skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thank you. Maybe I will. I think Bitcoin can be a very good, very useful, universal micropayment platform, and that's about it (well, that's plenty, really). And you can loan Bitcoin just as you do any other form of money; it just requires trust.

The problem with the more vociferous proponents of Bitcoin – and not only Bitcoin; you can see the same thing happen in the tech industry in discussions of women or minorities – is one of politics. The problem is this: many in the American tech industry don't know what politics is. According to Wikipedia, it "is the practice and theory of influencing other people on a civic or individual level;" it's a general term for managing powers and spheres of influence in society. Worse, they seem to shun it.

But politics can't be avoided. It is essential to human society. When people shy away from politics, a dangerous thing happens: they practice bad politics based on naturalistic fallacies. I think science oriented folk are particularly prone to that because science concerns itself with what is, while politics concerns itself with what ought to be. Science people might, and do, come to believe that what is, is what ought to be (or the only way to be).

In fact, Bitcoin is a very interesting example because it allows (actually, it is only imagined to allow) removing people out of the equation altogether, leaving algorithms. When you take power away from people and put it in the hands of mathematics you indeed lose politics (except, of course, for the original act of seizing that power). But then you lose a lot of what makes us human.

I think that there is in Bitcoin a confluence of tech people falling into naturalistic fallacies with a general lack of trust in institutions that has possibly been growing of late among Americans. It is interesting to watch, but the arguments, unfortunately, are no different from the old American-libertarian anti-government, pro-gold, arguments. The difference, this time, is not in political awareness (of which there is a dire lack), but in – here's that word again – power. American libertarians traditionally had little power. They have been a small minority of both the general population and even of the rich and influential. But now technology is not only a power (which it always was), but one with exceptionally low barriers to attain. Bitcoin supporters, by virtue of their part in the powerful Silicon Valley sphere of influence, actually do carry a not-insignificant political weight. This will be interesting to watch.

Whatever happens, even those who believe in institutions should welcome this challenge, because democratic institutions always benefit, in the long run, from worthwhile challenges. So far they've shown an incredible ability to adapt (though the rate still appears too slow to humans who only live about 80 years), and there's no reason to believe they will not evolve for the better as a result of this interesting challenge.

It is interesting to watch.
> Meanwhile everyone says Japan's only hope to keep their labor pool growing against their greying population is to start getting women involved.

I was under the impression that as women join the workforce their fertility plummets. This seems incredibly counterproductive if the problem is a "greying population"?
It's a direct connection into the docs of the API you're working with and not necessarily about saving a couple keystrokes.

When I had it available to me, I'd often use it to explore the class or object I'm working with.
Even if you're not curious about Haskell, have a look at the parser here. Parsing in Haskell feels like cheating.
Touch screen in cars is debatable, but for the record, Apple's solution allows the use of physical knobs and buttons in the car to hook into CarPlay.
Fuck, I sincerely hope our generation (early-mid 20s) do not react like crusty sheltered curmudgeons in 15-30 years when they occupy these positions of power and are confronted with something they've never seen before. I'm not too hopeful though. One of the few constants in life is that while individually people may change, groups of them rarely do.
The "Four Hamiltons" framework for mitigating faults in the cloud
> Your class just attended a field trip. They seemed to enjoy it, how engaged were they in reality? The old-fashioned way: A show of hands, a questionnaire, or perhaps a quiz to test learning. The big data way: Give students access to tablets, and monitor their social media or email data.

Really? They're proposing the mining of email?

> The kind of education-related big data you see will one of the following: System-wide Data: This includes grades, disciplinary records and attendance. This data can be used to draw inferences that can inform recommendations <snip>

Big data?
This. Or at least someone who appears to share the same values and decision-making criteria.
Indeed! And in much fewer words I may say.
One reason not mentioned already is that HR does not have the technical expertise to understand if someone is a good candidate. Also HR may be busy with other responsibilities.

Finally, many positions are difficult to fill especially if the company isn't well-known in technical circles. The easiest way to get candidates is to go through recruiters
Controller method that I can share? No.

This method in mime-types is reported by Code Climate as a code smell. They're wrong: it's the smallest it can possibly be while still correctly performing the necessary goal; any smaller, and you have to break it into multiple smaller methods that provide no value except keeping Code Climate happy. https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types/blob/master/lib/mim... The method is ~35 lines long. There are other cases I can provide from open source work (https://github.com/halostatue/mime-types/blob/master/lib/mim... is a good example: deprecated code, parser for a file type where splitting into multiple methods only complicates the logic flow).

It is true that the larger a method gets the less readable, understandable, and clear it gets—but that should never translate into the sort of nonsensical request you made, asking about maximum LOC. Asking that paints you as a prescriptivist who doesn't bother understanding the context the code requires.

I've been writing software for a long time, and while I try to write methods as short, clear, composable “paragraphs”, I sometimes will write something much longer than is readable because I can't figure out a meaningful way to break it down. That comes over time and reading and interaction with the code.

The best developers in my experience are pragmatic. They are aware of design patterns, but don't treat them like sewing patterns. They are aware of development practices, but don't treat them like holy writ. The GoF design patterns book is an excellent descriptivist treatise, but then people started treating it like a cookbook and looked for reasons to implement Patterns everywhere, rather than extracting the patterns from their code.

Blog posts like this one (that tell me that I should use an Interactor) pattern are actively dangerous, because they provide dicta without properly explaining the pain that the pattern evolved to solve, or the proper evolution of the pattern.

The current code base I work on shows a lot of evidence of Rails Fads just like this one, and I'm trying to get my team to step back and ask why we do things certain ways and to go back to first principles. Don't just reach for a Presenter because it's what was done before. Don't even reach for an ActiveModel::Serializer because it's what we're preferring now for API representations. Figure out your problem. State it clearly. Write the solution clearly. Find code that works similarly and figure out (a) if and (b) how they can be extracted into common code.

There is a cost to adopting things like Presenters and making smaller methods: your interface becomes larger. You can complain all you like of large files and functions, but code bases that have large numbers of classes whose purpose aren't clear…are harder to navigate and understand. (I have, in the current code base, unextracted code from external classes when that external class is used in one place and it makes the behaviour more understandable. It also provides a better place to understand where similar behaviour may appear later so that we can properly extract code if and when it is necessary later.)
the key-word/phrase is "internet of things"

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/02/16/technology/intels-sharp-ey...
Do those cultures have iPads?
Airpnp: Like Airbnb, but for toilets
As a loud supporter for menstrual cups, and someone who is admittedly not that familiar with Indian culture, I can see there being a large cultural barrier towards adoption of menstrual cups, as they require you to get, well, a little up close and personal with your own body. Even in the US, I know a few people that are completely uncomfortable with the idea and won't use menstrual cups or tampons without applicators (or tampons at all).
I can see how it would be true of normal programmers though -

Computer science courses usually teach something very different from every day programming. You learn linear algebra, AI, dynamic programming.

Then you go to work and spend 10 years mostly not doing those things. They are generic, and there are libraries for generic things - you just need to understand how they behave.

A decade later, most people will only retain the specific techniques they use in their domain. Maybe you know more than you ever did about indexing algorithms, but the math behind the deep learning algorithm you wrote at college is gone.
Looking at the debates there are in local governments in the US, it's interesting to look at how Uber has been received in London.

In London, we've had a setup for licensing 'mini-cabs' for almost a decade (and they've been around for far longer than that). In essence, they are all registered and regulated by a central authority, in a similar (but much less strict) way to London's famous black cabs. The difference being that mini-cabs are normal cars, that must be prebooked.

In that sense Uber fit right in, they're just another (one of 100's, if not 1000's) mini-cab providers. So for us in London, Uber hasn't really been revelatory at all except in the app driven aspects of their service (which is great).

There's always been a tension between liveried cabs and these 'mini-cabs' in London, and that's something that's been really interesting to see played out in different markets in the US. Especially when it's tied to the more prevalent laissez-faire attitude that the US has to market regulation.
That begs the question - what does Microsoft really gain with this? Poor countries never bought Windows anyway, and rich countries will now be getting it for free, instead of paying money for it.
Dual prop - not sure (I'm just an amateur drone builder) but it would counteract centrifugal forces, meaning the higher prop speeds can be achieved.
The issue, I assume, is that the parent poster would have liked to use beets on his or her existing music collection but now cannot because it's no longer local.
Kickstarter to bring a Cat Café to LA
Mostly. I need to update it a bit. I will ASAP.
You can always rent and buy.

I'd be nervous buying DRM'd content from a supplier that may not be around in the future. But renting I could care less - unless I paid for years upfront - but you generally don't do that.
if bitcoint was made for the people, it would be forbidden already. wake up.
Create stunning looking Websites with no effort Amazing Web Design
I agree those things are less than optimal in the US, but at a personal level:

1) The visa stuff is a PITA, but if you are in a situation where you can tell some company to deal with it, it shouldn't be too bad.

2) You get pretty good health care working for most companies in the US as a programmer. If you lose your job, you can presumably relocate to where you were before that has a different health care system.
With all due respect, I do not think multi-signature solves the real problem. The real problem is that Bitcoin transactions are irreversible, so even if we realize within hours that a hack has occurred, we can do nothing about it.

Banks as we knew them did not work this way. Yes, having to wait three days for settlement is absurd, but folks are working to speed that up (to just one day, haha). Yes, the fees add up. But the systems have been developed over a really long time, and they have multiple levels of protection against you losing all your money. In the US that's the FDIC and SIPC, for regular-sized accounts. There will never been a direct equivalent for BTC, precisely because no one's national security is tied to BTC. And most people won't buy deposit insurance at any price higher than the "free" one they get from their government.

Early adopters of Bitcoin spoke fondly of the fact that there are no chargebacks. That's a great way to reduce transaction costs. It's also a great way to make sure that when you get hacked (and you will) you cannot recover.

Compare this to the situation with ACH transfers (the US-only, low-cost "wire transfer" system). Anyone who knows anything about computers would be aghast at the technology comprising that system. The security appears to be pretty lame. Yet people do not lose their savings via ACH. Why? It isn't because ACH transfers are so secure--it's because the banks can undo them, which in turn lowers the incentive for thieves. This is a virtuous cycle, by contrast to Bitcoin's vicious one, and the way it works has nothing to do with technology.
12 videos to you get started with open source software
There are women who find that menstrual cups aren't for them, but in my experience, they tend to be the exception. Using one myself, and having turned many of my friends onto them, they're generally hailed as the greatest thing ever invented around here. Not to say theres anything wrong with your friends, because everyone likes what they likes, just wanted to throw my own experience.
I don't subscribe to it, but:

Taxis negotiated their monopoly by giving us concessions for e.g. universal service (a taxi, unlike most businesses, is obligated to serve any customer regardless of whether their custom is the most profitable use of the taxi's time). This allows us to depend on taxis as an outsourced component of our public transportation infrastructure. If competition creams the really desirable fairs away from taxis, that might kill taxis. DSX has no desire to implement universal service and never will. This will adversely affect our most vulnerable citizens, like little old ladies who depend on the $3.50 fare to the local supermarket (whose custom taxi drivers hate) due to limited mobility.

How can we be sure drivers at DSX have adequate insurance, safe driving records, and obey the traffic laws? DSX says that they have adequate procedures in place, but DSX has basically designed those procedures itself, and on the face of it DSX seems to operate under accept-everyone-and-weed-out-underperformers, which still means that at any given time there are dozens of commercial drivers who we know nothing about operating on the streets of our fair city.

We depend on "if you screw up, you lose your medallion" to discipline taxi owners (as opposed to operators) in this city. "If you screw up, your account gets deleted and you have to move to a competing provider" doesn't apply the same level of incentive.

If Disruptive Service X (DSX) will let literally anybody with a car start working for them, how can we be sure that DSX isn't a summon-a-rapist app? Cars present a higher risk of rape/kidnapping than e.g. barber salons (n.b. which we also regulate), since a) they move and b) the passenger generally doesn't have a convenient escape out of the door.
I imagined it and called it hand-to-mouth. It would be incredibly wasteful not to let others use resources you don't need at the moment in exchange for participating in their future proceeds. A large part of the resources in such a society would lie idle at all times.

There would be no insurance either, so everyone would be forced to save tons of money to cover adverse events that don't happen to most of them most of the time. For instance, everyone would have to save up enough to rebuild their home in case it burns down. That amount would be thousands of times what is needed to rebuild the homes that actually do burn down.
I would relocate first. You will get plenty of phone calls and interview invitations so you really need to be in UK.
That laissez-faire attitude, to the extent it exists at all, is generally only aimed at the federal and to a lesser degree state level. At the local level the voter involvement is so low that corruption and pandering to special interests are the norm.
One of the biggest problems with this forum is very narrow minded view of things looking through a limited binoculars of a capitalist culture when everything has to boil down to profit in pure money terms.

What this guy is achieving is more than bringing down the price.

The job he is creating for these women is providing incalculable benefit to themselves, their families, their children and is adding more to the society (which operates on a completely different value system than your own) that can not be calculated in 20 pause less per pad.

Also, you mentioned the scale of economy, but didn't see that he achieved this price reduction without mass scale production which in itself is a big achievement.

Without going in much details, I'd say the capitalist approach does not always benefit the society. I know everybody here is a superstar techie working on the next big social success to allow people do more fluff, other people in other worlds may have different priorities.
Ampache is awesome, although my iOS client is pretty old and ugly unfortunately. It's couple with ownCloud, so it's pretty seamless.
The way Arq splits files into chunks (to facilitate incremental backups), it averages $.05/GB in per-request Glacier fees for the initial backup.
After the initial backup, per-request fees are typically not significant because it only uploads new/changed files.
Five years ago, I would add a new feature and 50% of the time it would be a fair bit harder than I expected, then maybe 30% of the time I would find it easier than I expected, as I had designed the code well, and it was set up for extending / reuse.

Nowadays, I am getting better. If I don't understand a bit of code I wrote a few months back, then I use it as an opportunity to look at it freshly. Why is this code crap? Why is it making what I want to do difficult? How could it be better? That's a good place to start refactoring from.
What are the cost of the material + the proportional part of the 10 salaries + other costs?

>* He weighed it in his hand and wondered why 10g (less than 0.5oz) of cotton, which at the time cost 10 paise (£0.001), should sell for 4 rupees (£0.04) - 40 times the price.*

This is the first estimation of the material cost. Then he learned that they use cellulose. And I don't know if it considers the cost of the surrounding cloth or the plastic wrap. Just assume this is accurate and pick a material cost of 0.10 rupees/pad.

> [...] and provides employment for 10 women. They can produce 200-250 pads a day [...]

Assuming a 20 days/month work, we get 500 pads/month/worker. The minimum salary is slightly bigger than ~100 rupees, let's say 0.02 rupees/pad

I don't know the details in India, but tax and retirement founds and security health may add a 50%, that is 0.01 rupees/pad.

> A manual machine costs around 75,000 Indian rupees (£723) - a semi-automated machine costs more.

To recover machine the cost in 5 years, with 60000 pads/year, the result is 0.25 rupees/pad.

> First, a machine similar to a kitchen grinder breaks down the hard cellulose into fluffy material, which is packed into rectangular cakes with another machine.

Well, I don't know the cost of cellulose. Just assume that it's a good approximation to consider the cost of an equivalent amount of cotton instead, as in the first paragraph. [ * ]

Another cost source is the gas to cook the cellulose and the electricity for the light in the building and the building maintenance cost and ... I don't know how to do a good estimation of them, so just forget them.

And don't forget to add taxes.

Then my optimistic cost is 0.38 ruppes/pad and they sell them for 2.5 rupees, so it's a x6.6 margin, instead of a x25 margin.

[ * ] If I'm free to invent numbers, I'd like to double the material cost from 0.1 to 0.2 rupees/pad to consider the changes in the material. Then the total estimation is 0.48 ruppes/pad and the margin reduced to x5.2.
According to the article, with such a small n, the contestant should visit ~1.47 of collectors before picking the best one. That's hard to do in practice.
That must depend o having decent code to work on in the first place. Seeing some of the comments in the code bases I have worked on, I am not sure I was going to learn anything there.
GoodReads has lists pretty locked up for me. Discovery isn't perfect but Selectist seems to be more of what we already have. I'd love to see some innovation here though. Maybe some exhaustive normalized tagging and filtering (AND, OR, NOT).
fucking javascript is everywhere!
That's funny.

That's a bit of a holy grail. Because you need the shuffle to track your mood. I found that it really subdues my listening, in that I don't always want some punk music interupting a mellow interlude. So I've gone back to listening to albums, or crafted playlists.

There are album fillers, and there are tunes that are just bad, and they are better gone. Though granted, the holes don't feel quite right.

I'm trying to understand your MusicBrainz remark, are albums with missing tracks unidentifiable?
Microsoft makes pollster Penn head of strategy, exact role unclear
Yes, we do. I would pay for it if it is not ridiculously expensive (mykolab) and has decent privacy AND encryption. Servers in america == bad.

That icelandic one from recently (forgot the name) I can not take too seriously, since they want to roll their own browser that will basically be a bad version of Tor browser and also some other stuff they want to build their selves.
I'm slightly exasperated with this mythical cultural fit being used as the end all quality you seek in your potential employee. If someone can please spare some time to write a no-nonsense definition so that even an alien could understand I'll be grateful. All I ever get are hand-wavy explanations.
>That means Your Money have lost 30% of its value

That's completely false. You are ignoring the velocity the of money: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Velocity_of_money

And contrary to a savings account your bitcoin wallet doesn't even pay interest.
When you add a folder to Arq (and you're using AWS for a target) it asks whether you want S3 or Glacier and gives a chart of costs: http://www.haystacksoftware.com/storage_type_selection.png
In a big city like NYC, taxis are part of an overall transportation system. Regulating them ensures that they are available where and when they are expected to be. People plan their activities around the functioning of that system.

Naturally, a different system might work better or worse. A worse outcome would be more people taking their own cars into the city because they need or want quick access to a vehicle.

Regulating the number of cabs probably helps deal with traffic congestion, and also makes it potentially possible for drivers to earn a living wage. However, I can see where on-call cars are a different situation because they would serve a different purpose.
Stop using Nagios (so it can die peacefully)
The missing email feature I'm interested in is analytics - I couldn't find anything the last time I looked.

Who takes up most of my time, as measured by the number of words I've written to them? Who is worst at responding to me? Can you do anything with sentiment analysis?