skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I keep hearing this meme of "inflation is always great, deflation is always bad" with nothing to support it but the same tired "inflation makes you spend money" argument.

Inflation encourages spending money but discourages earning it.

Deflation encourages earning money but discourages spending it.

People need to eat, so in the end these competing interests will always balance out, whether your currency is inflationary or deflationary.
Chris - I too would love to hear your payments wishlist. bill@wepay.com if you'd like to share.
Most popular arch linux apps of 2013
I'd say that discrete mathematics does the best job of explaining and crossing over with Computer Science and programming. Not necessary to build a CRUD app, but perhaps necessary or at least very helpful for anything less trivial.
Maybe they could just write a check to electrify the caltrain a few years faster: http://sonic.net/~mly/Caltrain-Electrification/electrificati... . I never got why it has taken CA so long to make this happne.
Yep, I used a bad metaphor when referring to depression, you are right.
Elementary arithmetic, high-school english
Generics and parametric polymorphism are simple to implement in Go
> I ended up meeting my SO over IRC

You're not the first person to tell me that! A friend of mine met his husband on #gaynyc. I still love OkCupid, but I always idle in that chan now, just in case.... :)
5 cool things to do with `netcat'
Campaign To Stop Killer Robots
I think the way to answer this question is to imagine the universe of math students from age 8 to 21 and imagine which of them could learn 'bog standard journeyman CRUD programming' at the pace your son has.

I'm going to hazard a guess that you could teach it to most children his age although perhaps not as fast. I think the main obstacles being motivational and esoteric, not cognitive.

Not sure I like the structure of the poll choices either. Does anyone really think that trigonometry is at a higher cognitive level than the classes that are taken before it?
I still vividly remember spending nights online trying to find out more about the Dolphin... This is such a fascinating read, it strangely feels like hearing other points of view of a story I was part of, even if just very remotely.

This made me seriously consider buying a WiiU again, if only to experience how that story develops...
Thanks nisa, I actually own the Now Habit, but haven't read it... I bet this is common :P

Since getting a Jawbone UP, I'm pretty rigorous about my sleep as I was able to get real data showing when/how sleep affects me and I have been able to optimize the right amount of sleep and when the best windows for waking up are, it's been a great help in building a better structure for my day-to-day.

I'm really self aware, I can tell when I am stressed (though this took work to develop, I wonder if that's generally true, I didn't know what stress was, or rather, I couldn't identify it in myself until I was about 27).

Everything does fall apart when there are strong external stressors that cannot be remedied with even your own hard work, but that's a separate issue I think.
Curved Screens, Wearable Technology Dominate Consumer Electronic Show
What a concise way of stating the tradeoffs, and in a fairly value-neutral way to boot!
If all you're looking for in the comparison is "somewhere to sit, a coffee machine, etc." then it matches many things. GP's point with the airport lounge comparison is that it matches not just in objects but in purpose / business model.
Programming isn't analogous to math, programming is a communication language with really strict rules that uses math of all stages. Different tasks involve different math. I'll give some common examples for laymen, but they may seem obvious in hindsight:

Programming a very rudimentary "snake" computer game is [using] using Algebra. If your son (or anyone) understands variables, assignment and adding them together, they fundamentally understand Algebra.

Programming a the general parts of a diagramming library or a game with some physics is [using] Geometry and Trig.

Programming complex features of a diagramming library involve discrete math and graph theory.

Programming diagramming layouts can involve Masters level math understanding. (Sometimes, even when the algorithm is well known, it can take months to understand and implement, like planarity testing and embedding before 2004[1])

So it's roughly analogous to the difficulty and specificity of the task, which varies wildly.

~~~

[1] in 2004 there was a fast and "easier" to understand planarity testing and embedding algorithm, I suggest you skim it for an idea of the kind of math programmers can get into: http://jgaa.info/accepted/2004/BoyerMyrvold2004.8.3.pdf
No one steals CPU cycles to mine Bitcoin. CPUs are no longer profitable in the wake of Bitcoin ASICs, even with huge botnets.

Most of theoretical economics is, at best, approximations that only work sometimes. I don't care if Krugman tells you otherwise; economic theory is, at best, a feeble attempt to find a pattern that matches experimentally observed behaviors. So yes, it is fine to run economic experiments. And the great thing about Bitcoin is that no one is being forced to use it, which I can't say is true for most economic systems.

Do you disagree that Bitcoin is no worse than cash for illegal behavior?

Stross didn't actually describe or design any of the economic systems he wrote about; he just imagined them from an external perspective and wrote some vague description of what they might accomplish.
The unstated and assumption here is that the recipient of the bitcoins is the same as the person who bears the cost of mining them. Stealing computing resources is one way for this assumption to be violated.

I don't know though, that this amount of theft is significant compared to the bulk of resources spent on bitcoin.

Bitcoin mining, from my cursory research however, doesn't really consume much electricity compared to the aggregate of all usage across the world, as you've stated.
I did the same as you, so far. But interesting details from pdeuchler. There's always something to learn every day.
Simple, and easy to use UI; Robust and reliable; Extensible design; Massively scalable
> It's pretty funny to see one person claim dominion and authority over another person's inner state.

Well, this is exactly my point -- that this happens regularly, and isn't even commented upon, in many posts on HN when the inner state is, to take an example, a woman discussing her feelings of exclusion or a racial/social minority discussion their feelings of oppression. They're regularly dismissed as being "too sensitive" or having "misinterpreted the situation". But in this post particularly, the vast majority of responses are people who are directly contradicting the (controlled experimental) evidence, and there's very little pushback from the community at large.

In a perfect world, I'd expect each and every person who responded in a noncritical way to this post to respond similarly to future posts (if they're still active on HN) in which they're not the discouraged party. But... I think we all know the odds of that happening.
If consumers (of goods) hoard currency in a deflationary environment then producers (of goods) should hoard commodities in an inflationary environment. In both cases they're acting rationally to maximize value.
Indeed, that was some unnecessary ad hominem. However, it shouldn't detract from the blog post's other points, some of which were well-reasoned.

As we watch out for fallacies, we need to be careful not to invoke the fallacy fallacy :)
I've backed the better part of 1,000 crowd-funded projects in the last couple of years and it has been a very mixed experience.

I've stuck primarily to video game content and, of those, many are extremely late. Many have simply stopped responding to or updating backers despite great delays.

Some have simply said "sorry, even though we asked for $5k and raised $40k, this is too hard and we quit". There have been more than one of those. There have been some that tried, but majorly screwed up. Like the guys who were making a game, but the engineers wrote it in Google's GO. Then the engineers left and they couldn't find anyone who knew how to make games in GO.

Some have been delivered and are either quite broken and/or just completely awful (Takedown: Red Sabre from industry veterans that received a metacritic score of 20/100 comes to mind).

There have been a few that have been quite good and many remaining to be completed that look like they could be great.

However, I think I am largely done with the crowd-funding experiment and will only be dropping a few bucks here and there for things I truly must see created by people with a reputation. I'm tired of the finished products that are total let downs and, more, I'm tired of the people who just say "oh well, sorry" and don't even finish making the thing they were paid (usually far more than they were asking for) to do.

Sure, they are obligated by terms of service to fulfill or refund all rewards for pledges (which means you are obligated to provide your game, if your game was one of the pledge rewards). But in reality, what is anyone going to do to enforce it? Kickstarter sure doesn't give a fuck (hell, they don't even adhere to their own policies, letting people double-dip by running additional crowd-funding sessions for already expired-and-unfulfilled previously funded projects and so on...

As much as I delight in the idea of crowd-funding, I think we are headed for a major landslide. Primarily, due to a total lack of enforcement (or vetting) by the crowd-funding platforms. When your entire model is based on trust and reliability and you do little or nothing to protect it, then . . . well, you have nothing.
Yeah, but keep going down I75 and coverage gets spotty, you start roaming on AT&T, and then is mediocre T-Mobile until you hit southern Tennessee/Northern Georgia. Luckily though I was getting good 3G around Georgia though.
extend my light saber ... on my iSaber
I still remember the first time I played Super Mario 64. That game had an impact on me like none other. I had played 3-D games before, but with the level of control over Mario and the realism of his movements, that was the first where I felt like I was inhabiting a virtual world. I truly believe that's the greatest game of all time, from a standpoint of historical context.
Can you explain the telecommunications equipment one? We're an electronic design company setting up Stripe (Australian Beta), and while we don't have any products in this category currently, we've been thinking of doing some networking/telecoms products...

It'd be good to hear more specifically what's not allowed.
Is 52% Asian, 48% Caucasian a typical Canadian college student ethnicity distribution?
Thought Creates
Want to Boost your eCommerce Conversions During the 2014 Holiday Season?
If you could let me know where I can get illicit access to ASIC miners I'm all ears. From what I can tell those fucking things are guarded by all who own them in a severe way.

EDIT: I'm not actually interested in stealing time on people's ASICs to mine bitcoin. I just think it's effectively impossible to do so. But I'm genuinely curious to know if there's a plausible attack vector.
I agree 100% it is relevant.

I would put it into these terms, however, for simplification.

Coding simple programs is probably analogous to algebra/functional logic.

Having a 3-D model of workflow process with escalation loaded into your mind when you're working on an architecture is more akin to calculus. Add User Experience and network requirements into the mix and the skill is more akin to writing an Overture and the Opera. At this point you have a different animal than described above.
proof of work is inherently wasteful in a way that other systems are not.

Exactly how wasteful they are is yet to be determined. This depends on how much value a successful attack on the blockchain could be to an attacker. The greater the value, the greater the cost of the proof-of-work system needed to prevent it.
Man I wish I still had mine. My luck with my Nintendo consoles has been pretty bad lol:

- I sold my Super Nintendo in high school for $20. What the hell was I thinking...

- My sister took my N64 to someone's house many years ago and I never saw it since (nor do we remember whose house... at the moment I didn't care... foolish me).

- And finally, I left my Gamecube at my girlfriend's apartment, and then she moved and forgot it in some old cupboard in the closet... it's been a few years now unfortunately so I doubt it's still there.

It's funny how in the moment you don't really care that much but later on you're smacking yourself heh.
No one steals computing resources to mine Bitcoins. Bitcoin ASICs made Bitcoin botnets completely unprofitable.

On the other hand, a small number of miners (none of the big mining groups) steal (if you want to call it that) electricity from, say, dorm rooms or apartment buildings. However, I doubt these people contribute even a percent of the network's total hashing power.
IMHO, that was the best blog on the Internet at the time. Thanks for all that work. :-)
A large botnet for bitcoin mining was stealing CPU cycles last week. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/technology-25653664
Usually not. A handful of indie games become big hits and make the creators lots of money. A small number of games do reasonably well and can fund a tiny studio for a year or two. The large majority of indie games fail to turn a profit.

Most indie game devs i've met are unrealistically optimistic and think their game is going to be the next angry birds. (Very similar to most startup founders i've met).
I understand the desire for an individual to purchase a firearm in the interest of protecting your family. However this still available comment on twitter seems like it is more about making a profit and circumventing what little regulation we have on the books;

"Listen, I'm not saying I want to see Sandy Hook Part II but another 20 or 30 dead kids would really dress out my balance sheet."

https://twitter.com/FirearmConcierg/status/41086858090578329...

Please someone who loves the 2nd amendment come up with a way to justify this disgusting comment.
What do students do in other mathematical areas if they don't do proofs?

The book I already mentioned, Knowing and Teaching Elementary Mathematics, will give much of the sad story. A really sad description of how mathematics textbooks are written in the United States[1] and a contrasting description of what kinds of problems are found in Russian textbooks[2] fill in more details.

It was on my second stay overseas (1998-2001), that I became especially aware of differences in primary mathematics education. I discovered that the textbooks used in Singapore, Taiwan (and some neighboring countries) are far better designed than mathematics textbooks in the United States. (During that same stay in Taiwan, I had access to the samples United States textbooks in the storeroom of a school for expatriates, but they were never of any use to my family. I pored over those and was appalled at how poorly designed those textbooks were.) I discovered that the mathematics gap between the United States and the top countries of the world was, if anything, deeper and wider than the second-language gap.

Now I put instructional methodologies to the test by teaching supplemental mathematics courses to elementary-age pupils willing to take on a prealgebra-level course at that age. My pupils' families come from multiple countries in Asia, Europe, Africa, and the Caribbean Islands. (Oh, families from all over the United States also enroll in my classes. See my user profile for more specifics.) Simply by benefit of a better-designed set of instructional materials (formerly English translations of Russian textbooks, with reference to the Singapore textbooks, and now the Prealgebra textbook from the Art of Problem Solving),[3] the pupils in my classes can make big jumps in mathematics level (as verified by various standardized tests they take in their schools of regular enrollment, and by their participation in the AMC mathematics tests) and gains in confidence and delight in solving unfamiliar problems. More schools in the United States could do this, if only they would.

[1] http://open.salon.com/blog/annie_keeghan/2012/02/17/afraid_o...

[2] http://www.de.ufpe.br/~toom/travel/sweden05/WP-SWEDEN-NEW.pd...

[3] http://www.artofproblemsolving.com/Store/viewitem.php?item=p...
Hmm? When we switched to Tmo my wife used an unlocked 4S I had lying around while we waited for AT&T to unlock our iPhone 5s. I heard no complaints from her. As part of my job I run plenty of phones on Tmo's network, and non-LTE phones work fine for both data and voice. Your current phones will work fine. Is it possible you misunderstood something?
In BC? Yes it is.
Either the botnet operators are small-time fools or the article is incorrect. More likely is that the malware used some more CPU-friendly cryptocurrency.

Even if you had a million slave computers, you really couldn't make all that much Bitcoin. There are significantly more profitable things to do with CPU time.
Under the new "Common Core" standards for mathematics in the US, there's a lot more emphasis on proof in elementary-school mathematics than there was before. The terminology is usually more along the lines of "explain your reasoning", but the process is definitely proof-oriented. (Whether teachers will be able to incorporate those standards into their teaching, and whether students can live up to them, remains to be seen.)

Disclosure: I'm a full-time tutor for third and fourth grade mathematics in the inner city through the Denver Math Fellows program ( http://www.teachindenver.com/teachindenver/denver-fellows-pr... ).
Check out http://hackerchat.im

It offers anonymous chat, a console in the chat box, the option to use wget to pull up websites within the chat, pull up xkcd's by simply typing xkcd {xkcdNumber}, and other cool stuff like that.
Ask HN: Recommended Statistics Books/Topics for Founders?
I'm making more of an effort to devote time to learning subjects now that I believe will be especially important in the coming years - and as a founder I believe statistics are going to be especially important.

I'd love to hear from the HN crowd - which statistics topics may be especially useful? Also - I'm currently enrolled at Stanford so if there are specific classes there that you recommend - I'll probably take them!
Yes, but I'm also skeptical of the idea that some math subjects are cognitively more intense than others.

The "cognitive load" or whatever is really just a function of how much you've practiced and internalized that area of math. Calculus builds on algebra, sure, but once you've internalized algebra you don't have to "think real hard about algebra" _while_ you "think real hard about calculus."

Running a 10k for the first time is not the same as running your first 5k twice.
Glooko Lands $7M To Bring Predictive Diabetes Care Global
A Link Between Worlds took me about ~16 hours. I only died 3 times (twice to the 50 floor challenge in the Treacherous Tower because I didn't have enough bottles at the time). I can still replay it in hero mode, but the game just felt very, very short. Don't get me wrong, I thoroughly enjoyed the game. I just wish the main content was longer.
This. I've been on holiday in la and sf and using tmobile 4g on my iPhone. It's a joke and I'm from New Zealand and on a carrier that is only 3G. The coverage drops all the time and speeds were awful, also super expensive ($60 for 2.5 gigs and some arbitrary amount of minutes/texts).
Sure, but we have a economy that's extremely reliant on consumer spending, in fact it's about 70% of GDP these days [1]. Major deflation of the USD and the resulting decrease in spending would be devastating to the national economy [2]. Moderate inflation, however, serves to stimulate economic growth (while a similar degree of deflation would have a proportionally negative effect on growth).

Is this an ideal economic system? Maybe not, who knows. It's what we have though. And it is a direct consequence of an economy driven by growth, and one that encourages liberal individual consumption.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consumer_economy
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panic_of_1837
Office depot chairs that were bought on discount by our company, even the CEO uses one of these generic chairs and if that is good enough for him it is good enough for me.
I'll see your Wikipedia link and raise you one:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eight_dimensions_of_quality

When you're getting shot at and your life depends on being able to shoot back, reliability trumps all other metrics.
And I think my exact point was that is an Apples to oranges comparison. The whole point of the subsidy is you pay more per month and less up front. The whole point of a shitty network is that it doesn't cost as much to maintain.
> One would hope that this wouldn't be as fatal as they suggest

Indeed. Thanks.
Nintendo is used to selling games for $40-$60 a pop. They don't want to be lead into the situation like on the iPhone where the average game is 99 cents.

Their strategy so far is to pretend that it's still 2001 and that isn't a strategy that they can sustain forever.
I was wondering this as well. According to Wikipedia:

The EPL 1.0 is not compatible with the GPL, and a work created by combining a work licensed under the GPL with a work licensed under the EPL cannot be lawfully distributed.

I haven't looked, but Light Table is using some EPL software for sure, starting with ClojureScript itself.
To dismiss concerns over deflation as a "tired argument" is to ignore a good amount of serious academic research (which has been conducted over nearly a century) about the role that deflation has to play in exacerbating (and possibly triggering) economic depressions.

Although the point is contested, many economists believe that the competing interests you describe will not balance out.

Some Wikipedia links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deflation#Deflationary_spiral

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Debt_deflation
Cool! I was just writing one of these for myself.

For me the most important thing is managing my psychology—keeping myself motivated on a project. So mine are all based around that:

1. Work (hard) on what you love
2. Ship
3. Tell your story
4. No big projects
5. Collaborate
6. Learn how to make money
7. Be creative
8. Think long-term
9. ???
10. Profit
Your $30 plan must be grandfathered in.

Their current deal is $50 for an "unlimited" plan that switches to EDGE after 500MB and $60 for a similar plan with a 2 GB limit (or 3 GB, can't remember which).
Turn it into a real computer -- i.e. materialize a keyboard, decent-sized monitor, and ethernet port out of the aether.
Takes forever to load, but pretty neat, it has a vector for the direction your eyes are pointing, detects blinks and mouth opening/closing.

It seems pretty bound to symmetry though, if I blink just one eye, it seemed to think I blinked both, and if I raised one eyebrow it seemed sticky and raised the other even if it went down.

Also, it didn't detect things like frowning, or slanted brows, but still, very neat.
Contact Lenses Are Like Google Glass For Eyeballs
wget, w3m, lynx, and links are all rated “bad” here… :( Is there any way to improve this?
Easel Acquired by GitHub
The plan to pay for ETFs to switch from other carriers does not seem to make much financial sense. For a monthly plan of $50, it would take T-Mobile many years to break even on this initial cost and it is not clear if they will be guaranteed to retain the subscriber for that time. Unless they again charge the equivalent of an ETF on their contract, something seems off here.
Re: Vermont -> I had no T-Mo coverage at all in southern Vermont, specifically Brattleboro, which is in the extreme southern part of the state and not far from civilization. Out here in eastern Washington I've had pretty good coverage (though I AM on the I90 corridor - civilization again, relatively speaking) and am a happy camper on their $30/mo, 100min, 5G Walmart plan.