skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Prob is that waterfront real-estate in Westchester[1] is just white privledge. And all waterfronts are geologically (not climate-related) unstable. So basically rich white people want perpetual status-insurance. The climate angle is a red-herring.

The economic cost of natural disasters--NY, CA, and FL--is all related to RE development ("upscale") of unstable geography.

[1] Hudson Valley/Fairfield CT etc.
Derek Sivers talks about how ideas don't necessarily have value, but are multipliers of value. This happens to me at least once a week.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QgaBvEO2LYY
You have to be doing something really wrong for satellites to catch you. They aren't overhead on demand so you only get snapshots, and they work on very large things.
If "in practice, you're not going to be able to get things right..." than what the hell? That just strikes me as crazy.

Note that I am not necessarily against monads. However, this idea that they are both a good answer and require fairly extensive programmatic help seem counter.

I realize we can never reduce programs to things which are trivial and easy to comprehend. However, any new paradigm/trick that will always require compiler assistance doesn't sound like a step forward.

(Of course, in my mind a step forward are tools that don't necessarily need you to change your current languages and programs. Which is one of the things that annoys me with many new languages. Seems we always get a new wave of effectively solved areas of programming with incomplete solutions that are "cool" because they are in the new language.)
There really needs to be more, very public, displays of stories like this one. Whenever I hear someone ask why we should invest in missions to Mars and/or the Moon this is the kind of thing I think about. How many amazing things that we take completely for granted were created in order for us to send humans to the moon and live in space?

Setting our sights on harsh and distant destinations creates a massive vacuum of technological innovation. I firmly believe that solutions to energy, hunger, conservation/human impact on ecosystems can be found on our journey to the further reaches of space.
Surely we're at that phase in technological development where Murphy's law no longer applies. I mean, we have build systems and unit tests now!
Cool, interesting. I also like the top level domain.
A framework of leadership types:

- positional (the boss)
- subject matter expertise (the PhD)
- many social connections (the politician)
- particularly valuable/strategic connections (the guy dating the owner's daughter)
- charismatic (the guy who talks the talk, may or may not walk the walk)
Sorry, I posted it thinking they were real. I changed the title.
Something many folks fail to realize is that the War on Drugs has origins dating back a century ago: [1]

Although Nixon declared the War on Drugs public enemy number one in
1971,[14] the policies that his administration implemented as part of the
Comprehensive Drug Abuse Prevention and Control Act of 1970 were a
continuation of drug prohibition policies in the U.S., which started in
1914

During this time there have been many wars fought where a principle component of the reason for the war was the War on Drugs.

In Mexico, the "official count" (always an underestimate) is now over 100k. [2]

In Afghanistan, Opium has played a major role in almost every war and genocide, where deaths have exceeded several million. [3][4][5]

You can do your own research for the number of deaths that the War on Drugs has caused in just about every country on the planet (Russia, China, all countries in South America, especially Columbia). Summed up "millions of deaths" is easily accounted for by bad drug-related policies.

And that's not even counting all the drug-related deaths that are caused thanks to illicit drugs being illicit. How many people have blamed the deaths of their loved ones on "illegal drugs" when the truth is that it is the War on Drugs that killed their son, spouse, loved one? When you don't know what you're actually ingesting/smoking/injecting (as a consequence of the substances being illegal and not regulated), again the death toll leads to the millions.

And then there's the number of lives ruined (not killed)...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/War_on_Drugs#History
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mexican_Drug_War
[3] https://sites.google.com/site/afghanholocaustafghangenocide/
[4] http://www.countercurrents.org/polya270611.htm
[5] http://www.tomdispatch.com/post/175225
Never done any Delphi and only a couple fairly small Swing/GTK apps. Most of my other development experience has been backend systems. I'll agree Web development has a lot of rough edges, but the main reason I love it so much is that it's the easiest way to get code I write in front of others.
Thats interesting. I wonder if anyone has done a performance study to measure and compare the speed up offered by the functional approach for some standard workload.
'Codebabes' – Is This The Most Sexist Tech Website On The Internet?
Great reference. That first point relates more to Crew Resource Management (CRM)[1], an important concept making its way from aviation to surgery. After a decade flying F-18s for the Navy, I value checklists but communication is probably even more important and often overlooked. Finding the courage to speak up is more challenging then it seems. It's so easy to assume that the Captain, Surgeon, or whoever is in charge knows what they are doing. One of the worst accidents in history[2] that helped kick off CRM, could have likely been prevented if the co-pilot had assertively told the Captain that they weren't cleared for take-off.

I still remember the Navy's version and believe it's applicable to many places other than aviation.

D - decision making
A - assertiveness
M - mission analysis
C - communication
L - leadership
A - adaptability / flexibility
S - situational awareness

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crew_Resource_Management
[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tenerife_airport_disaster
> Lifetimes completely confuse me, as it seems like they would be handled by garbage collection?

RAII approach (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAII) is more efficeint than garbage collection and also way better because of predictability. I'd say it's also more straightforward. Instead of some unpredictable and chaotic background magic going on, resources are deallocated right when they aren't needed anymore. I really don't see why would anyone prefer GC to it.
This is a good idea and I've thought about it in the past. I think http://snapterms.com/ is doing something along these lines, although I think the price is still too high.

Ideally, I'd like to see the service keep diff's of the terms so consumers (and you) can see how they've changed over time.

I'm also wondering if there's any value in having cohorts of customers based on what set of terms they signed up under.
Email me, I have a few
It's kind of interesting to take an approach like this and contrast it with the user experience of something like Vim or Emacs. These editors are extremely popular despite not making it easy for first time users.

Is this because the target demographic of Vim/Emacs are all power users? It seems like making powerful tools like these are at odds with treating the user like they're drunk.
Software already has checklists - using names like 'regression tests', 'automation scripts', etc.
New Exploit targeting IE Versions 9 through 11 Identified in Targeted Attacks
What is the difference between data scientist and statistician? Have you ever seen data scientist, like with a PhD? Have you ever seen statistician with PhD like https://statistics.wharton.upenn.edu/programs/phd/ ?
This would require that, between now and 2021, it becomes possible to use HTML+CSS to create an exact publishable layout, and someone makes a TeX renderer that uses it. That would be great. I'm not optimistic about it, given that right now we can't even manage to standardize e-books, but yes, one can only hope.

(It's not that the TeX tuneup inherently needs to be formatted like a publication; but that's what TeX is for, and it would be silly to expect that the TeX tuneup would not be written in TeX.)
do you post under handle sigmaalgebra on avc.com? if so, have always really enjoyed reading your take on stuff.
The World's Resources Aren't Running Out
Are acqui-hires really making failed team members rich?
responding to bitemyapp? brave...
Peter Thiel's talks are usually more philosophical but interesting.
Question, even if Google were to actually do this, given that GMail runs on server-provided JS code inside the browser, doesn't this carry the same problems as all other in-browser encryption applications?

Isn't this type of in-browser encryption code considered broken, no matter what way you go about it?
I'm a senior compsci student at one of the largest (by # of students) universities in the nation. I assure you, most of my classmates could not do such a thing in a week!
Isn't part of the reason for this that journalists need to eat even when nothing is happening in their area?
Why is lowering the information density of everything now considered good design? Wikipedia's typography update a couple weeks ago brought increased line spacing and it really sucks. Facebook used to have a great information-rich design but went to 'cards' earlier this year and now I can see about 2.5 posts at a time (at 1200 lines). Medium and all the rest with their giant, bold fonts, 90+ chars per line etc. tell us that the computing audience today is expected to be mentally challenged, using some kind of handheld casino gaming device, or both. It's a sad world to wake up in for those of us who love computing.

Then there's OkCupid's question interface. The gateway to the greatest survey of all time is now more low-density crap. And somebody thought a pulldown (a custom one with its own quirky behavior, at that) was a good substitute for radio buttons.

I guess it's not surprising when you consider what the design community talks about. They don't measure anything that would let them detect a loss of computing power. They don't think about cybernetics or cognitive psychology. It's all "affordances" and other stuff that sounds like it was overheard in a 60s-era art gallery.

I can imagine a satirical redesign of the violin. They're so hard to use... Except it's too late. Only a tiny fraction of people appreciate violin music now. Such redesigns have been proposed in earnest! Shelves at electronic music departments are filled with the prototypes. Only problem: the music people made with them sucks.
Well, literacy hasn't been all that common up until the past century (at least not the rates we see today), and it seems like the website is saying the book is from the 15 hundreds and the writing (might?) be from the 19th century.

Someone with access to a 300 year old book would probably be educated. The guy who writes temple OS is fairly educated too and if he had been around 300 years ago, someone might have put him in charge of some stuff like this, but just look at the kind of stuff he writes: https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=TempleOSV2

Some people who can do extraordinary things are also capable of having serious mental issues.

But I'm not saying I'm right or wrong, I'm just putting the idea out there.
Vocaltiv did a short video documentary on this last year:

http://motherboard.vice.com/blog/inside-caracas-tower-of-dav...

The part I remembered was how residents are taxied up the first 10 floors by motorcycles.
Gerald Weinberg put it this way: when you solve the most important problem, you've promoted the second most important problem into first place.

That doesn't change that problem #1 was worthy to solve. The middle road is that we should neither rest on our laurels nor give up because of the impossibility of the perfect world.
Interesting point. In California this issue exists with high-end real estate on mud-slide and fire-prone areas, like Malibu. Things that would make a difference, like controlled burns, are fought by homeowners who don't want to look at charred landscape -- and as a result the the LAFD spends enormous resources on heroic measures. [1]

1: http://books.google.com/books/about/Ecology_of_fear.html?id=...
Simple and Interoperable Functional Reactive Programming with Scala.Rx
It's all about the point at the end of the video — the amount of attention and effort the user wants to give to your app.

If it's a usual consumer app, the potential user obviously has a lot less attention to give to it then you, the creator; to feel this, you really should imagine that the user is actually drunk.

But for a professional app, like vim or emacs, it doesn't apply. I switched from Sublime to vim this february, and it was a real effort, but I knew why I'm doing this, and I was willing to put this effort in. And it wasn't my first attempt either; I tried using emacs a year ago, but it still was to much of an effort and I had too much work to complete, so I dropped it.
How to get tech guys to treat their next girlfriends like dogs.
Some sex workers are sex workers because they want to work in that industry. Accurate figures are hard to find, but the proportionnis probably quite low. After that group you move through people with an addiction to sex, and then people with debts or drug addictions, and then controlled, coerced, forced, or trafficed women.

So it's not impossible that a woman with free choice chooses to work as a prostitute.
If you are a Mozilla rep, you probably want to delete this post or at least remove your overtly critical language. Hardware manufactures invest a lot of resources trying to build for your platform. They are your customer. Insulting them is not good business..
It's much worse after it's compiled. :-)
I looks to me sort of like the way Da'vinci would write Latin as a mirror image.
I love Linux and is in the same dilemma re MBPs - but this just makes my blood boil. How can this work well in Windows and OSX but require Linux users to hunt down magical incantations and fiddle hundreds of settings? Isn't it possible extract the settings from the running driver in Windows/OSX and apply those?
I tried the service, and am pretty amazed. It has all dutch national newspapers. You can scroll through the papers pages, and click (and pay) to read the articles.

The only thing I am really missing is an indication of article length. Knowing the length of an article beforehand will influence my selection, since I prefer (longer) background articles.
What's your email? :-)
Indeed- languages without bloated and messy codebases are languages without serious users.
It's very difficult to switch to a user's perception when you've spent a lot of time working on a product. Even if you didn't, being a professional in the field (game design, software development, even being an audio engineer while listening to music) really distorts your vision — so, if you want to predict the actual user/consumer's reaction, you'll better ask them.
When exactly do you think allowing a user to incorporate bitmap fonts in a document became a bug? It certainly wasn't when TeX was first written. Do you imagine it magically became a bug on a particular date?

Also, isn't TeX limited to the .tex -> .dvi transformation? I'm not sure the transformation from .dvi to .ps/.pdf is even part of TeX proper. And that's where the bitmapped fonts come in.

In summary, all of this may just be a fantastic illustration of the gap between Don Knuth and you.
"Completely functional" obviously doesn't work as there would be no side effects aside from your computer getting warm. Every functional language has escape mechanisms that allow you to see what the program is doing. "Mostly functional" is as close as you can get to functional.
I'm not much clued up with legalities of these kinds of situations, but is there any law that allows him to threaten legal action? Surely if they're holding money owed to him due to lack of ID and they're violating their own policies by not accepting it, then something is legally applicable to the situation?
For easy reading: http://wayfinder.co/pathways/535d479d8760ec110089a874/15-in-...
Can you already source leads with a different language than English? Most relevant for me: Can you find leads within Germany/Austria/Switzerland?
Getting Into the Ivies
What doesn't? discrimination by skin appearance, race, gender, or age?
Ask HN: How can I spend $1000 of AWS credit on learning about HDFS performance?
I want to spend a week better understanding performance (probably of things in the Hadoop ecosystem) on a few different dataset sizes (8GB, 100GB, 1TB). I have $1000 of AWS credit that I can spend on this (yay!)

Some things I want:

* get a much better grasp on the performance of in-memory operations (put 8GB of data into memory and be done) vs running a distributed map reduce.

* Understand what goes into the performance (how much time is spent copying data? sending data over the network? CPU?)

* Learn something about tradeoffs

I'd love suggestions for experiments to run and setups to use. At work I've been using HDFS / Impala / Scalding, so my current thought is to spend time looking in depth at running a map/reduce with Scalding vs an Impala query vs running a non-distributed job in memory, because I already know about those things. But I'm open to other ideas!

Some questions I need to answer:

* Are there good large open datasets I could use? I'd like to use real data because it's more fun.

* If you were going to try to make reproducible experiments, where would you start?

* How can I set up an environment without spending an entire week on it?

* How can I make installing everything as easy as possible?

* I have $1000 of AWS credit to spend. How much should I budget? What machines should I spend it on?
I was going to post some of my stories but they simply pale in comparison to yours.

I agree about the writing style also.. have you heard of Leanpub? Pretty sure you could make a small book that would be tons of fun to read.
Not an eye-opener, but very professional presentation. I've heard this ideas before and even talked about them myself, but I still enjoyed watching to it, and I'll definitely use the metaphor afterwards.
Obligatory:

http://www.amazon.com/Ready-Player-One-A-Novel/dp/0307887448

Avoid spoilers, just read the book!
ZTE Open.

The good: cheap, it tethers very nicely.
The bad: almost everything else.

I gave my android phone to my son when I decided to try FFOS as my only phone on the ZTE open. The hardware isn't good enough and it often lags. I can live with it since I almost always have my tablet which is wifi only.

My biggest concern is that Mozilla hasn't done a good job of providing an update path. I can live without OTA updates, but I'm not going to spend the time hunting in random websites for builds that have vague instructions to update my phone.
I've been wanting to look at TeXmacs for a while now. It seems to have similar typesetting abilities as TeX, but the ability to edit the document live and connect with a running program. I haven't had the time to look into it, though, so it may not be what you want.
The hi res images are, themselves, also in some mysterious script: the ancient TIFF file format!

Why not just high res PNG files so that they're easier to view? :/
Well, there's "benefit of doubt," and then there's "anybody who played this game for more than five minutes would realize that it's unshippable garbage".

Except that marketing guys wanted their bonuses, and didn't know shit about games, and furthermore they didn't care (because Atari's hiring practices were incomprehensibly bad and, in some cases, just downright corrupt).

So you deny a programmer -- a domain expert -- 2K of ROM and you get FlickerMan instead of Pac-Man, but hey what does that coder know, anyway? He's just typing bullshit into a computer and anybody can do that. And you give another programmer maybe six weeks to write something that should take four months minimum, because that guy is always complaining and how hard could it really be? And the company crashes, and you skate off to Burger King and sell plastic toys to screaming kids and you think it's the same thing. "What? None of that stuff back there at Atari was my fault, it was all the self-important geeks who just didn't listen."

I remember being chastised for writing a game in 5 months. They wanted it in six weeks, and I told them it couldn't be done. They wanted to add three or four more programmers to make the work go faster (sorry, I've already taught two of my co-workers to program this machine, I don't have time to do that again). I gave them a day-by-day schedule and they actually accepted it (which later surprised me).

Atari marketing was full of this:

- The marketing genius who wanted to print out and copyright all possible 8x8 four-color (maybe five-color) bitmaps, as some kind of pre-emption against the competition. I am not kidding about this. Had to do some math in front of him to show how much paper it actually was (it doesn't outweigh the Earth, but only a few orders of magnitude).

[edit: my bad, I did the math for a monochrome bitmap. If we'd printed it out it would have weighed significantly more than the solar system. Let's go put all the marketing people on their own Dyson Sphere, okay? :-) ]

- The marketroid who decided that the Home Computer Division would no longer make any more games with shooting (result: a bunch of shitty games that never shipped, and some that did ship and made me sad).

- The team that added a "Help" button to the Atari computers, and expected help to magically just happen on already shipped software. For a long time, that button did absolutely nothing at all.

I wanted to work on games and computers, but these people made it awfully hard.
Why don't we make energy, hunger, and conservation the moonshots themselves instead of trying to make a literal moonshot and hope that we solve those problems as a side effect?
Ask HN: Do you have a side project you want to sell?
A thread similar to this was posted ~1 year ago by illdave. I think it's time for an updated 2014 version.

If you have any side projects that you've built and that you no longer have time for, list them here and let's see if others want to buy it from you.
For those still in college, I think Zach Holman's talk ”If Only I Knew This Shit in College” is pretty good. He describes why he thinks startups are great, what they allowed him to do, what made him join GitHub, and how to keep improving.

http://zachholman.com/talk/if-only-i-knew-this-shit-in-colle...
http://vimeo.com/92087878
My best guess is that a statistician is a focus more on mathematics/pure statistics while data scientist is involved in more algorithms.. but the lines are blurred and I don't know what we would call people like Nate Silver. According to Wikipedia he's a statistician.
I'm sympathetic to what you're saying -- these articles are great reads -- but remember there's also the opportunity cost of taking money via taxes from entrepreneurs and private-sector innovators who, in aggregate, would surely have come up with some of their own innovations with additional resources. And perhaps they would have been even more useful to humanity.
+1 for your awesome stories.
another +1 for your defense of CRUD.

too many people look down on those doing the "grunt" work, despite the fact that it is usually necessary.
I guess a good rule of thumb is 'could I make this safer and faster by writing more repetitive code?'. If the problem can be solved by writing code explicitly but that quickly becomes too verbose (or error-prone), macros are a good technique.