men with no real world example, it's a large modern bandwagon. Modern day pseudo-feminism, that is.