skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I don't find the arguments against macros workable since the emergence of syntax transformation while modeling a problem shows many deep relationships between parts of the domain .. in the cases I've seen. Just want to share some stuff that I haven't seen others write about.

I don't code much lisp these days (though getting into clojurescript a bit now), but when I used to, the cycle went pretty much like this -

1. Express what you want to express as an s-expression, capturing known structures in the simplest way I can think of.

2. Figure out which aspects can be "functions" straight forwardly and which are macros and implement them.

3. Test and iterate a bit till I like the way domain elements are composing and the way the composition looks in code. Try to reduce the required concepts in each iteration.

4. Document the relationships that have emerged from this process so others can understand it.

5. Usually I'm done, but sometimes (the few) users of my "api" come back with questions, based on which I iterate a bit more.

I've mostly followed this in building the "editing style specification language"[1] part of the product "muvee Reveal" (an automatic video editor)[2], built in a custom scheme dialect called "muSE"[3].
(Full disclosure: I've happily worked for muvee Technologies from 2002 to 2011.)

Btw - most discussion on macros and lisp seem to first assume that there two things - a) functions and b) macros. There are more, depending on the kind of lisp system you're working with.

You could form a taxonomy of sorts based on whether argument forms are evaluated and whether the result form is evaluated -

1. Argument forms are evaluated before "apply", result is a value (i.e. not evaluated). => Function

2. Argument forms are unevaluated before "apply", result is code (i.e. is evaluated). => Traditional macro

3. Argument forms are evaluated before "apply", result is code (i.e. is evaluated).

4. Argument forms are unevaluated before "apply", result is a value. => Traditional macro (depending on system)

In the course of using the domain modeling approach above, I've written stuff like functions that create one or more macros, macros that evaluate to function values (not s-expressions) and such stuff that might be considered an "abomination" by the OP ... but in the context of the domain, the concepts are usually clear enough to be used without major issues.

[1]: https://code.google.com/p/muvee-style-authoring/
[2]: http://www.muvee.com/en/products/reveal
[3]: https://code.google.com/p/muvee-symbolic-expressions/
I don't think the parent meant that land has fixed value, but that we can't willy-nilly create more of it through the sweat of our brow, in the way that we could make more widgets.
The issue with Windows 8 isn't that it's unusable, obviously it can be used. The issue is that the changes to the desktop were made in service of a use case (that is: a full screen, mono-tasking, touch-based mode) that doesn't really seem to exist on a desktop computer, and so the changes do not improve anything for most people using traditional systems.

Changing the way a UI functions has a cost to the user, and users expect that if they are willing to pay that cost they gain something in return. Once a user acclimates to it, perhaps Windows 8 is equally as usable as Windows 7 was, but given its relatively poor uptake I think it would be difficult to argue that many users actually find the experience better.

Ultimately, paying the "learn a new interface" cost for what is effectively side-grade is a poor value.

In contrast, for users of touchscreen-based Windows devices, this is a cost that is likely worth paying, since the features enhance usability for their hardware. But such devices represent a minority of Windows based PCs on the market.
Mocking HTML5 API's Using PhantomJS Extensions
Yes, but that may be illegal: http://www.forbes.com/sites/erikkain/2011/08/03/the-inexplic...
Ask HN: Where do Canadians buy their Bitcoins?
I am Canadian and want to buy a serious amount of Bitcoins (> $10K). Getting mixed reactions from people at the office (Top Hat). Where do you buy them?
How would you decrypt the message? The only safe option would be to print out the encoded message, and retype it into the offline computer. I don't think anyone does that.

Also, the offline computer can be physically compromised.
Yes, anytime you're working on something that's supposed to be for a business and you're going "wheeee!" and "wow so cool", you should be questioning whether you're building it because it's needed, or because it's fun to build. Engineers have a way of doing things they enjoy, and then retconning it as important and necessary, even noble.

This is also my problem with people who talk about being "builders" and "makers". Are you building and making things that need to exist, or sating your need to build and make? Not that that's inherently wrong, but it is certainly not inherently noble or impressive.
Mixed up go and rust.
I mixed up go and rust. Go send around raw pointers.
The article lied to me. It said it would tell me why so many tech founders who are jerks become insanely rich and successful.

Instead it tells me that there are rich and successful jerks, and that some people would prefer not to work with or finance jerks, and finally that there are some really great guys who are rich and successful.

It never tells me why so many tech founders who are jerks become insanely rich and successful.
2014 Gates Annual Letter: Myths About Foreign Aid
Apple Wins Temporary Stay on Court Monitor
Demanding equality, except when being a woman is advantageous.
Weren't Senn momentums available at that time?
I bought an IBM Deskstar and went through five returns over the course of a couple of years - across two different generations of drives! (The 75GXP and the 60GXP, I believe) I will say their warranty service was generally not bad... they seemed to get a lot of practice.

The interesting thing is that what you say strikes me as almost certainly true, in a narrow way: there were probably some manufacturing runs that were a lot better than others. The proportion of bad runs to good runs is significant.
One does not need to break the cyphers if one can obtain the decryption key, either by locating them, or "enhanced interrogation techniques" them out of biological systems.
http://femalefoundersconference.org/
Also worth pointing out that it's in Yale's interest to collect and provide the data. If they collect it, they can ensure a more representative sample size, even if they can't ensure how that data is ultimately presented. If students start using a third party service, not only does Yale still not have control over presentation, the data collected will probably make the faculty look worse by virtue of the fact that disgruntled students are more likely to respond than happy students.
>It seems as if 95% of news stories focus on poverty, war and chaos in the continent. They rarely go so far as to differentiate among countries.

I can't go a month without an FT special on Nigeria or Tanzania. This may be more a critique of the news sources you are exposed to than media as a whole.
South Korea Promises Robot Land Opening in 2016
It's amusing they reference Michael Jordan as a "poster boy"... he's known for being a jerk too!
They have a concept of an "ephemeral" volume, which is a disk mounted on the same rack. It goes away every time you reboot, but is useful for caching or file transfers, because it's the fastest disk you have access to. In day to day usage it's not actually that important.

You can have as much EBS/SAN data as you're willing to pay for, so everything important gets stored on that.
If Reactjs performs so well, shouldn't it be part of the browser?
Mind maps don't imply a hierarchy. This change in how a problem is structured can alter how you think about it. (It's basically a different data structure, which makes it easier or harder to perform certain processing on it.)
Show HN: Contra is async for the browser under 3kb
The names are indeed realistic, but some details are not.

First are cars: most tests I made produced cars that are not sold in Brazil, althought some did.

The lack of apartment or similar data in most addresses will not raise suspicion in the US, where most people live at houses, but it will surely jump to the attention of anyone looking at the database in Brazil. Not to say, it won't test most DBs properly as we commonly store apartment numbers in a dedicated column.

The English name of the companies also won't help.
Fez, file-based build tool for javascript
I am with you; i have a 1.5TB WD green as my main non-ssd storage medium, and it performs great. I put everything on there, movies, music, photos, Virtual Machines, etc, and I've never had any kind of (overly) noticeable performance problems.
Could I ask why? Would you, for example, ban them in our own society?
Shouldn't it be called X Combinator? :)
To a large extent, yes. A decade ago you needed to significant upgrade every couple of years to stay current but now a machine can stay useful for the basics and beyond[1] for considerably longer.

There is also competition from the consoles, cheap media players and portable devices: instead of upgrading their PCs many home users buy those devices instead and leave the old PC for when they need to crank open a MS Office document. And having not spent money on new hardware, they resent paying for an upgrade to Windows (which traditionally the cost of was hidden in amongst the cost of that new PC).

[1] even games if you don't mind not playing the latest graphics fests, especially with the growing indy circuit[2] and the growth of mobile devices[3].

[2] which is supporting older hardware better than the big players

[3] because once you are optimised to the point where the game works on cheap tablets, that old PC will probably play a port of it quite well too
The problem is whether it was doing a good job. Sure, students may have felt they were making good decisions by looking at 1-5 average ranking, and yes, the UI was very pretty and made it look like it was providing you lots of information, but the fact is, a simple average of a single metric is not a good way to pick a course.

There are always hard, scary courses, and those classes are going to end up ranked lower because the material is harder or the professor isn't as "cool" or because a 20-year-old doesn't see the point in learning how to do proofs. Letting that become the dominant factor in course selection is not good for education (or intellectual freedom--what happens when a professor with unpopular views is ranked poorly and his/her classes become sparsely attended?)
> Why add more moving parts when they don't do anything but make more work?

Because in this case we're talking about intentionally accepting files from users to either integrate into the system or offer to other users. Why would you not at least check files for cleanness and reject any that fail instead of blindly accepting them because you wanted to enable file uploads.

Vulnerability scanning isn't going to tell you much when you want to accept files from users.
This person is trolling by getting people to argue with a position that he or she doesn't even put forth. Don't fall for it -- ignore people who say things and refuse to back them up.
I have heard from friends at Amazon that that is in large part an origin myth. This is hearsay, so take it fwiw.
While we're on the topic of conferences that target a specific slice, does anyone know if there's something like an Immigrant Founders Conference? That sounds like another demographic that has huge potential and could use some pretty specific kinds of help.
Andressen is making bitcoin out to be a decentralized paypal, when it was more intended to be a form of currency. It makes more sense as a long term investment or speculative bet than it does a way to transfer money from point A to point B.

An analogy would be if person A and person B conducted a transaction by converting their money from dollars to euros or vice versa (assuming A and B are both in the same country). Depending on the current exchange rate, this could be a good or a bad thing for both of them. If the dollar is weak, both parties stand to lose. If the dollar is strong then it won't last because the market will quickly be flooded with people trying to get in on the deal.

There is no way of controlling or predicting the bitcoin exchange rate. If I send money to someone in my country with paypal they are going to whack me with fees, but at least I know what the fees will be in advance. I can plan on it as a business. Having to deal with an unknown and uncontrolled exchange rate just doesn't sound fun. This is assuming that bitcoin stops having wild price swings over time and stabilizes to the level of established global currencies.

It just doesn't make sense to perform a currency conversion when transferring money to someone who uses the same currency as the sender. This article was amazing and pmarca opened my eyes to uses of bitcoin that I never would have imagined. But the only thing I can't imagine is this new currency living up to the utility that is expected of it.

Bitcoin the protocal, however, is freaking awesome. I expect to see a lot of startups taking advantage of some of the non-monetary uses, up to and including micropayments. It could be a very long time before bitcoin paychecks are mainstream. But electronic transactions of all kinds are going to be getting easier soon.
And who is this microcontroller maker and how do I ensure that they have not been "cooperating" with anyone interested in breaking the encryption?

Or do I have to build my own chips? And hopefully I didn't make an implementation mistake.
Seagate Barracuda Green
(ST1500DL003)	1.5TB	51	0.8	120.0%

I've got one sitting on my desk that seagate sent me as a RMA return. Guess it won't be going back into our RAID.
This is interesting and the first I've heard of this. Can you elaborate more?
> The only objections to contraceptive access are religious in nature, and we can safely discard those.

I think this is pretty much his (her?) point. You've basically said that no matter what the point is, it's either not cogent or not valid.
When I say money on the line, it really means your own money on the line. The disaster you refer to is when people trade other people's money for a share of profits but no liability.
I ran into Donna Dubinsky at an event once and got to pick her brain for an hour. It was amazing. She's in SFBA, and I'd love to see her added to the list of speakers. (I'm really hoping someone does full notes for this conference the way that someone usually does for Startup School).
Do you really want to associate yourself with Klout?
When the US does it = good.

When a country we don't agree politically with does it = bad.

Likewise protesters attacking police with Molotov cocktails, charging their lines with farm equipment and torching police vehicles would elicit a fairly strong reaction from any Western government, yet the Ukrainian government is demonized...
This looks really awesome.

Can I just drag the app folder and drag and drop onto any supported desktop?

Or will I have to install a bunch dependencies?
Are immigrants underrepresented in this community? My guess would be just the opposite.

However, I understand they may have lots of things in common that are specific for this group.
Copyright statements in source files
With Traction But Out Of Cash, 4chan Founder Kills Off Canvas/DrawQuest
Any stats on power consumption? Over 5 years the difference between a drive that uses 6 Watts and one that uses 7 is 44kWh or about $5. Double that to include cooling costs and saving a Watt should be worth something like $10 to you, so a more expensive more efficient drive could be worth it. Do these drives all use similar amounts of power?
You can download the database that is used to update Wikipedia (bots do that job):

http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProjekt_Georefere...

3.54 million entries in 273 languages with Cities, GPS coordinates, ZIP codes, and a lot of more - all free and up-to-date. It's a project of German Wikipedia, but the website is in English and the data is used by all Wikipedia instances.
TodoMVC: An Angular vs React Comparison
Yev from Backblaze here -> Unfortunately we don't really have any publishable stats on that quite yet, but I can say that we prefer low-power drives so that we can fit more of them in to the racks and not go over power-limits.
I am using my gaming PC that I built years ago and a $1079/mo dual hexacore dual Tesla M2090 server from Softlayer.

Fortunately I have a $1k/mo Softlayer credit, so my hardware costs were approximately $79. My rent includes electricity, so my electricity costs were $0.
Node-webkit - Build desktop applications with HTML + JS and Node
I get a feeling that Valleywag probably had less to do with this conference than you think. I would guess that this topic is something that Jessica et al have clearly been thinking about, and I wouldn't be surprised if I learned that something like this had been cooking for a while.
Wouldn't that just be a Founders Conference? :)

Joking! As an immigrant founder, I can think of a couple of key issues may have been different for me than a resident founder: immigration laws and their impact on startups (obviously) and to some degree, context - understanding customers well, even when you did not grow up in the same context as them.
Small thing: I would drop the "bulk" as the tagline is too much of a mouthful and "bulk" is unnecessary. It's free at smaller volumes anyway, so certainly not deceptive to drop it.
Censorship is not a valid tool for an educational institution to use. They are free to promote their version of the information, ask people to not use the other, etc. but however much they dislike it, blocking it should not even be considered.
When you are turning off the cell phone it sends a signal to the operator (graceful shut down) so the operator knows that you turned off the phone. When you remove the battery the phone has no time to send a message to the operator about the phone going offline so the operator doesn't know for sure whether it's turned off or it is out of the towers range at this moment.

Of course this doesn't mean that they can't track turned off phones, it's still technically possible (while the battery is there).
> only asymmetric systems based on DLP and IFP will be compromised due to the efficiency of Shor's algorithm.

Quantum computing has larger implications than that. For instance, AES with 128-bit keys will need to be phased out since Grover's algorithm would allow a 2^64 time known-plaintext search. MD5 will likewise require 2^64 time to find a preimage, despite its resistance so far to non-quantum preimage attacks.

You should not discount that "only" asymmetric schemes based on DLP/IFP will be vulnerable, either. Much of our current key-exchange implementations do not have post-quantum strength at present.

Still, as you say, it is not "end of the world" status for cryptography. It will just require a lot of effort on the part of system builders to implement post-quantum constructions. The issue of backwards compatibility and widespread implementations will (as it always is) be a significant hurdle.

It's my experience, however, that the average person doesn't know or care about encrypting their data at all. It's almost certainly the opposite on a site like reddit or HN, but anecdotally, when my parents' friends (as an example) ask what I study and I say "cryptography," it's exceptionally hit-and-miss if they'll even know what I'm talking about. (A nontrivial portion of people think I've said "photography," actually!)

I've found that "encryption" is more widely-known than cryptography, but even then, it's been my experience that most (non-techie) people have no clue about it. But, I suspect that changes quite drastically given your social circle, area of the world you live in, and culture.
Pushing Money to Debit Cards Using Balanced
The Tale of the Dreaded Infrared Module
As I explained here

http://paulgraham.com/wids.html

we'd already been planning this event before that article.
Abstracting Classics
There is the Tie group - which started off as primarily Indian-American entrepreneurs, but is now a very diverse set of members.
Of the many replies to this post, this is the best response (so far) because it promotes discussion instead of trying to presume, argue, or pre-emptively invalidate sdegutis's opinion.
The first thing would be to gather more data, which might be difficult, because what percentage of people use online editors for daily work?
you just type `npm run deploy`, and for every target system there will be a application folder placed in "/dist", which you can basically just drag'n'drop.

Endusers just have to doubleclick the executable inside this folder to run your app.
The biggest issue I have with Beats (or any streaming music service for that matter) is that it's just curating existing music. Even their tagline includes the word "curating." This goes to the heart of what's wrong with the entire music industry. It seems that the industry is happy with keeping things the way they are instead of finding ways to be prolific. Curating what we already have is not going to push the music industry forward. Hopefully Beats is different than other music services and actually pays the bands. If not, who gives a shit about another service trying to separate us from our money?
Totally agree, the website is lacking compared with the app. I guess launching solid apps on three separate platforms in the same week meant dedicating fewer engineers to the website, hopefully it'll improve quickly. I do most of my listening on my laptop and having to listen on my phone is quite annoying as I'm using it for dev purposes all day.
The XX combinator
I'm against these, because I'm against gender discrimination. Gender discrimination means that one gender is treated differently from another.

It's also interesting to know whether transwomen will be allowed. Some radical feminists only accept 'born as women' to their conferences. And if transwomen are accepted, what's their definition of that.
Who searches for games based on the thematic metaphor? I think it's more likely that people search for Bejeweled or Candy Crush, and unscrupulous and uncreative game creators want to muddy the waters and siphon off some of that money.
Oh wow, you have a vagina! Congrats! You're so special and unique!
>I can't.

This belittles your argument in a way nobody else could even approach.

When someone asks you why you have come to a conclusion, they are looking to understand you. That is automatically counter to your assertion that there "is no chance for a fair debate".

More people disagreeing with you than agreeing with you is not the measurement of the validity of your opinion. There are many things that I believe that I know are unpopular but I still believe them, and if you ask me why, I will give you my reasoning.

Basically stating that you have no reason (or do but refuse to share it) is something that is bound to be ridiculed, and deservedly so, since it doesn't demonstrate a thought process at all.

I encourage you to share your reasons, so that we may understand your point of view better.
I tried creating economic models like this for a video game I was trying to make, but inevitably the market would end up oscillating too much or the whole thing would crash. The idea was to allow people to exploit arbitrage, but then as they did that, the market would become more efficient and the player would have to find some other commodity to arbitrage. I spent more hours than I care to mention and trying to take as many factors in as possible, but doing quasi-realistic simulations is just hard.

I think part of that is for reasons others have stated here, which is that there aren't a lot of people doing market simulation. Even the best simulations are going to be wrong, so what's the point.
"Rare" is the key here, thanks. An AFR of 3.2% is already a pretty damn long MTBF. Makes sense now!