skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Imagine a world where some magic firehose of money gives everyone $100k/year for free. And now suppose you have the skill of redirecting that firehose a bit, with the result that you can make one lucky person get $200k/year instead, while 11 other people get $90k/year instead of $100k/year.

Then your firehose-manipulation skills are worthless to society at large -- they reduce the net influx of money by $10k/year when you practise them -- but I bet you'd have no trouble finding someone sane and willing to pay you $50k/year to point the firehose their way.

(Of course in this exact scenario you would do better just to take the extra yourself; the real-world counterpart of the skill, though, produces gains roughly in proportion to the amount of money put in, and you can do better by persuading thousands of people to get you to point the firehose their way than by just working for yourself.)

I make no claim that the real-world finance industry is like that. But it illustrates schematically how something can be (1) of negative value to society as a whole and (2) something sane people are willing to pay for. And it's not unreasonable to conjecture that a lot of the things investment banks and hedge funds do have something like the same structure.

Oh, one other thing. Suppose that actually the firehose distributes money very unevenly. Then you might do this: manipulate the firehose to benefit one set of rich people at the expense of another, take their money, and give some of it to poor people. Doing that might be substantially net positive to society. So even taking this rather cynical view of the finance industry, some people in it might be doing a whole lot of good on balance. (It's called "earning to give" by the cool kids these days. But even if you don't explicitly give anything away, the magic of income tax -- if the government spends reasonably wisely -- may turn a slightly-negative-sum activity into something that benefits society on the whole.)

[EDITED to insert an accidentally omitted word and clarify slightly. No change in substance.]
...the founder is the same guy as Twitter, I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon :-)

They're probably going to stick with Twitter access for a while.
I actually think Bitcoin could help poorer people more than it can the rich.

For example, if you've ever been a poor college student, you know that banking fees can be very onerous. (Buy a $2 coffee with too little in your account; boom $40 overdraft.)

But you're forced to use a bank because it's really hard to get by in the world without one. (It's hard to receive money and impossible to spend it online or send it to a friend without the risk of carrying around cash.) Bitcoin could solve those problems for the poor.
Sometimes you are assigned to a death march by management. Not everyone lives in a place where there are 10 employers waiting to immediately hire you if you quit on the spot. You need to figure out how to live with the death march and be supportive of your teammates while finding greener pastures.
Bitcoin does not offer any form of privacy as a direct result of being decentralized. In many ways bitcoins are a huge step back from a privacy perspective simply because private people can follow all transactions.
Great article. Last summer I put together a concept app for a micro-coding marketplace using Python and Flask. Stripe made taking payments insanely simple.
Today I completed a difficult five days and the blasted thing works and I hope I never see this code again. Before you laugh because you've all pulled off 9 months without sleep or whatever manly chest beating, hear me out, because its all fresh in my mind (obviously, with successful completion being today).

1) WRT athlete, your brain is overworked. The most important thing leading to the quick(ish) resolution of the redesign was doing absolutely nothing on Friday. If I hadn't done that, it would probably be another week... or two... until I got this thing done. After the first ten hours on Wednesday and Thursday I was making, in retrospect, provable negative progress at the rate of about five hours of re-work required per hour of work.

2) Never deviate from procedure. When you're sleepy, cranky, panic, and tired, skipping unit tests or a sort of individual code review is an excellent way to make negative ten hours progress. If you know how to do it the right way, do it that way even if its not immediately the fastest. I've never wasted so much time as when I've tried to speed things up (this applies to general life, now that I think about it).

3) Explain the whole thing as if to a noob or a coworker, over and over, until you find the bug. So this case class inserts into that db table using ... uh.. that code that doesn't exist. Yeah. (Edited to emphasize "the whole thing" means to find and fix major system design issues... the compiler will do a fine job of finding missing semicolons, but entirely missing flowchart boxes can only be found via systems analysis, and this is probably not the ideal time for it)

I can mathematically prove that working 13+ hours a day results in about as much net forward progress as working 4 hours per day. I would probably have been done on Friday if I had just stopped early on Wednesday and Thursday, but instead it took till Sunday afternoon. People who claim to work 90+ hours are probably doing the mental equivalent of ditch digging or are only getting net 10+ hours per week forward progress.

Back to easy, much more productive, shorter hours next week...
But you can't rely on things like the mortgage interest deduction staying place beyond each current period it is passed/allowed.
This will change when you're a bit older. Not everyone else's perception, mind you, but your perception that they listen/appreciate you being an asshole. Their perception will be the same it is today (which, in the asshole case is mainly pretending they accept you so you can shut up quicker). :-)
You wouldn't even need to have a separate section — you could get the point across well enough with a simple

render_template('error.html')
...the founder is the same guy as Twitter, I don't think it's gonna happen anytime soon :-)

(i.g., IMHO they're probably going to stick with Twitter access for a while)
questions@domain.com

most of the time people are mailing you unsolicited it's because there's something they want to know
questions@domain.com

most of the time people are mailing you unsolicited it's because there's something they want to know.
Yeah, I look good in a suit.
I'm sick of people telling me I'm elite or privileged because I have a job as software engineer. Fuck you Miya Tokumitsu.

As if the journalists for rags like Slate aren't elitist bourgeoisie...
Since it's extracting additional data from the second-party website, I would classify it as enhanced browsing, not as scraping. Enhancing the browsing experience is the purpose of browser extensions.
So I posted this advertisement!
They make it so the interest on your mortgage is 3% instead of maybe 3.5%. That's a lot of money that you and many other normal people get to save because they do the work of connecting you to institutional investors via packaging your debt. They might take a cut and it may look big in nominal terms but barring fraud everyone is better off.
As the above commenter stated. In the classical example (and a perfect world) derivatives can act as a sort of "insurance" or guidebook of risk. But we do not live in a perfect world. Greed is a real thing (and maybe one of the reasons Capitalism works so damn well), so it rarely works exactly that way. In the end it is often just a way to treat the little guy as a sucker while insulating the bigger fish. Or at least that is how history has shown it to play out so far.
Listening to music and taking my time :)
The author starts it right: “Do what you love. Love what you do.”
Just to build an entire case on half-the-thought: DWYL...
I've read the comments and that first part (DWYL) is practically the only thing people are discussing, but I believe it loses the bigger picture.
DWYL. LWYD. - Both things make it balanced. It's not only about DWYL. When you have to do something else, you need a conscious effort and purpose to LWYD.

I've read some years back (can't remember the name of the book) written by a chinese talking about his father that was a locksmith and got a job as street sweeper.
He faced it with an intent. He'd be the best street sweeper in China. He would love the streets assigned under his care.
That is the LWYD. That takes commitment and guts. But when you LWYD, you also DWYL.
Be that as it may, I'm pretty sure I've been using MySQL since version 3 and I don't recall '*' ever working as a password.
That's true in JavaScript - there's an Object.create() method, which creates new object with any other object set as prototype: https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Refe...

There is a problem with accessing prototypes of objects, as they are not exposed to the user and only available through internal property __prototype__ (IIRC). And there's quite a bit of magic involved with constructor prototypes, which - again - makes it impossible to traverse prototype chain unless you create your objects yourself and store the references yourself.

So yeah, prototypes are nothing special in JS, but their API kind of sucks and could get better. Object.create is a step in the right direction IMO.
My advice would be: starting dead march anytime sooner then last week and half is irrational. I do not believe authors estimate of three weeks 80 hours, that is too long too much. It may feel good, but it is not a good idea. First, you need to keep clean head and think eg.)
* prioritize and cut everything non-essential,
* being organized is not waste of time, but do not overdo it,
* prioritize again and cut everything not super essential,
* sleep enough hours,
* eat regularly and real food,
* take short break after every longer subtask (!short - measure it!),
* be conscious: if you find yourself staring at the screen or procrastinating, then it is good time for short break,
* use the above breaks for short but intensive physical activity,
* socialize less then usually, but find some time to socialize anyway.

Important:
* have good testers and let them check for regressions as often as possible. Really, they are more valuable then new programmers on team.

If you need to achieve something exceptional, you need to think clear above all. The idea "wait we do not have to do it at all" saves more time then all clever hacking in the world. And if you do not sleep and do not eat, you will not be clever anyway.

As for last point, most people need to talk. If they do not get to talk out of work, they tend to get more talkative in work. That means a lot of wasted time. The last thing you want is to unconsciously use team meetings to satisfy your communication needs and waste everybody's time.

It is ok to bundle things together eg. run to grocery store for food (3 in 1: physical activity and break and food).
Yay, more villifying "Wall Street" and fueling the "Wall Street vs. Main Street" fire, and suggesting that it's somehow noble or good to not want to be rich.

I think everybody should want to be rich.

I've tried poverty and in my opinion - it sucks. It sucks big, steaming donkey balls.

The desire to make more money, to improve one's "lot in life" and to succeed, this is a Good Thing. Because a few assholes go too far in some ways, or do bad things along the path, does not change the fundamentals.

You can be rich and unhappy, or poor and unhappy. Given a choice, if I'm going to be unhappy, I'd rather at least be rich.

No one should feel any need to apologize or feel guilty about wanting to make money, even lots of money. If you want to be a fucking billionaire, go become a billionaire. Just feel guilty if you lie, or cheat or steal, or otherwise do unethical things to get there. And remember that having more money doesn't make you a better person, or intrinsically more valuable.
sorry for my ignorance, but what is the practical use for this?
Yeah, the writer of that statement hasn't done years of on call work. If there is any form of communication more invasive than your third phone call after midnight (and before 6am) after weeks or months of the same, I'd be surprised. Instantly awake, instantly angry. Have a civil conversation, hang up the phone and swear as you get dressed, drive in to work swearing, swear as you work, drive home, swear into bed, rinse and repeat. And if one of the calls is poorly worded or a mistake (>>oh good, you're awake<< or >>I was after the house surgeon, not you<<), the instant ability to conjure up new sarcastic comments was amazing. I quit and became mostly human again.
Turns out it's way more complicated than I anticipated.
Not really. I mean they act upon it. I used to be the empathetic good guy, but since the transition, my income has sky rocketed, I feel less pressure and my health has improved.

Being an asshole takes some work and exercise too. All I'm saying is that I'm very surprised by the conclusion this article makes and would definitely suggest the opposite to the very few I care about.
It's not worthless - derivates have an important function in reducing volatility. But the rewards for being a merely competent derivatives trader are wildly disproportionate to the rewards for being competent in some other challenging field (eg nursing, as mentioned int he article). It's a classic example of rent-seeking.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Betteridge's_law_of_headlines

Also: Can we please stop taking comments on IRC as a credible source of information?
Yep, we moved form Nagios to Zabbix once we crossed the ~300 devices as that is one of the main advantages for Zabbix: it scales pretty nice. Takes a bit to get to know how everything works and set it up correctly but it's a pretty good piece of monitoring software.
This reminds me of TheDraw, back in the BBS days.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TheDraw
Armed response vehicles do exist in the major cities in the UK, although the number of incidents in which they are used is declining. In England and Wales for the year ending March 2012, the police discharged firearms at a total of five incidents [1]. That's for a population of 56 million.

[1] https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/statistics-on-police-...
> 2 - Some sense of Naiveté in the European site, in part because of the less restrictive laws and stronger regulations (beats me how Soundcloud started in Germany, anyone who has tried to use Youtube there can relate - at the same time Soundcloud is "the exception that proves the rule")

It proves (tests) the rule and the rule doesn't hold for them, which is an argument against the general validity of the rule. I don't understand why you write "at the same time..." because then it looks like the fact that it proves a rule is in fact an argument for the general validity of the rule.
You need only read all of the comments made by that account to get the answer to that. I actually have a pretty good idea of who it is, and we will wait to see if I'm proven right.
I missed one, and now it's too late to edit my post, so I'm responding to myself...

FreeBSD 10's New Technologies:

http://www.freebsdnews.net/2013/09/20/freebsd-10s-new-techno...

There was an HN discussion of the article as well:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6417168
Unbundle project and yourself: it is not failure not to achieve impossible.

Is there anything you can push to other people? Some self contained part or may something mechanical they can easily learn?
Alternate route, especially to machine learning / data science:

- Become a "business analyst", AKA spreadsheet jockey, at some gigantic & relatively faceless corporation.

- Learn Python, or some other scripting language that runs on Windows and has hooks into spreadsheets / backend data stores / email systems and makes data manipulation easy.

- Automate your job away. Use the time to learn the basics of "real" statistics and machine learning. Gradually feed these into your work product, for instance by putting confidence intervals on your reports or generating trend lines via simple ARIMA.

- Write some public demo projects that implement these techniques. Do some public evaluations of different techniques or implementations of techniques.

You now have a super plausible "in" to do basically the same thing at a technology company or someplace that sees analytics as a key part of their value proposition, and bootstrap yourself from there.
Does Elon Musk come from a banking family?
He somehow got banks to accept PayPal (if I have his biography correct.)

No matter how great a programmer you are, you know that banks are probably going to say no to something like PayPal (at least back in the mid-nineties).

So, this question has been nagging me for a while. How did he get them to accept payment transfers in and out of PayPal?
The PS4 runs FreeBSD on AMD hardware, but that doesn't mean it's necessarily the same AMD hardware as you or I have access to. If you're buying 50,000,000 units, AMD will design a chip for you.
Managers don't like hearing "no" but they love dollars and cents and being a "decision maker". "I hear you'd like this done in a month... well its going to take me two months if I work alone. The good news is I know two consultants and the three of us can do it in a month for $abcxyz. Why will it take 50% more labor hours to get it done quickly, well much like nine women can't pop out a baby by cooperating in a month ... and BTW here is a nice book for you called the mythical man month and it would be well worth your reading time. So get back to me on that decision"
I can think of at least two reasons for it to be on HN:

(1) Replicating as a browser extension the functionality to which Yale objects qualifies as a damn good hack.

(2) The original issue is about internet freedom, a matter of concern to the HN community.
In case anyone doesn't recognize the name, this guy here is the FreeBSD 10.0 release engineer.
How we confuse symbols and things
Yeah, i remember when i did something similar in Visual Basic when i was 14..
I think you're misreading this: it's saying that 6% of California households (778k/13m) have net worth >=$1m, not that 6% of US households with >=$1m net worth live in California. The percentage of US millionaires who live in California is almost certainly higher than 6%.
I use this all the time for quick network diagrams when explaining things via email.
I think history (2008 in particular) has shown many times over that they do anything BUT reduce volatility... Shielding or obfuscating possibly, but reduction in the long term, has not been their strong point.
I find i very hard to believe that someone (even a extremely large group) would be able to build an operating system from the ground up that runs java applications and renders HTML5.
In less than something like 10 years.

Using that as i ground i would put a large bet on that it is not at built from the ground up at all. Probably just a really bad linux distro.
The basic idea here is that cliveowen becomes distressed when people that he is jealous of dare complain about anything. There is nothing deeper going on here.
Use standard deviation (not mad about MAD)
I fully agree. With the exception that the derivatives market allowed them to make a more risky loan to you (IE one you may likely have not been able to pay off and they knew it). I would say the value to society at large is very observable as a negative. Getting a low percentage loan that is unstable or even totally illusory is not value. At least not in my opinion.
> Hits the nail on the head for me. In the end these people make incredible amounts of money for doing what amounts to a job that is worthless to the society at large.

As opposed to making incredibly amounts of money finding ways of getting Random Joe to click on ads? The only difference between him and most 20 something kids working their asses off in SV is a million dollars.
Recurring theme of HN success stories: setting a goal, and hustling to meet it by sheer determination and creativity.

I think I have the hustle down, Just not so sure I've been great at setting lofty enough goals for myself lately. I think I did well setting goals early on in my career, but after achieving all of those, I am not sure which direction is "up". I am happy at the level I reached, just adding skills tech as it interests me.. But can't help feel a little guilty for not setting goals as high as I used to? Is that just societal pressure from watching others grow, or recognition of complacency? Is there anything wrong with complacency?
Meteor.js - The Perfect Match For Lean Startups
This doesn't seem like a collision of fair use and creative commons so much as a simple refusal to use fair use in the first place. The publications have decided that fair use is not sufficient for their needs, requiring instead a more explicit licensing agreement that fits their needs better.
Just because the Extension is removed from the "play store" doesn't mean it's unattainable. You can still distribute Chrome Extensions from a third party site, of course they can take steps to get your take it off of your site, but one would assume that college students who want to use this could simply share it via email or simply on a USB stick.
Content Shock: Why content marketing is not a sustainable strategy
It would, it that were an automated process. Can we satisfy your quibble by using the word "automated" before "extraction"?
The state of the art in virtual audio is keeping pace with these developments. I've had some experience with research headphones that combine HRTF models with head tracking, and the result is uncanny - Except that the environment your ears are presented with has to match the strong priors from your eyeballs. So it will be awesome to experience virtual audio and video at the same time.
Patients’ Costs Skyrocket; Specialists’ Incomes Soar
What is needed in urban (and even suburban neighbourhoods) is efficient transport. If a minibus system with an autonomous driver were available with reasonable (under 5 minute) headings and better than human driver delivery times, I suspect most people would opt for it rather than their own car. Traffic would be reduced and parking would no longer be as much of a problem. Helsinki is currently the home prototype system of this sort, but with human rather than autonomous drivers.
The manager asked if I needed help, I said yes, he said you didn't give it any thought. I decided that it was fruitless.
In Europe we have database rights (see eg http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Database_Directive) that can be used to prevent others from using your data - under quite narrowly defined conditions AFAIR.

Copyright doesn't protect from reuse of data, it's there to protect a particular artistic expression, a particular form if you like. I don't think the USA have anything akin to the European database rights?
As someone who has done a good deal of hiring, I think this guy has nailed it. You want "social proof" for yourself. This comes from shipping good-quality code that people use. If you have that and can prove it, actual resume-line experience and education become nearly irrelevant.
I used this site about 2 years ago when working on a CLI for my old company. Love it and can't wait to use it again.

edit: And we just ddos'd it.
This is almost identical to the issue of open-source license conflicts, where everyone is OK with their code being freely downloaded / compiled / modified by users, but not necessarily with the terms under which it can then be redistributed by those users.
Not to quibble, but 'poor college student' is a statistical oxymoron. I do agree though that cryptocurrencies offer great promise for 3rd-world economies and is a democratizing influence.
Oh, I always assumed is was from the same author. Thanks for correcting me :)
From memory (I don't have my copy of "Peopleware" here), there was an large IBM study in the '80s that showed 40 hours as the practical optimum work week.

Could be remembering incorrectly, though.