skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> China's mass production model then? How do you propose jump-starting that?

By loans made by the private or public sectors for the purpose of developing large scale productive capacities ? Craftsmen can't compete with industrial production, there is a minimal scale problem.

> microlending helps them create a job, or sustain it themselves rather than looking for one.

A $50 loan can't do that. You will not get an education and you will not build a business with $50, not even in the poorest village on Earth. You might help a small business owner solve a crisis situation and find some stability.

The source of poverty is lack of investment, micro-loans will drain resources out of the community (principal + interest) and leave very little actual productive capital behind.

While the idea as initially conceived by Yunus was well intentioned, the focus on lending (as opposed to developing and building) has transformed it into a form of loan sharking. Many of the newer Microlending networks that operate in India have focused so tightly on performance and profit and so little on the welfare of the clients that it has resulted in a slew of suicides and assorted tragedies:
http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2010-12-28/suicides-among-borr...

Edit: the example you provide is just that, an anecdote. It's certainly possible, but is the dominant story or the exception ? At 20% interest rate in US dollars, plus any volatility the local currency will induce, we are talking about credit card level rates, and not business loans. The introductory loan in 50 to 150$, if you need more you need to build credit, just like credit cards. How well are the borrowers and their scheme selected ? What's to prevent it from becoming a way for poor families to finance interest bearing consumption, just like a credit card ?

On a case by case basis, there are opportunities for development that can withstand 20% interest because the local need for that service is so great, thus the amortization is very rapid. There is a massive risk in this internet driven model that borrowers are selected solely for their ability to repay, and that scale and growth becomes the driving factors.

You will NOT spur development by simply lending money to the poor, quite the contrary you will lock them into a high debt, high interest form of consumption that is all too familiar to poor families in the West.
You are absolutely correct. What typically happens is a company will bring in a focused solution like a contract management system. Because of its focus, it is able to do its job pretty well.

As that tool is successful, people will start thinking, "I sure wish I could do that with my [Word docs, Photoshop files, video files, etc]," and they start looking. Then they find Content Management and think they've found the perfect solution (and it really does sound good on paper).

But there are three fundamental problems: Unlike the contract management system, you generally don't use the CMS to create or edit documents[1], so you always have a point of impedance between the authoring and the management. Now you are relying on people to "do the right thing", and the right thing isn't the easiest thing.

The next problem is managing versions of the documents gets ugly and confusing pretty quickly. Most file formats we use today don't diff well, so the benefits of e.g. seeing just the changes from v2 to v3 are hard-to-impossible to implement.

The final problem is the content lifecycle of most documents is very fluid. Whereas a contract has a well-known lifecycle with a point in time that it is DONE (e.g. the contract is signed) and a well-known set of approvers (companies generally understand their money-spending approval process well), most documents people interact with follow very ad hoc processes. Invariable, people try to build formal processes out of those ad hoc processes, and people get frustrated. Given the first problem (authoring outside of management), people can easily make an end-run around the tool, perhaps putting a document into it only when they absolutely have to.

Anyway, I could go on for a long time, but my take-away from my experience in content management is to solve small, well-defined problems and forget about the siren's call of "all our documents managed in bliss" because it won't happen.

1. Like contract management, web content management tends to be more successful, because the authoring environment is usually the management environment.
It was in the Freakonomics documentary. They also referenced another study where they cataloged over 100 unique spellings of the name "Unique" (e.g. "Uneek").

They also appear to have covered it in a podcast...

http://freakonomics.com/2013/04/08/how-much-does-your-name-m...
I'm not sure this is true, regardless of how large Bitcoin grows to be. If a significant enough problem were discovered, wouldn't it be in everyone's best interest to protect the value of their wallets by accepting a forked blockchain?
FYI, does not play nice with DDG's dark theme.
Notezilla.io iPad app released – Interactive sheet music
"...then go to where those potential customers are first." From a business perspective, that's great. And really it's no different from what other ISPs have done for years; Google's just turning customer discovery into a PR fiesta. But it ignores what tech geeks everywhere[1] have always said about network access: that the mere presence of access spurs innovation, provides opportunity. Many, many people without broadband internet access still see it as a superfluous luxury service used to access Facebook and YouTube from their homes where their smartphone has less reliable service.

Access to the network should be considered as crucial to modern human existence as electricity. Access eliminates barriers to education, therapy (just having asynchronous communication with other sufferers of your condition is itself therapeutic), not to mention gaining inspiration for creativity or even innovating some unforeseen improvement in peoples' lives.

1 - "citation needed"
This post highlights some persistent myths surrounding electric vehicles:

1) Even if you're using electricity derived 100% from burning coal, you're still causing less pollution than most gas-powered cars. This is because power plants are hugely, massively more efficient than internal combustion engines, and because it's much easier to filter pollution out of one big smokestack than thousands of small ones. Furthermore, even just refining oil into gasoline takes almost as much electricity as you'd need to power an EV directly. In the worst-case 100% coal scenario, certain fuel-efficient vehicles might be better than an EV in terms of carbon emissions, but in most real-world cases any EV is more environmentally friendly than any gasoline vehicle. This gap will only continue to widen as renewables continue to replace fossil fuel generation.

2) The production of lithium ion batteries doesn't cause significant environmental damage beyond what would otherwise go into building a gasoline car. There is some environmental damage caused by mining the required metals, but not nearly as much as the environmental damage caused by drilling for oil and refining it into gasoline. None of the materials involved are particularly exotic or toxic, and they are all easily recyclable, so the long-term damage here is pretty limited. Tesla uses batteries made of lithium, aluminum, carbon, and nickel. Older battery tech used toxic metals like cadmium or lead, and were somewhat less easy to recycle, but this is not the case with modern lithium cells.

Driving your current car for longer might be better than buying a brand new EV, assuming your current car is really efficient, and assuming you don't live somewhere that already uses a lot of renewables for generation, and assuming you don't slap some solar panels on your house (which many EV owners already do). But, driving an old F150 for 300k miles is definitely, unequivocally worse than buying a new Tesla. It would also cost you nearly as much money, when you factor in the fuel costs.

And, even then, you're assuming that your options are "trash my current car and buy an EV" or "keep driving my current car". You could also, say, sell your current car to someone else and put the proceeds toward buying an EV.
HTTPie is a command line HTTP client, a user-friendly cURL replacement
I understood what you were saying, but that slave owners consider person objects has no merit in this discussion and doesn't provide evidence for anything you said.
Submitted title was true to its every letter. It even costs less than 150$ and it is an oculus rift-clone.

It may be inappropriate to use Oculus Rift brand though. I can agree with that. Since it is a copyrighted brand and it sounds like challenging their price tag.

But current title, only addresses only one step of the build; Software side.

Can we at least make it

"OpenVR : Building a VR Headset for 150$"

if having a price tag on the title is the problem;

"OpenVR : A Complete Guide to build a VR Headset"

Sorry about my friends being too enthusiastic.
Thanks,
> Like IPv4, the "experiment" has grown so large that it may be impossible to get consensus on any non-backwards-compatible change.

How is that an accurate description of IPv4 at all? IPv6 has made monumental progress[0] in a relatively short time (yes, for what we're talking about, it's only been a short amount of time).

[0] https://www.google.com/intl/en/ipv6/statistics.html
In choosing a partner, satisficing beats optimizing any day.
Five Reasons to Choose WebRTC for Video Calling
I grew up in the DC area and lived there for 8 years after college. Moved to SF (now Oakland) 6.5 years ago.

I'm not sure it's truly accurate, but the east coast, DC and NYC in particular, feel like a dog-eat-dog, I'll do anything to get ahead, kind of place while the bay area feels like a much more friendly competitive environment.

Whatever the cause, there is a very real difference in attitude between the two coasts.
I enjoy your mention of strength of spirit, because I rather feel that people who drink coffee are too weak of spirit to handle espresso :-)

Give me a few shots of straight, black espresso. Perhaps with a little whipped cream on top if I'm in the mood. Very easy to make quality espresso in the home with modern pre-ground capsule machines.

If you also like coffee black, I recommend giving espresso a try. Unfortunately there is quite a lot of variation in what coffee houses serve. Some indie shops serve espresso that is extremely bitter and not smooth; in my opinion these are not well made. I usually prefer the espresso made by larger chains or capsule machines. It is heavy on industrial consistency and quality control, with less emphasis on artistry (more relevant in mixed espresso drinks). Good espresso by my taste is strong and smooth, and only very marginally bitter, and at that only as an after taste.
The category of cardboard rectangles and bits of wool string
Wouldn't GHash be able to pivot their existing mining power to take 51% of that new blockchain?
Thanks! We're working on making these instant answers look better with different themes.
You're spot on. Unfortunately, our approach was a double edged sword. No company who licenses a big catalog of music first ever survives to tell the tale. But building a two sided marketplace meant splitting half of our already thin resources in half, switching back and forth between pleasing listeners and pleasing bands, and we just weren't able to build the consumer experience necessary. In retrospect, had we focused on mobile first, built mostly listener features until that product was great, then focus on the artists, we may have had a better shot. The problem with that is, had we not built enough stuff to wow the bands and labels, we would have never gotten the kind of artists we did. We had to prove two different concepts on 1/100th the budget of our competitors, who only serve one side of the market.
Is there a !-shortcut as well?
From "A Fistful of Monads" chapter in "Learn you a Haskell"

> When we first talked about functors, we saw that they were a useful concept for values that can be mapped over. Then, we took that concept one step further by introducing applicative functors, which allow us to view values of certain data types as values with contexts and use normal functions on those values while preserving the meaning of those contexts.

> In this chapter, we'll learn about monads, which are just beefed up applicative functors, much like applicative functors are only beefed up functors

> Monads are a natural extension of applicative functors and with them we're concerned with this: if you have a value with a context, m a, how do you apply to it a function that takes a normal a and returns a value with a context? That is, how do you apply a function of type a -> m b to a value of type m a?

Some people might find this easy to understand, but I guess that many people won't. I don't think that it is because they are stupid, rather that most people are concrete thinkers rather than abstract thinkers.

You would expect programmers to be more comfortable with abstraction than the general population, but even so, in my experience, the level of abstraction that mathematicians use is a level too far for most programmers.

Why should a concept be generalized when you are just learning it? Would you complain that a elementary book on arithmetic fails to mention that the integers form a ring? And that addition is just a special case of a monoid? What advantage is there to this kind of premature generalization?
Any non-trivially sized software system will use a framework to avoid code duplication. You can either choose someone else's framework, or roll your own, but unless you're a framework design wizard you're unlikely to build an all-purpose web dev framework which beats the well known ones.

Which is to say that I definitely recommend that everyone at some point develop their own all-purpose framework, because it's a great learning experience, but if they're doing production work they should stick to one of the existing ones, even if it's just so other developers will have an easier time understanding the codebase.
"The average vegan food is a lot more efficient than any animal product. An animal is just a biological machien which converts plant matter to animal products. You could take out the inefficient converter and just eat the plant directly. For example, 99% of soy in the United States is eaten by animals."

Not that this destroys your thesis, but some animals happily eat things humans won't. A pig fed leftovers is going to be more efficient than sending those leftovers to landfill. People don't eat much grass. &c. This is, of course, mostly irrelevant to how we actually feed ourselves in the developed world (where, for instance, pasture would serve other uses).
I find several problems with this argument.

First, it is oversimplification. Robots don't eat jobs as in "there is nothing more to do for humans." The argument is that automation will decrease the wage share (labour share) and increase the share of capital (wage share has been in decline in OECD countries since early 70's.)

Secondly, history disagrees. Luddites had it right first. When industrialization started, automation reduced the living standards of workers for several decades. What turned things around was political struggle and unions. There was violence and people were shot at factory gates. Automation itself is not going to create utopia. There has to be political change in how we share profits.

Automation and Robots create new economic situation where the value and ratio between human capital and capital changes.

Krugman has written few easy to digest articles that explain why Anderseens first and second point are very problematic.

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/08/rise-of-the-robo...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/11/human-versus-phy...

http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/12/10/technology-and-w...
Tinfoil hat time: But not everyone will automatically comprehend the situation properly. There will be a possibility that media can be manipulated to keep the subvertible network alive and dominant through its network effect, while it is subtly manipulated from behind the scenes. Perhaps this happened before, and will happen again. (I'm talking about pre-Internet financial networks, as well as making a BSG reference. In BSG, if the Cylons were really smart, wouldn't they have taken over the financial and media networks instead of the defense computers? They would have had far more to gain from subtly controlling the wealth of the colonies instead of destroying it. Over time, they could have taken over society from the inside and just replaced everyone with attractive flashy sexbots.)
a) what collateral do you accept and how do you value the collateral?

We don't accept any collateral, because 1) most of our borrowers are low-income individuals just entering the working population, and don't have any substantial assets, and 2) a collateral-based credit risk mitigation system would be too expensive relative to the size of the loans (the starting loan amount is $50 - $150).

b) do you consider country risk ? and how do you quantify individual's risk profile ? have you developed a credit risk model ?

Currently, once a borrower is admitted to Zidisha, lenders alone judge country and credit risk. However, we're currently working on a data-driven credit risk model to complement our other risk mitigation measures.

c) would you consider offloading credit risk by partially securitizing your loans?

Not in the near term, because our lending model is too new and changes too rapidly for credit risk to be easily quantifiable. In addition, we'd be concerned about moral hazard.

d) Countries where you operate in have a serious risk of document fraud. can you share stories of fraud mitigation ?

One of the major shifts in our lending approach has been a move away from document-based vetting. For example, we used to require local community leaders (religious officials, school principals etc.) to sign recommendation forms for loan applicants. We found that fraudulent applicants would forge these, even having false organizational stamps manufactured for this purpose. It was possible to mitigate this by telephoning the officials who signed the forms and asking them to verify their institutions' addresses or other hard-to-remember information, but it proved too difficult for our all-volunteer staff to cope with the erratic phone networks and linguistic barriers once we started processing thousands of applications.

We never did figure out a way to mitigate document fraud at scale. Instead, we developed other verification methods that were more difficult to falsify, and reduced the initial loan amount, until the costs of getting a fraudulent application through our vetting system outweighed the expected gains.

f) finally, what kind of lenders do you seek ? Are you looking for altruistic people or people seeking to spread their investment risk ?

We are looking for altruistic people, who want to help people in the world's poorest places without dependency-creating handouts or exorbitant interest rates. Zidisha at present is not viable as a purely commercial investment.

e) Also, do you realize that you have the opportunity to become the Equifax of third-world countries ?

Yes, that's an interesting possibility, though I've not yet heard of Zidisha being used in this way. Most people who can borrow with Zidisha do not seek credit elsewhere.
I feel your pain is genuine and I am sorry for is happening with your father. As a Bulgarian though I feel the need to say that there are several untrue facts in your post - e.g. there are no riots in BG. Also the IT sector is very strong with HP, Micsosoft, IBM etc. having offices + emerging startup ecosystem growing rapidly and I honestly have not heard anyone in IT having issues finding a well-paid job.

That being said I think you can help your father in many ways:

Support him by telling him he is doing a great job of being a father and caring for his family and profession.

You can help with the CV - I recently read an article on HN about an older guy in US in a similar position and basically it turned out that his CV was just not adjusted to the new realities of the IT world.

Be active in communities like HN and you might get unexpected help.

Checkout the portfolios of startup hubs - e.g. http://launchub.com/portfolio/ - perfection and attention to detail do mean a lot there. Contact directly, be creative -e.g. ask if they would like to have someone helping them with networking for free one month and they can then decide if they would like to hire.

If you are more adventurous try a small project on indiegogo https://www.indiegogo.com/ - I believe enough people from HN will back it. If it is a nice idea I know I will.

If it is not about the work itself but looking urgently for money - try mechanical turk or something like that to make ends meet for the time being..

Hope it helps, I wish you luck
Aside from these reasons, you also have the case of performance optimization. In Perl, for example, pretty much all string parsing (that I've ever seen done in Perl code) is done via regular expressions. Regular expressions in Perl are such a thing that most software I've used that uses regular expressions uses the Perl-compatible regular expression library (libpcre).

The issue is that if you provide developers with a simple method of e.g. splitting a string using regular expressions, then they will always split their strings with regular expressions. This is rarely the most optimal way of doing it, however, and it requires more memory and more overhead than e.g. splitting a string by simply scanning it.

The reason this is a problem for Swift in particular is mobile devices, where memory and CPU use is more costly than on desktop software.

I don't think it's coincidence that all the languages I'm aware of which natively support regexes as part of the language syntax are interpreted/scripting languages where performance is not the language's primary concern (Python being one such language with this syntax notably absent), whereas the language that the grandparent comment listed for 'safer languages' which do not have regex literal support ("Java, C#, Go, Rust, Haskell, or to be charitable, C++") are all compiled languages where performance is assumed to be part of the primary concern for the language design and for developers in the language.
We use this at my work, except with humans instead of rubber ducks.
Facebook does the exact same thing. I keep getting their spam and I don't have an account so they pester me to sign up. Incredible that such big companies get away with this. Even google has joined the legion of spammers with their new 'g+ linkdrive'.
This doesn't work in the event higher quality participants are pairing off earlier (i.e., attractive partners get committed earlier in their lives) or in the event attractiveness isn't life static. The Secretary Problem provides a lot of great insight, but you need to be very careful applying stylized stories to real problems.
While I have certainly had my share of clueless recruiters contact me through LinkedIn, I have also had a good number of decent contacts that either didn't pan out or which I just wasn't interested in. I don't get nearly the deluge of contacts that some people here say they get, though.
Is "curated sets" something I shuold know what is?
I'm not talking about do-notation. There's plenty of black magic in Haskell. The overuse of operators and abstractions over everything makes it impossible to even figure out what a given function will be taking as parameters, never mind what a function actually does.

I want to think in terms of actual, concrete pieces of data. Types are just definitions for shapes of data. I can't think at the level of "X takes a Y", I think at the level of "the x function takes the result of the y function". Haskell is obviously not the language for me.
Depends on what changes to the algorithm are involved.
I don't think they could make it any shorter than typing in the address. Using a !bang would just make it longer.