skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> How about taking seriously someone who is, you know, well-known (to the point of receiving a Nobel Prize for his work) for being good at this economics stuff?

When was the last time you saw a Keynesian taking Hayek's work on business cycle theory seriously? (For which, in part, he won the Nobel prize for!)

Ironically, to more directly address your point, Hayek had this to say in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech:[1]

In his speech at the 1974 Nobel Prize banquet Friedrich Hayek
stated that had he been consulted on the establishment of a
Nobel Prize in economics, he would "have decidedly advised
against it" primarily because "the Nobel Prize confers
on an individual an authority which in economics no man ought to
possess.... This does not matter in the natural sciences. Here
the influence exercised by an individual is chiefly an influence
on his fellow experts; and they will soon cut him down to size
if he exceeds his competence. But the influence of the economist
that mainly matters is an influence over laymen: politicians,
journalists, civil servants and the public generally."

Stated differently, the comparison between a hard science (like Chemistry) and economics is rather unfair.

[1] - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nobel_prize_economics#Controver...
I'm writing a blog post about it to detail what goes behind the scenes.
But globally, an HTML5 audio recorder & MP3 front-end converter (emscripten + LAME + inspired from RecorderJS).
It is not helpful to blanket condemn the HN community. Yes, the vast majority are white men. Yes, a significant portion hold political positions on minority peoples that do not take into account the history and structural disadvantages of being both not-white and not-male. But that position is a meaningful way to survive in a system that for hundreds of years would have punished or killed even white men for acknowledging the humanity and difficulties of those peoples.

So, while I disagree with them, telling them that they're all assholes is useless.

Building equality is not a zero-sum game between those who-have and those who don't. It is the elevation of our collective humanity through empathy.
Good point. I think the debit card replacement angle is much more attractive than this one.
Unfortunately the squiggle trick doesn't work to send $0.20 to that friend in Angola who runs the water and sanitation project? It also doesn't convert to Mpesa in Kenya [1] (Bitcoin now does). And wiring $500k to China for that shipment on a Sunday doesn't work either with squiggles or e-payments.

[1]: http://www.economist.com/blogs/economist-explains/2013/05/ec...
Singer's book talks about finding and supporting effective charities. Here's one I now support that seems pretty direct: https://www.fistulafoundation.org

It also made me rethink what I am doing with my life/career. Is creating apps for well-off people with iPads the best use of my time? Is getting rich and donating most of your wealth a good strategy? What's the biggest problem I can personally solve?

I'm still trying to figure it out.
Oh and the thing that impressed me is that it's not just the typical BS-filled self-help book. The Power of Habit appears to be very well-researched and doesn't promise wonders, just shows you how habits work and how you can influence them.
When there is background noise, it feels to me as if focusing on a task drowns it out. Eg noise provides an incentive to concentrate on your work?
Dominions 3/4, Freeciv and recently Kerbal Space Program, the latter of which I can fully recommend to anybody who enjoys blowing up rockets.
I imagine Vegas hotels are much cheaper than any other sunny/beachy locale in the US because of the casino industry.
In Rust, you have to import a trait (in this case active_support::Period) into the file that uses 2.days(). It's not a global change.

If you see 2.days(), you know where to look for the definition, and the type system means that you can easily learn what 2.days() returns. In this case, 2.days() returns a `TimeChange` object (https://github.com/wycats/rust-activesupport/blob/master/dsl...).

`TimeChange` implements a `from_now` method here: https://github.com/wycats/rust-activesupport/blob/master/lib... which returns a `Time`.

This is a lot easier to reason about than global modifications to Fixnum in an untyped language.
And, perhaps predictably, a noble post falls off the front page as the discussion devolves into a cartoonish dust ball of chest-beating, setting off the flame-war detectors. The girls lose, but thank god the opinionated "experts" on US racial politics have had their moment.
Thanks for sharing. After reading the Mercury News article, I googled around and pulled up the following piece by Businessweek. It's longer but more detailed, and, IMO, better written.

http://www.businessweek.com/articles/2013-09-26/declara-co-f...
You're making a huge, possibly fatal, assumption about quality remaining constant.
I'm referring to price inflation. You seem to be referring to monetary inflation. Less dollar use will lead to fewer dollar equivalents in circulation, but prices in dollars will go up because people will value them less.
I think it basically comes down to trust. Can you trust that the person who wrote the library isn't a dingbat, and that they've thought out the edge cases and composability of the interface they've designed, and that they've taken care that code actually does what it looks like it does, and confusing cases are either inexpressible or at least look confusing so you know you have to look closer. In short, can you trust the author to design interfaces well.

Personally I don't think it's inherently good or inherently bad, it's just one of those things that makes good code better (concise & expressive) and bad code worse (inscrutable & brittle). Glass-half-full and glass-half-empty are both valid opinions on the matter, and I strongly suspect which way you leans towards depends heavily on the quality of other people's architecture that you have to deal with on a daily basis.
What happened to the parent? I know what it said, I'm just not sure why it got deleted...
Great idea. As a former horticulture major who dropped out, became an organic farmer, and then somehow found myself studying computer science, I often marveled at how so many people had really awful black thumbs.

The concept of plant nutrition eluded most people. Water made sense, sunlight made sense, nitrogen didn't.
Thanks, this looks interesting. Do you have a setup using this trick live on the web anywhere?
> Inherent value of USD is that government declared it has value (by fiat).

Wait, what? Definition of fiat currency is the one that has no intrinsic value.

USD's intrinsic value is the paper and the metal used to manufacture it.
Were they referred to as "windows" 30 years ago? (I believe so, but I can't recall the exact source) It's easy to think it's a common GUI element name since we all refer to windows in various OS's, but back then, there could have been any number of valid names (panes, panels, boxes, mini-screens, etc)
It's actually nice to see activity on the LtU front page. The two other posts I would assign to the same category as the submitted one would be xkcd: Functional [0] and The Three Laws of Programming Language Design [1] posts. They both had good discussion, which is where a lot of value at LtU comes from. I even wrote my own little script to make the expanded, threaded list of comments collapsible to consume them more to my liking.

To be fair, I was being unjustly negative because of my worry about how Microsoft treats such projects. Admittedly, after sleeping on it, I don't see it to be as big as a deal as I did last night. It'll be interesting to see what Microsoft produces, and we'll still have the open and approachable Rust regardless.

I find Charles reply to your comment about the HN thread odd though. He says

> It's interesting, though not unexpected, that folks are already comparing this language to D, Rust, and Go which also aim for a nirvana (safe, productive, fast, open) without really having many of the details required to make intelligent comparisons (on reddit, somebody made a post asserting this language is MS's _answer_ to D and Rust... WTF?).

Why is this interesting or unexpected? Joe Duffy's blog post mentions D and Rust explicitly. That we don't have "many of the details required to make intelligent comparisons" was my issue with it being hand wavy. There are already conspiracy themed posts about this being because Microsoft wants to lock down patents on these parts of the language [2]. Post the details, and we'll likely see "intelligent comparisons" being made on HN and Reddit.

The post is spreading on Reddit as well, if you would like to see others feelings on the matter [3].

[0] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4816

[1] http://lambda-the-ultimate.org/node/4754

[2] http://www.reddit.com/r/rust/comments/1tve0m/a_glimpse_into_...

[3] http://www.reddit.com/r/programming/duplicates/1tvic1/the_mi...
Thanks. Hopefully it will :)
There is absolutely no reason not to use C++ in modern software development.

C++ gives you deterministic object lifetimes without the overhead of manual management through the RAII pattern and smart pointers. It gives you std::string, which is as easy to use, if not easier, than char*. It gives you parameterized types and real value semantics for user-defined types. There are even template versions of strcpy and friends which pass implicit length parameters to strcpy_s and friends, which prevent a whole class of buffer overflow bugs which have been the bane of C programmers since the language came into existence.

With all the added safety and convenience that C++ gives you over C, it is literally insane to use C where C++ could be used.
http://mynoise.net/NoiseMachines/babbleNoiseGenerator.php
If you took me to mean the "default" first-year calculus textbook then yes, that's not common. But it's definitely aimed at first-year college students, or at least people who haven't had prior exposure to rigorous mathematical thinking. Compare the style to, say, Spivak's Calculus on Manifolds to see what I mean.

(Edit: I just read your HN bio and know you know the stylistic differences, etc. Sorry!)

Spivak is the first-year Honors Calculus textbook at my alma mater, the University of Chicago. Harvard is also famous for having the most difficult first-year math classes that use even more advanced textbooks like Rudin's Principles of Mathematical Analysis.

My HS background in mathematics was definitely "weak," too. My senior year was the first year my school district ever offered calculus of any stripe in its entire history and I still managed to handle Spivak my first year of college. I took the AP Calculus test on my own and got a 4/5. It's not that crazy.
It's not a column, it's a blog.

This is his column:
http://www.nytimes.com/2013/12/23/opinion/krugman-bits-and-b...
It is deplorable that he used the word "evil" to describe Bitcoin. He fails to point out that Bitcoin is a system and of course it is possible for individuals to use this system to achieve some personal nefarious goals; but we have literally watched banks knowingly gamble huge sums of money in the centrally banked system and the whole system came crashing down. The decentralized nature of Bitcoin will not allow a few major players to crash the system, and then use the government to bail it out... and as a side note the government doesn't ever bail anyone out, it leverages its authority to force taxpayers (today and future generations) to bail out a system so that it can maintain the status quo.
depends on the ads.

I think they're afraid of adblock
I typed it from memory, so I could be wrong. I thought the 13th axiom was the least upper bound property.
What I have to say to that: Ooh rah!

There are many stories like this out there, but unfortunately they don't get publicized much since our media & society has a voracious appetite for fear. It's always heartening to hear of these herculean trials people go through and triumph over them.
Newer mining equipment doesnt use as much electricity. Power is a variable but not an important one.
You can write as many paragraphs about the technical definition of "racism" as you'd like. You are criticizing a private effort someone is taking to commit private resources to helping an underserved demographic get access to programming expertise. Your choice of controversy speaks louder than any particular argument you might make. The point of these arguments, whether you realize and accept it or not, is to diminish the claim people have to being underserved in the first place. I find that notion contemptible.
I have had similar experiences with Kivy. I previously developed a simple game with PyMT[0] relatively easily, so I was very excited when Kivy came out. I had another project requiring multitouch support on a PC recently and decided to use Kivy and it immediately crashed my window manager every time I tried to run it which turned me off pretty quickly.

I ended up doing the multi-touch UI in JavaScript and HTML instead. It felt much clunkier to work with, but I wasn't comfortable with wrangling Kivy's instability for the rest of the project.

[0] http://cleichner.blogspot.com/2011/02/multitouch-project.htm...
You mean type-classes? Scala and Haskel have them. It's certainly nice to be able to do statically type-checked stuff like:

list.sorted
list.max
list.sum

The problems with languages like C# (or Java) go beyond the lack of type-classes or similar. For example, given a type such as List<T>, you're restricted to define methods only "for all T", as these languages don't allow you to define methods only "for some T". Examples include methods such as "sorted" or "max", relying on type T implement some sort of Ordering interface, or "sum", relying on type T to be some sort of Number.

So even if you would have a way to specify that types X, Y and Z have implementations for this and that set of extension methods, it would still be of somewhat limited use, given that one wouldn't be able to also use this in code making heavy use of generics, much like how interfaces themselves aren't used much in code making use of generics, because code making use of generics is usually some dumb Container<T>, where almost nothing about T is known.

The best part about type classes is that you don't have to control/modify the type's implementation, in order to make it implement a certain type-class. Type-classes are like open interfaces. If the builders of C# never bothered to provide you with some common interface you want for built-in types, that's OK, because you can make one up.

Scala also has implicit conversions and "view bounds". Implicit conversions go beyond extension methods and View Bounds allow one to specify that some type X can be viewed as some type Y (either Y inherits from X, or there exists an implicit conversion from X to Y). Something like:

def sample[X <% Y](item: X) = item.callMethodFromY

But these are mostly useful for builtins and deprecated for general-purpose usage in favor of context bounds (type-classes). It's still nice that builtins such as Array[T] is viewable as a Seq[T] and Strings are viewable (in true FP tradition) as sequences of chars, allowing one to do this:

"some string".map(_.toUpper) // => "SOME STRING"

What's interesting about the above example is that mapping over a string, produces a string, highlighting another Scala feature that goes beyond type-classes:

"some string".map(_.toString)
// => Seq(s, o, m, e, " ", s, t, r, i, n, g)

This is the CanBuildFrom pattern. See this awesome example from M. Odersky himself: http://stackoverflow.com/a/1728140
Quality of submissions or comments?

I was part of another forum-based company that went from zero advertising to full display advertising with banners and adsense (the ads brought in another $200k to $500k per month). Some of the vocal members (read: always bitchy about everything, even mild color or margin changes) complained at first, then went back to their normal bitching about everything else in the world.

All changes hurt at first, but we can't not change everything forever.
A Patent From 2004 Describes Dual EC As Key Escrow
It's worth mentioning that Saunders MacLane, along with Samuel Eilenberg, invented category theory.
Did the bzip maintainer steal someones girlfriend or anything else?
Krugman's rants can be safely ignored. He either genuinely thinks that the solution to problems created by printing and borrowing way too much money is.. printing and borrowing shitloads more money, or he doesn't actually think that and is a government shill instead.

Either way, he's not to be trusted.

>> BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions

So? Damaging States' ability to forcefully confiscate everyone's wealth is a distinctly good thing, here in the real world.
Lol. That's a good one I'm going to steal.
You have literally said nothing of substance in any of your responses to me.
You might find Project Lombok [1] interesting. It's a library of annotations that can be used to generate boilerplate code.

[1] http://projectlombok.org/
>>BitCoin looks like it was designed as a weapon intended to damage central banking and money issuing banks, with a Libertarian political agenda in mind—to damage states ability to collect tax and monitor their citizens financial transactions.

What does that sound like? Maybe an earlier top post on HN http://blog.oleganza.com/post/71410377996/crypto-anarchy-doe...
I love this site, especially how it goes into some depth explaining the different sounds. I had no trouble with it on my S3 in Chrome.
"...making exploiting the poor trivially easy.... you already support redistributionist taxation and the welfare state."

Judging by the clichés you use, exploiting the poor is probably a good thing in your Libertarian utopia.
Well, I didn't think what he was proposing would be trivial. He was simply trying to make the app more accessible to a larger audience.

Listening to his podcasts made be think the about the way Apple does it with constant UI refinement, and why many open source projects are really lacking.
Been waiting a little while for this one to come out.

Key escrow schemes were the establishment answer to the problem of crypto enabling crime. The idea was that strong crypto would be outlawed, and the government would instead provide regulated crypto that would include overt backdoors for lawful access. Thankfully, that idea perished in the crypto wars of the '90s.

One line of reasoning about Dual EC, the PKRNG that is believed to be the backdoor referenced by the NSA BULLRUN leak, is that it could have been innocuous and suffering merely from bad optics: while there would in the universe be ECC points that would allow attackers to "decrypt" random numbers and recover PKRNG state, those numbers had been generated and discarded honestly.

The presence of this patent and its explicit claims on key escrow applications grievously harms that argument. It's circumstantially but potently damning.

For whatever it's worth to you: while I don't believe that it had much real-world impact (I think pretty much exactly what Lucky Green said about Dual EC in the most recent Reuters discussion), I'm 99% convinced Dual EC was intended as a backdoor. There is at least one scenario where it actually made sense in practice --- that is, where it could plausibly have been deployed.

The PKRNG "escrow" scheme is especially damning, because it's intrinsically surreptitious. Conventional key escrow schemes presume that all users know their keys are escrowed. A PKRNG escrow scheme kicks in even in systems that assume they aren't escrowed. It's an evil idea.

There is at least one plausible (though I think dumb) argument for PKRNG (it allows you to compose a whole cryptosystem in terms of a smaller number of primitives --- if you need the PK primitives anyways, it might be nice in a formal sense to have the CSPRNG rely on those same primitives). But there are no practical arguments in favor of a CSPRNG having PK structure. CSPRNGs based on stream ciphers, for instance, regularly rekey: their outputs aren't all bound under a static root secret. PKRNG is such a goofy idea that it was hard to take it seriously as a backdoor to begin with.

If the whole Twitter thread doesn't pop up for you like it does for me, here's the link to the actual patent:

http://www.freshpatents.com/Elliptic-curve-random-number-gen...

Tanja Lange makes another devious point: since ECC PKRNGs are patented, there's a financial disincentive to ever using alternate parameters for it, because tuning your ECC PKRNG and using (presumably) non-backdoored points could result in your system being royalty-encumbered. Man. Ick.
Thumbs up for James Altucher's book. I liked a lot "I was blind but now I see" by him. I don't think a book can be a life changer at my age (who knows), but it was a great read.
There's plenty of reasons to prefer C over C++, but I don't feel like this post is doing a good job of capturing them. I was much more amused by Linus's version: http://lwn.net/Articles/249460/

IMO the most confused part of this post is to dismiss templates as "stupid". I myself am rather "C-leaning" but I can acknowledge that some C++ features are well thought out. Templates enable a lot of the "good C++" in a number of ways.

My favorite example: for things like callbacks and lambdas. In C you often find yourself using function pointers for this. With templates, you can make that a compile-time cost instead of a runtime cost. So your callback can get inlined right inside the caller. One practical result of this: things like std::sort are faster than libc's qsort.

Similarly, he is right to say that exceptions can introduce memory leaks in C++... But the C++ advocate's position would be that the RAII pattern avoids this. And when you get into that habit, so long as you are consistent with it, I can't say the whole thing is too bad. It's rather elegant.

Personally I think the problem is not C++ itself, rather that it asks a lot of developers to be able to navigate towards the "good C++" and avoid the costly anti-patterns. To make matters worse, people don't agree about what the "good C++" is. IMO this is all more of a social problem than a technical one. Which leads me into something similar to Linus's argument, to choose C to "keep the C++ programmers out" -- not that it's impossible to do C++ well, but that there's a large community of people who are "doing it wrong", even if you can agree what "right" is.
Try Intellij IDEA with Java and the various Java frameworks - IDEA is Jetbrains' (developers of Resharper) flagship IDE, they also do slightly more focused variants for Python, Ruby, PHP, and web development (PyCharm, RubyMine, PHPStorm, and WebStorm respectively.)
That's essentially how traits work in Rust. You need to import the trait into your scope, and 2.days().from_now() is essentially sugar for days(2).from_now() where days() returns a TimeChange object.
I'll post it up this evening when I get home and drop you a link, thanks for the interest!
Observe the kernel of every language (to the theme of 2001 space odyssey)
You are absolutely right; the question of whether this is racist is a red herring. The question is really: "is this bad". You seem to think it is. How about you begin the discussion by stating how this is bad.
>> we have on the one side a dollar that has endured as a value store and medium of exchange for hundreds of years, and which has proven remarkably resilient (valuable) by any objective measure throughout the worst economic implosion since the Great Depression (which the dollar also survived)

There's something you're overlooking though: the dollar was backed by gold until 1971, and that's where our problems really started mounting.
When you right click in chrome it says "Save video as..." so I think that's not a problem.