skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Once they are forced to play on a level playing field, their rates won't be as competitive and their service not as popular.

This is a common misconception on HN. People with technical backgrounds love structural explanations for things. You see a similar phenomenon in the number of people who believe that the shape of an airfoil is what keeps a plane up. But in fact the main thing driving Airbnb's growth is not price, but that guests are looking for authentic experiences. Price helps, just as lift generated by airfoil shapes does, but it's not what has made Airbnb big.
What if you aren't a finisher? How can you become one?
Perhaps it is because Google is doing good, nobel things as well.
They're quite happy with it (except when it breaks, understandably). Mostly, they just want it to work as they expect (i.e. like Word or Google Docs), so the goal is for them to not notice it. Doing the Right Thing on paste from GMail or Google Docs (a very frequent use case) is therefore crucial. At the same time, we want to rely on Scribe to enforce correct, standard typography rules, valid markup (unlike if it were free-form HTML), etc.

We're only at the beginning, but the curly quotes plugin mentioned in the blog post is a good example of that. Other ideas in the pipeline include automatically enforcing and converting to UL/LI lists instead of paragraphs with bullet point characters, warning on punctuation issues, etc.

Scribe has also allowed us to integrate contextual options, such as buttons to add images when the caret is on an empty line, or a button to embed any URL pasted into the body.

So the biggest challenge is therefore to provide a reliable UI that responds as one would expect, while allowing extra features to be built on top of it without too much effort.
Hell, giving the poorest even an extra dollar a day can double their income and make a vast difference in their standard of living.
History is written by the winners (or survivors), so if a colony on "MARS" would survive humanity, certainly option b) will deserve most of the chapters.

It's pretty sad to see though that many users are only seeing two options:

1) give away money to charities to solve symptomatic problems
2) invest money in technologies who try to solve, again, symptomatic problems

A more effective approach would be to work out the causes; first of all, education would be the key.

But this is the hard way of approaching problems.
Log-structured Memory for DRAM-based Storage
Is really depressing reading the cynical comments right here.
Polio is an occurrence with a probability of one, and a non-zero impact.

An catastrophic asteroid impact is a low daily probability, with an impact of up to one (one being complete wipeout of the human race).

I think it's a tossup which yields better happiness or productivity for humanity to address in the short run. In the extreme long run, of course, if you don't solve the second, there's little point solving the first issue.

The problem is a lack of resources - that resource being some collective focus of humankind, as there's no real physical resource limit preventing us from pursuing both at the moment.
It would be cheaper and faster to build the technology to find and destroy/deflect these asteroids than to create even a small permanent colony on mars.
Why does Elon Musk strike you as a misogynistic creep? It seems like that kind of claim warrants some justification.
And your best explanation is that WordPress core devs just don't care?
The solution I describe is basically a functional approach. The function is responsible for the policy concerns over all data in the system.

The function itself can be decomposed into smaller functions.

If you need extensibility, you could make the function composable and register additional pieces to the policy. Most codebases don't need this sort of extensibility.

Simple constructs & consistent, accurate, precise naming is preferable to complicated architectures.
Network latency to or from what?
> If a major asteroid impacts earth

A good reason to support the B612 Foundation (http://b612foundation.org)
I'll try to keep this short. Money is simply a medium of exchange between two parties. This can take the form of paper, precious metals, cigarettes, animals, etc.

Money arises in a society to avoid the problem known as the "double coincidence of wants”. In other words, it's much easier to trade something like gold as a medium instead of hoping that someone will be willing to exchange their chicken, or even half of one, for my butter. They must want my butter and I must want their chicken. Something like gold is more scarce, portable, durable, and divisible along with many other factors.

I use gold simply because it has a long history as money, but it could be anything. It’s determined by the market. The more desirable something is by the market as a whole, or the more commonly it is used by market participants as a medium of exchange because they know others will accept it, will determine how well it will function as money. Multiple currencies could be used within a market at the same time as well.

Feel free to ask follow-up questions. I love this topic :)
It's closely tied to and originated from HHVM, which is not a fork of the standard PHP engine. Since Hack will only run on HHVM (and related), it's not really a fork of PHP. Hack is simply a subset of PHP that's been extended.
>Going to Mars to backup humanity has the real, bona-fide potential to save more lives than any amount of Earth charity;

I really find this morality baffling. As I see it extinction level event would be a tragedy on account of the deaths of billions. But the human species, as a whole, is not an individual; it does not think or feel or suffer. Its cessation has no moral value beyond the death of the individuals which make it up.

I'm open to hearing an argument to the contrary; usually discussions of space colonization, it's assumed obvious that perpetuating humanity is important. But I don't see it, and so I tend to view anything that helps actual individuals as a better use of resources.
Markdown was indeed considered, but we ended up rejecting the idea for a variety of reasons. Given the interest around this decision in several comments here, maybe we should write up about it as well.
See, I still genuinely think we're saying the same things! We're just going about it in different ways.

Rails encourages you to use the "primitives" it ships with, because they've all been more or less designed to work together, and I think this is what DHH is getting at - you get a lot of free behaviour, and in his mind you need a rather strong reason to be throwing them away.

>This is problematic, because you still have massive god-models, but now their code is split between a dozen different files, called "Concerns".

When you put it that way, that still sounds identical to your policies and interactors - you've just chosen a different nomenclature.

Both your approach and concerns are reactions to the way we've been shoving "responsibilities" into our domain objects. When we talk about coupling, we're talking about our ability to reason about our business logic in isolation; generally, the fewer atomic items we have to think about, the easier it is to maintain.

Concerns are just a DSL for writing Ruby mixins; I recently upgraded an older app and discovered I could port it all over by renaming my app/modules folder to app/concerns and I was basically done. So, the differentiating aspect rests in your preferred mental model for breaking up the business logic into these "atomic units".

When you talk about disliking AR models, to my ears it sounds like what you're really saying is "I hate the overhead of hitting the database when I'm writing tests", which is a different idea altogether from "these semantic units ought to only be responsible for serialization".

To me, it's not necessarily relevant if this one object can be persisted; what matters is that it's semantically relevant in my model of the domain/business/etc.

So, at the end of the day there is a ton of logic that is more meaningful when associated with my "users"; but it's an enormous pain in the ass to have huge swaths of my User model governing totally different bits of unrelated functionality. In this circumstance, splitting off the different unrelated bits of functionality is a net win, from both testing and maintenance.

Meanwhile, if we find that there is no good place for stuffing this bit of functionality… then we're probably missing a whole new domain model and we didn't even know it, and imho we're better off encapsulating those behaviours into an independent model.

This is to say: policies as presented in your post strike me as a more convoluted way to achieve this separation of concerns already afford to us by regular ruby mixins/classes.
Sorry, but it is pretty pointless to stomp out Polio if 90% of life is stomped out by an asteroid. It's great to have a Bill Gates, but it's even better to have an Elon Musk, IMHO.
The problem is that you probably have some sort of unrealistic godlike caricature of who he is. He's an extremely idealistic, prolific and successful startup founder. Whether he is the "savior of humanity" is a different topic, although plenty do tend to exaggerate. It's largely because ambitious founders project their hopes and dreams onto him and revere him. Which is a normal psychological occurrence, but also emotionally driven.

Musk is a fallible human like anyone else. Why should his misogyny (can you back that up by the way, I'm not aware?) deflect from his business endeavors?

The thing is you'll always disagree with people on certain things. It seems to me like you're trying too hard to find something to get offended over. I enjoy the works of plenty of people whom I ideologically disagree with, but it poses no grievance to me. Separate the actor from the act.
The beginnings of Turtl
> potentially every human will be as dead as those killed by Polio

Everyone would be dead so there wouldn't be anyone left to care.
I tend to agree. From my point of view, polio doesn't exist in this part of the world. It's as phantasmal as an asteroid.
Maybe they are slower to some extend, but for most cases it won't matter too much. I wrote simple game in scala and it was easy to constantly get 55-60 fps on newer devices: https://github.com/pkukielka/stronghold-defense

That being said I agree that jars are bigger and scala generates much more anonymous classes. Even with ProGuard that could be a problem on Android 2.3 or older. And ProGuard is a bit slow (for my game it was taking 30+ seconds for every build). Also Typesafe doesn't have plans for making scala first class citizen of Android.

So while Android development with scala is certainly possible there are few inconveniences which one should be aware of.
Harsh Samsung Ad Throws Shade on Pretty Much Everybody
Doesn't money have to be symbolic? OR its barter which doesn't use money. Blur these two and the word quits having much meaning.
Yes, and the way that will happen is that money will be invested into space technology companies like SpaceX.
First, we kill the 2048 clones.
Nowadays these same people would be the characters of a 'Why I never hire Marketing people to run a Tech company' article.
Exactly. On windows the OpenGL implementation is supplied by the graphics vender. AMD, Nvidia, or in the case of the i7, intel.

Windows comes with an OpenGL implementation but it's an ancient version.
This happened to me too! I thought chrome had somehow silently updated while I was playing.
And in an alternate reality the one destined to invent the warp drive gets killed by malaria on safari.
The impact on human progress due to preventable death is incalculable.
I believe we have an obligation to explore space, but there has to be balance, and fortunately there is. Page is welcome to leave his money to Musk if that's what he wants, charity will continue regardless.
Yes and the OP is criticizing the decisions being made now as "yak shaving." Could it perhaps be that the "yak shavers" made a conscious and well-reasoned decision to go in the direction of "extend PHP" vs "throw it all out and rewrite everything in language-of-the-month?"
Depends on the charity. That's why Bill Gates has devoted most of his productivity towards building and running charities that work.
Twitter's latest experiment hints at typographical changes
What's the difference between giving your money to Gates vs Musk?

Here's one way to look at it: When you give your money to Gates you generally know what you're going to get - stamping up diseases, immunisation and lots of other great stuff.

When you give your money to Musk, you don't. It's much less clear. You don't know what problems he's going to tackle. You don't know how he's going to tackle them. And you don't know if he'll succeed.

1. Giving your money to Bill is like investing in a tried-and-tested branch of science or technology with measurable possible outcomes.

2. Giving your money to Elon is like investing in an absolutely cutting-edge branch of science. At the absolute bleeding-edge. Maybe even beyond the bleeding-edge.

Both are important. Here's a story to show you why.

One day back in the 1930s, before the war, all the academics in the USA found an unusual survey in their pigeonholes. It asked them to rank all the various academic departments in the USA by importance. Most important at the top. Least important at the bottom. They were asked to use their intuitions - what did they feel were the most and least relevant to the future of humanity.

After the academics filled in these surveys, their responses were gathered up and collated into a league table with the 'most important' disciplines at the top, and the least at the bottom. What was at the top? All the usual suspects like branches of physics, chemistry and biology.

What was at the bottom? Right at the bottom was Medieval History. The very least important academic subject. So far, so unexpected. But second to bottom was Nuclear Physics. Before the war it was considered a useless, hypo-theoretical branch of science only studied by nuts and eccentrics.

Of course, not much longer later the US dropped 2 bombs on Japan ending the nuclear war.

If we'd only funnelled our money in those things with obvious tangible, well-defined outputs, we'd have shut down our nuclear physics departments and the world would have been a very different place.

What I'm saying is that investing in long-sighted, ill-defined, radical, impractical projects is not only valuable but essential.

Dropping money to people like Bill is important. But so is dropping money to Elon.

One of them ensures that we continue to make sustainable progress - that we continue down the road that we're already walking. The other ensures that we have the opportunity to find new roads, new paths and new routes.
That post doesn't mention anything about tail latency, while the GCE thing does point to P95 latency < 100ms consistently, which is nice.
I would prefer they announce they were discontinuing dx and joining the opengl project =\.
Your iPhone is About to Have a Lot More Ads
Unfortunately the parent link is to a second hand source rather than a direct quote. The way Slate frames Page's answer makes it seem lacking in empathy to people alive today who suffer. Maybe it is just Slate's framing, but reading the article makes it sound like Page's intention in saying he would leave his money to Elon Musk is to say that Elon Musk is doing more for the world than people curing polio or building schools.

Which he has every right to believe, just as I believe saying something like that is lacking in empathy.
Hopefully nobody uses it and opengl becomes the norm.
Show HN: Unirentsity – Helps university students find rent
OpenGL has generally been great on Windows, due to the overwhelming demand for high performance graphics on Windows. While i7 GPUs are good in terms of integrated GPUs, they are still not great compared to discrete GPUs (try a GeForce or Radeon).
I think the point he was trying to make was brilliant men arent exactly:

>careful, detail-oriented and have good business sense and skills.

He was referring to the brilliant man who dress flashy, go to the hottest clubs, befriend people in higher stature, and dont really contribute to goals. They just have flashy ideas and move on to the next without realizing the goals of the first idea.
Hey, from the author. I dont think it is impossible (it is hard though). Wiping a line is not necessary you can slide left or rigt to collapse them.

But, i am also increasing the tendency of the block to freeze stronger as it moves down (i.e. with its every movement), so that sliding left or right doesnt become that easy.

There were few bugs with that, which i fixed. Does it still sound unreasonable.
>If we'd only funnelled our money in those things with tangible, well-defined outputs, we'd have shut down our nuclear physics Departments and the world would have been a very different place.

What? Are you suggesting that the US wouldn't have researched Nuclear weapons if we had started sooner?
You know what else will wipe out polio? An extinction-level asteroid strike that wipes out all of mankind if we don't manage to colonize another planet before then.
As for 3, the desk in the article can be raised and lowered electically. I have a similar one and it makes it really easy to switch between standing and sitting.
Oh I see, so there's no change in code generation for typed code, then?
:%s/function/module/ and no meaning is lost :).

I've yet to catch up on my lisp and fully grok the "functional paradigm" and, admittedly, passing around consts is less elegant than passing around function pointers, but what you're describing sounds isomorphic to me in terms of code organization. Look at the blog post; he's just passing a one method class, which… is basically a less elegant function.
you don't need billions to eradicate polio. How much money has Bill Gates actually spent on polio?

There are at most a few thousand workers in Pakistan, india and nigeria going around with polio vaccine oral drops that cost cents per dose. They don't cost billions, not even hundreds of millions.
Design iOS Transitions and export the Obj-C code
No, I didn't miss that. It the lack of "crowd" that is the problem. There is no crowd, really, there are a bunch of people performing a sampling algorithm. But crowds don't work that way.

This is a perfectly good demonstration of bias in statistical estimators. It just doesn't have anything to do with crowds, their wisdom, or their unwisdom.
This.

I wish people would understand that "losing perceived power", such as recognizing that an information asymmetry exists, is a completely different situation than "never having had power".

There are valid arguments for creating information symmetry, but it's not going to actually fix anything except lack of symmetry.
To put it in HN terms: what every self-described "idea guy" aspires to.
This isn't the original headline, but HN won't allow @, '@', [at], (at), 'at', at-sign, etc. in headlines. The story is about Twitter possibly getting rid of the @ sign in user handles.
Curing polio is a force multiplier that will probably help us get to Mars, in the form of more demand for satellites and space related industries, as well more inventors and scientists.

Colonizing Mars will be a force mulitpler as well, mostly through indirect technology benefit and ancillary space industries(asteroid mining). It probably won't impact the effort to cure polio but will probably increase our ability to cure other diseases.
1) if you win the game, the game end time doesn't really depend on how 'good' your moves are - it comes a bit after you've gathered 16348+ total value on the board.

2) The fact that the game doesn't drop only 1-tokens means that the time is shorter - again, since the 'total' accumulates faster.

That being said, the game is much, much longer than the previous ones - 2048->16384 alone increases the time by 8, and starting with ones instead of twos doubles it again.
So, I was never good at (or interested in) economy.

What I don't understand is where this 'wealth' is coming from. You say no one can provide it now. But it's seemingly coming out of thin air (your chinese example: What happened? The people are the same. Resources are probably comparable. Building an iPhone in CN generates money .. how?).

The whole big picture, macroscopic view never made sense for me. The 'click' is missing. It seems that this wealth is more or less as arbitrary as shares (look to me).
Alternately, this is the story of a man who hired based on word of mouth, then when that didn't work out, learned the wrong lesson.
Did those 600 million people work at all to be out of poverty or the invisible hand fed them? If they had to work to get out of poverty, I would imagine $100 would buy them enough meals, sleep, medicines to start looking for a job.
I was afraid that this was going to be a post on solving hard technical things early. Which is a terrible idea, because it's basically making large bets on your future direction before you have any data about where you're going.

But this is actually pretty sensible. People learn culture mostly by osmosis, and the bigger you are, the harder culture is to change. If your organization is kinda screwed up at 5 people, it's reasonable to bet that growth will magnify the problems, making it pretty screwed up at 25, and a big ol' mess once you cross Dunbar's number at around 125.
Well it's unfortunate that we didn't get more of his comments. It would be interesting to hear why he thinks the Mars shot is a better investment if he does in fact think that. It could be Slate's framing but it's easy to read the article as Page saying "Musk is doing more for humanity than the people building schools or curing malaria." Which to me sounds lacking in empathy. Both of these things are subjective. Page has a right to not think it's important to build schools and cure malaria and I have a right to consider that stance lacking in empathy.

I think we all agree that we have individual rights. When you make your opinions public you open them up to discussion.
AirBnB had 200k listings and claimed 3MM guests at the end of 2012. I do suspect the average AirBnB stay is shorter.

Do note, from the Hyatt 2012 10-K "As of December 31, 2012, our worldwide portfolio consisted of 500 properties (135,144 rooms and units)."

With availability of 300-365 nights a year, unlike AirBnB, this amounts to more than 40-49MM room-nights they can sell. Occupancy rates varies of course, but even at 70% average, that's a whole bunch more people than AirBnB.
Pretty much only the front-end code is written in PHP (or Hack, I guess).

Services (things like the feed, the typeahead, graph search, messages, &c.) are written in C++ and other languages - ie, the things it is sensible to write them in...
Likely a lot more than 7 billion if you were to look at the population projections between now and the time we could have 300,000 people settled on Mars.

The point though, is that 300,000 people with knowledge acquired from the entirety of history is better than an empty solar system.
Given that it's 90 years old I suspect there's some connotation at play here.