skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think it's the definition of "unfair advantage", but I don't think it's the definition of "malfeasance". The individual SEC employees have no agency here: they are required by policy to sell the stock of any companies they are investigating.

Moreover, it's not clear if any other policy would better serve the public interest. Requiring or allowing them to not to sell that stock is an even worse conflict of interest; it would incentivize them to never find a company guilty, because then their own holdings would drop. Requiring that they never own stocks would be a prohibitive restriction that would turn away many people who are most qualified for the job. The blind trust idea might work, but adds a lot of overhead for employees, and also requires another level of enforcement to make sure employees are not leaking information to the trustee.

A lot of people are really uncomfortable with the idea that someone might have an unfair advantage in financial markets, but oftentimes this is quite unavoidable. It's also pretty small-potatoes compared to the advantages that professional financiers get by being primary dealers for the Fed, or market makers, or having relationships with Wall Street policy makers, or hobnobbing with company CEOs on the golf course.
> Yes. Scripting powers of Perl are unmatched.

Can you offer any examples of how that is true?
> Hospitals don't let uninsured people die

Irrelevant, even if true. Uninsured people often don't go to the hospital until it's too late, because they know the expense will ruin them and they're hoping it will get better on its own.
This isn't new technology, it's readily available for iOS. People haven't implemented it for broad use because it doesn't work as well on iOS as intents do on Android i.e. I can't link from an email and have the OS decide if I should send it to the app or to a web browser.
How about C: They aren't allowed to trade at all.
the ussr was socially conservative.
Tax free re-balance? Wow!
Paulsen took got 500 million with no tax.
Don't languages with native MOPs, such as Python and Ruby, create better internal DSLs than Perl?
heya, glad you like it!
Won't do countries, because its Unicode support is garbage.
Here are some odd highlights: matrix http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Matr...

Lists http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/List...

Algebra: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Basi...

Algebra rewrites: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Rewr...

Programming calc: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Prog...

And (gasp) Data Types: http://www.gnu.org/software/emacs/manual/html_node/calc/Type...

(mind you, i mostly use the HP-calculator level stuff. But the rest is certainly awesome)
I'd really like to see a proper postmortem of the launch problems. Read about how it got fixed is nice, but I want a detailed account of how such an important project with the direct attention of the U.S. President managed to get fucked so absolutely.
The victim is trust in the market. If you know that someone else may have better information than you do, you get a "market for lemmings" situation where everybody assumes that the only reason someone would sell a stock is that they know it's going to tank, and so nobody buys. Liquidity collapses, and with it, the market.

The SEC isn't intended to protect individual investors, it's intended to protect the market as a whole. That's why they don't care when individual people get screwed, only when people get screwed to an extent that they won't invest in the market. People change their behavior based on what other people do; without full public information, the result of that tendency is to tend towards zero liquidity.
That doesn't help either. If I have a thousand shares in BofA that become frozen, I might be tempted to go lightly on punitive damages against BofA to minimize losses to my portfolio.
I live in San Diego. I don't make any more than your average programmer around here (very low six figures.) I can do all of those things, and in a nice area.
Concentrate on crunching numbers, not on the grunge.
I never let episodes in a series autoplay on netflix, but the other night I did and it paused a few minutes in to make me click to continue.

I assumed this was to protect their bandwidth. They don't want users streaming a whole series while they sleep (or aren't in the room for that matter).

I did wonder if the interruption was based on time of day, since it was late at night.
True on the sales point. And it's getting harder and harder to find coders who want to spend all their time writing perl, as great as it is. That makes it tough for enterprises to maintain perl codebases.

Also, more CPAN libraries seem to be in a state of atrophy these days and I think the long-looming specter of perl 6 has had a depressing effect on that community.

The post talks about Moose, which is a behemoth with huge and varied dependencies and must be be tougher to maintain these days. Every time I've tried to write a project in Moose, I've regretted it in the long run.

However, I've written plenty of big, enterprise-class projects in perl instead of buying them from major vendors. Over the years, we were almost always able to beat the value proposition of Big Software precisely because we had a solid team of perl coders.
> On the other hand, if SEC employees are not forced to sell, then their holdings may diminish their impartiality. It seems like the only fair and neutral approach is to require SEC employees to hold no individual stocks at all during their employment - or any type of financial instrument issued by organizations they might potentially investigate.

The solution is blind trusts, with the additional cost picked up as part of their compensation package. The way to guarantee impartiality is to remove any chance of impropriety.

I would also settle for extremely common ETFs like the SPDR S&P 500.
The concept of 'works X hours on job Y so deserves Z' is totally bogus. You have to reveal how much Y is in demand, what kind of risks are involved and what kind of predictability exists in in the results doing Y.

An accountant working 70 hrs a week at $20/hr will take $1400 a week. A start up guy will take $0 if it things go sour. That is the difference. Do you wish to settle for $1400/week without risks or take a risk and make $100 million working 3-4 years? Note if things go bad for the entrepreneur(and that's the most common case) the accountant is still significantly richer than the start up guy.

If you look at it that, way the accountant is having it way easier than the start up guy. A lot of predictability in results, measurable productivity, guaranteed pay etc.

Apply that definition and you see why programming is actually "coal mine of its own sort".
Where did you get 1K for rent? I live in CT and my rent is approx 3K for 1 bedroom + den. Income is a bit higher than OP (10K more annually).
Granted. That said, "Apple couldn't undetectably intercept your messages even if they wanted to" is surprisingly close.
How I begin a project.
> we rag a lot on Federal Reserve chairpeople for not doing NGDP level targeting

I wish HN was actually this economically informed.
Wave didn't strike me as the most performant of client-side webapps, but certainly may have been ahead of its time in terms of what it was trying to do. I wonder if browsers could make this sort of thing easier, or even automatic. Querying the positions relative to viewport of elements on scroll is expensive, even using throttling.
What happens when someone turns on their phone on a plane? ;-P
One Week as an Uber Driver
Who is behind Auroracoin? Do they communicate with other Icelandic cryptocurrency enthusiasts?
Isn't this like telling people to not to break the law but we can because we are the law?

What stops a hedge fund manager from being extra nice to the boys that turn Bud Fox?
It's basic abstract algebra - this is literally stuff I learned in a math class 12 years ago. It's used in hojillion papers, some abstract and some concrete and highly relevant to real world problems (including encryption and linear algebra - both of which can be directly useful to programmers), and they're not even hard. Just learn some math - this is undergrad stuff.
Show HN: Spreed, the speed reading Chrome extension I made a year ago
~1k is what a studio costs in Seattle. I pay ~1400 for a large 2 bedroom.
Isn't this obviously illegal?

"I call on the cryptocurrency exchanges of the world to accept transactions with auroracoins."

That's plainly violating the capital control laws (on the Icelandic side). Notably, the central bank already declared that those laws apply to Bitcoin:

"It is prohibited to engage in foreign exchange trading with the electronic currency Bitcoin, according to the Icelandic Foreign Exchange Act"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Legal_status_of_Bitcoin
Yelp Data Reveals Top 100 Places to Eat: Bookmark These Babies Now
You're confusing "start-up programming" with "programming," I probably that seems to be endemic on Hacker News.
> I can't imagine a more elitist, entitled attitude than being seriously upset at people trying to pay you lots of money to work.

I think the recruiters that most people complain about aren't "trying to pay you lots of money to work." The recruiters people complain about are just looking for people and don't really care whether or not those people actually fit the job description.

They may not even have a job they're recruiting for and may just be looking for people to keep "on hand."

So rather than "paying lots of money," they cost money in terms of time spent filtering them out and communicating with the duds.

In addition to that, the recruiters themselves aren't actually the ones paying money... the companies are. I don't think anyone is getting upset about companies offering jobs -- just shoddy recruiters who waste our time.

So saying that complaining about bad recruiters is an "elitist, entitled attitude" seems to me like saying that people are elitist and entitled for not liking Nigerian scammers... hey, they're offering you free money!

But they're not.
Ex-Googlers talk about why they won't game the system
> It did not control for many factors that may be relevant (e.g. smoking).

From the abstract: "After additional adjustment for race/ethnicity, income, education, self- and physician-rated health status, body mass index, leisure exercise, smoking, and regular alcohol use"

> On the authors of the correlation study, who should never have studied this question without looking at extensive control variables or without more specifically studying causation?

How do you suggest studying causation in this setting? A randomized controlled trial where we deprive people of health insurance? Even that will likely not yield a true causal estimate, because randomization only helps for pre-randomization differences in the population, and behavior change from lacking health insurance will occur post randomization. The authors do extensively discuss their control variables, and important to remember is the fact that most papers only control for variables which ended up doing something, a subset of all variables that were tried. The NHANES data the study was pulled from includes a staggering number of covariates.

---

While not an ironclad study, I found the paper itself vastly more compelling than the politifact analysis of it, which boils down to "Well, observational studies might be wrong because reasons".
LOL That would only be true if they were willing to break the law (by blackmailing somebody, yet felt the strange need to making a legal accusation.

It's very hard to defend against institutional blackmail. The blackmailer just has to make their demands, that need to be followed "if you known what's good for you". Generally, that will work and no further steps are necessary.

If somebody decides to resist the demand in any way, you simply place some of those pictures of underage kid - perhaps from the project mentioned in this article - and place a "tip" with the local police. Of course, they could always "parallel construction" it. Many options there, because you never actually have to show real evidence in court, or even show up. You just have to get the ball rolling, and the child-porn accusation will do the rest for you.

In fact, it's important to make a big show about it, because coming down hard on the occasional person that questions your demands serves as an excellent way to discourage other from trying.
The hangup with pagination is even if it can be done well, most people associate it with a full page reload, often very slow, often because of ads.
A public service announcement: There’s still a lot of pretty good programmers who don’t write tests… and programmers who write tests are not necessarily any good - http://blog.choonkeat.com/weblog/2012/06/tdd-for-those-who-d...
Not only do they have significant value, but they're the only type of evidence you'll ever have for something like this - it's impossible, and almost certainly unethical - to run a randomized trial of keeping people from having health insurance.

Also, while "Correlation is not causation" is, as you mentioned, a tired canard on the internet, people often seem to forget that all things that do have a causal relationship with have some form of association. Association doesn't prove causation, but it's a damned fine first step, and miles above "guessing", which is what happens without evidence.
Creative spam?
So if you have to sell you're essentially shorting and the only way to make good on the trade is to make the price go down.
What's the most creative spam you've received? Forward that spam message to web@snipek.com, and you can get a URL for that spam mail and share here.
How confident do you feel you are in the right career path?
Exactly why we built monitoring tools.
What's the point of programming in a language that has 100 ways to do something, and then banning all but 99 of them? Why would you use a language if you don't agree that the designers did a good job? That's like going to a burger joint and ordering a salad. Only someone hell-bent on maintaining an emotional connection to a worn-out old programming language, would even consider that.

I've never seen a project that could enforce its coding standards in every case. Things always slipped through. Turns out, machines are much better at enforcing arbitrary coding standards than humans. Maybe we should let the machines do the machines' job, and the humans do the humans' job.

Perl has all the problems of an old language. No commonly-agreed on coding style (you'll get flamed to a crisp in some parts for even talking about Modern Perl), no single object framework (Moose, Class::Accessor, Object::Tiny, Role::Tiny, and plain old "inside out object." References are confusing and unnecessary (neither Python nor Ruby needed to make an artifical distinction between references and non-references). All the various different ways that things can fail at runtime are a huge burden, especially when you combine them with the different modes that perl itself can be run in, like "use strict" versus not.

Just about the only thing Perl did right was regular expressions. That, and avoiding the version hell that Python got itself into.

Perl was fun in the early 90s, but it's time to let go. Only a masochist would use it today. Only a sadist would recommend it to newcomers.
Ada too, it has distinct procedures and functions; the latter producing only one output based only on its inputs (though I believe recently they added the ability to also have out parameters so multiple values can be returned).
There you have the github repo: https://github.com/popcorn-time/popcorn-app
Does Causation Imply Correlation?
I just submitted this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7317254 which is the CrossValidated (StackOverflow for stats) discussion of whether or not causation implies correlation.
Harris Semiconductor attempted to intro the "RTX" microncontroller in the late 1980s. It featured a true Forth-based instruction set. RTX never caught traction due (IMO) to the lack of developer tools; the group was discontinued in ~1989.
I'm working on an infinite-scroll widget, and I have a very specific insight into this: if you know the number of non-visible rows and their heights upfront, it can be implemented in a way that doesn't jump around. If you can estimate the heights closely, you can make the jumps less disturbing (but still noticeable in the trained eyes).

Unfortunately this is rarely the case, with a few exceptions, e.g. a spreadsheet, where you know everything upfront.
In theory. In reality it's got a ton of cultural baggage.
Back online http://getpopcornti.me/
You can also read the license for OCB to confirm this:

http://www.cs.ucdavis.edu/~rogaway/ocb/license.htm

OCB is neat; unfortunately, the patent means it's also become exotic. Lesser authenticated encryption have also become absurdly fast. Also: I dispute the idea that OCB is easier to understand than GCM.
If you had read the paper linked above, you'd note they controlled for income.
Einstein’s Lost Theorem, Revealed
and it all works about the same with a GUI or over ssh in a terminal. I pity the new engineers stuck with Eclipse or whatever (muscle memory doesn't transfer).
Google Search. The search form has autocomplete=off so that it can be replaced with Google Suggest.
Sorry, but no. 100 times no. Correlation is very often linked to a third factor or multiple factors which are not visible, nor measured in observational studies. Besides, let's not disregard the fact that correlation still has some good chance to be pure luck. Even correlation with 95% confidence statistical significance can be a random result in a non-nil number of times.

So, no, you never prove anything nor imply anything at all with correlation. You're still guessing.
Einstein’s Lost Theorem, freely viewable at Einstein archive
Debt provides leverage. If the burden will obviously prevent reaching 2 million page views per month then it might be time to restructure. If it might keep you from hitting 20 million, all the bottle necks on that path havent been built yet. So there's no way to solve that problem now and anyway growing by an order of magnitude is a more important problem to solve.

That's not to say that building a wall around new code to keep the mud out is a bad idea, but that's a response to growth.
I also question the Sears and Microsoft logos.

The thing about Helvetica -- its essential character -- is in its directness and balance and understatedness and purity, modulo a few well-known quirks (e.g. capital R).

When you perturb that (rounded terminals for Skype, fucked up "e" and "a" for Evian, block-skew-italic and glyph mods for Microsoft) I feel like you lose the whole point of the typeface.

"Based on Helvetica" is not Helvetica.
This is an implementation choice, and not the failure of infinite scrolling: you could embed the infinite scrolling inside a DIV and have a visible footer DIV underneath. Or alternatively, implement a sticky footer, or e.g. a fixed footer that appears on certain conditions.
The solution set to equations of the form X^2 + Y^2 = R^2?

The boundary of a ball in a 2-dimensional, euclidean metric space?

An equivalence class of Gaussian numbers based on their norms?
Although Evian isn't, the Skype logo is based on some customized variant of Helvetica Rounded.

Other logos that clearly aren't Helvetica are the the Crate & Barrel logo pictured in the article, which is Arial, and the American Airlines typeface which appears to be a customized Frutiger (although the old version of the logo was set in Helvetica).

It's a perfectly great typeface, but far too overused.
If I were designing a new programming language I'd copy pythons capitalization/lowercase conventions wholesale because in my opinion they're fantastic
Safari in 10.9.2 ignores autocomplete=off. The preference was removed since it's no longer of any use.
Texas appeals court says police can’t search your phone after you’re jailed
Deep Black: More details on Boeing’s new secure Android smartphone
Stream Torrents – Popcorn Time
This truly is not reddit. I've noticed so many humor-less posts (not that every site needs a sense of humor) and so many grammatical errors that it really paints a picture; reddit is for bored, out of work english majors and this place seems to be for enlightened, snooty programmers.
Google donates $6.8M to SF public transit amid bus controversy
A randomized controlled trial where we deprive people of health insurance?

Yes.

Before instituting Obamacare/Romneycare/$POLICY, we should have run a pilot program based on random assignment with clear predefined success metrics. But that's politically dangerous - after all, what if the experiment shows that $POLICY doesn't work?

We did that, by accident, in Oregon (google Oregon Health Experiment). There were no statistically significant results beyond the placebo effect [1]. Strangely, none of our fact based politicians have proposed scrapping the medicaid expansion based on that.

[1] People with insurance perceived themselves to be healthier before actually consuming any medical care and became less depressed. But no statistically significant difference was observed in any of the objective metrics chosen before the study started.
OS X is case-insensitive in the FS by default, so I guess that's a win? You'll never notice it until one day you lose a file when you're unpacking an archive from another platform that has different files named Makefile, makefile, and MAKEFILE (not that I'm condoning that practice).

More importantly, case folding is complicated or ill-defined in some non-English languages, and there are presumably edge cases in the algorithms. So it gets harder to tell what any given code will do.

If "var x" and "VAR X" were the same in JavaScript, we'd just have to make our company style guide longer. Having more ways to write different-looking but equivalent code isn't necessarily a good thing.

Sure, it's fun to write code like this: Circle circle = Circle.CIRCLE; But were I to use a case-insensitive language, I'm pretty sure I'd get comfortable not being able to do so.

Sounds like the kind of thing you should try before advocating it.
They actually have quite a lot of influence on nominal GDP. (Real GDP is a different beast.)
My point was the zero sum game in that these SEC guys were former traders. So trying to have them not participate in the thing they were bred to do, is not practical or else they would have done it.
It's time to leave the brothels and strip clubs behind [...]
I didn't realize elementary school students like to ride MUNI all by themselves. Publicity stunt.
I've been running into this issue as well. A similar one is that the SSH connection is lost whenever the network is lost. I think both issues are supposed to be solved with the latest version of VB (4.3.8) from this ticket (https://github.com/mitchellh/vagrant/issues/2691).
California court says it’s ok for drivers to look at smartphone maps
I always thought non-repudiability was desirable and what whistleblowers need is anonymity. Thanks for that link.
Court: No-phones traffic law does not apply to apps
Edit - that's what I get for reading comments before the article. But the dictionary is on Netflix, and worth watching.
That's an opinion, not fact.

I'd say it's closer to vanilla: So versatile and distinct that it was elevated to ubiquity. Your average person would have a hard time telling you when helvetica was created or when vanilla ice cream was created. That's an achievement.
SEC employment is often preceded by time in the industry. This means a large fraction of high-value employees are likely entering their roles with existing holdings. Requiring immediate divestment for all SEC roles sounds extreme.

It makes sense that any new investments made during one's time at the SEC should be made into index funds or accounts managed at the independent discretion of a non-SEC manager. But banning all SEC employees from holding any individual stocks during their employment is a deterrent to recruiting.