skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm not a fan of accredited investor requirements. At the same time, you're misstating the posture of the regulations somewhat. The accredited investor requirements don't directly prevent you from investing your money in particular ventures. Instead, they create an exception to the general rule that any entity selling securities to the public must register those securities with the SEC and abide by disclosure requirements.[1] The accredited investor exception is just one of several exceptions to the SEC's registration rules.

The purpose of the regulations is deeper than just protecting you, the individual investor. Originally, the regulations were created because of the systematic effects resulting from selling investments to the general public. When a whole bunch of people lose their retirement savings to bad investments, it's something the government ends up having to deal with, and "it's your fault" isn't a politically tenable answer. Not to mention, when these sham investments go under, they create a lot of collateral damage.

In modern times, the securities laws have been rationalized as a response to the information asymmetry that exists between sellers of securities and investors.[2] The nature of this asymmetry is that sellers have a lot more information about the investment than buyers do, and can use this advantage to systematically undermine the market.

Now, and this part is editorializing, the problem with the accredited investor exception is that it misunderstands the nature of what the securities laws exist to correct. The focus on "investor sophistication" is totally misplaced. In economic terms, the relevant asymmetry is not the asymmetry is sophistication between sellers and investors. It is the asymmetry in inside information. While accredited investors are likely to be more financially sophisticated, they are not any more likely to have more inside information than members of the general public. Thus, the rationale behind creating exceptions to the disclosure requirements doesn't hold.

[1] http://www.sec.gov/answers/accred.htm

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Market_failure ("Some markets can fail due to the nature of their exchange. Markets may have significant transaction costs, agency problems, or informational asymmetry. Such incomplete markets may result in economic inefficiency but also a possibility of improving efficiency through market, legal, and regulatory remedies. From contract theory, decisions in transactions where one party has more or better information than the other is an asymmetry. This creates an imbalance of power in transactions which can sometimes cause the transactions to go awry. Examples of this problem are adverse selection and moral hazard. Most commonly, information asymmetries are studied in the context of principal–agent problems. George Akerlof, Michael Spence, and Joseph E. Stiglitz developed the idea and shared the 2001 Nobel Prize in Economics")
Yet it has solved nothing, because we still have investment scams all over the place. Those investment scams are already illegal, so prosecute them. Why do I need another law to "protect" me? This reminds me of taxi regulations. Local governments are trying to prevent your use of Uber and Lyft because of some regulations on the books that are meant to prevent you from unscrupulous drivers. Yet the actions of those unscrupulous drivers were already illegal, so prosecute them.

This is something the market can easily sort out. We don't need to throw out the good with the bad.
Sure. But Larry Page was not referring to Google employees reducing their hours, but everybody else.
stuck on retrieving reading list for me in two different vanilla browsers.
There's three access levels: public (anyone can access), authenticated (anyone authenticated user in your organisation can access), and private (only selected users can access).

If an API requires authentication, then you'll need to login to see documentation or query it.

There's a little about it on https://sheetlabs.com/#/docs at the bottom, but you're right that the docs need to be fleshed out more fully and linked from the front page.
One reason why I started to use Docker is that we work in a SOA environment, and eventually bundling our own services as Docker containers would make it much easier to replicate our production environment locally.
Yes. I commit node_modules though.
I meant to say "new hotnesses like Macaw, old hotnesses like Dreamweaver" but now HN isn't letting me edit my post :|
Fedora is the RedHat "testbed" and has regular updates similar to the debian/ubuntu universes.

One of the core features of CentOS/RedHat/Scientific Linux/etc is their longterm support and package freeze (excluding critical security updates). If you are reliant on a different version of software from the default repositories (both newer or older) then you are encouraged to build and package them yourself. Additionally in the RedHat-derivative universe there is the EPEL package repository which contains a wider range of software and is kept more readily updated in addition to being maintained by the Fedora Project (essentially RedHat).
correct. Demand-siders have insisted that we all need to start spending more money to kick the economy into gear. Broadly, the only tool to do this is to "print money"; read: lower interest rates, twiddle with the reserve ratio requirement, directly pay off banks for certain types of activities.

Supposedly this will make people want to buy things now (instead of later). There is this odd effect though, that increasing prices also can make people insecure, as in: Worldwide, more money is piling into savings than businesses believe they can use to make productive investments. In other words, the people WANT deflation.

The net effect though is we will be transferring wealth from the poor to the rich; and then the bubble will pop, the rich will cash out of their assets early, and people with slower investment classes (401ks, pension funds, etc.) will get screwed. And some of these other people will even get fired, putting them into even greater risk.

I'm not going to defend "supply-side" economics, either, because that's got it's own brand of stupid going on.

There is a modest distinction between bubbles and inflation. While inflation guns bubbles and aggregates small, local bubbles into bigger, systemic bubbles, there can be bubbles during deflationary periods, and systemic inflation doesn't necessarily end in a bubble. Bubbles are characterized by a specific set of price dynamics that are guided by human psychology; the most characteristic, but hardest to notice, is when the asset price collapses, typically around twice the speed that it rose.
Have you actually looked at these issues in any detail because I'm fairly certain there are solutions to most of the objections you are raising.

You don't need to store the whole block chain there are methods to prune it so to speak so that it takes up significantly less space. The Bitcoin client Multibit already does this.

As the transaction volume of the Bitcoin network picks up they can increase the block size so more transactions can be included per block. More transactions means more fees per block.

The right combination of transaction volume, block size, and Bitcoin value could certainly make mining for only transaction fees profitable.
http://principles-wiki.net/

A wiki with some nice explanations of design principles.
But Denmark, like many Northern European countries is an economy with high tax rates and high redistribution, which can compensate for the lack of growth of labor wages. The US is not a market like that at all.
Interesting improvement in Swift programming language.
These are really great books. I stumbled upon them while reading the great article about the Selenium WebDriver http://aosabook.org/en/selenium.html
I started at $72,000 and that seemed pretty common.
Advice on a startup targeting people on the go
Hi all, I'm currently working with a friend on an interesting start-up idea - it's kind of a mashup of Papyrus and Dollar Shave Club. We're trying now to better understand our target audience to see if there would be a market for the service. If you have time, our short 2 minute survey is located here: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/1qlLQFwsWTkKyeSBkkl2kBt5fK-uOkW1Cheo0SijiGqY/viewform?usp=send_form. Thanks again everyone!
Publicly traded stocks are subject to a large number of regulations that have the intent to protect investors. The point isn't to make it impossible to lose all your money; the law will gladly let you give it all away if you so choose. But the idea is that people should have the necessary information to know what they are getting into. In exchange for exemption from SEC registration requirements (which are costly for a small company to deal with) and less disclosure, companies can only deal with accredited investors.
Urllib3, Stripe, and Open Source Grants
Given that both Kay and Bracha are U if Utah PhDs, then it must be a Utah thing :) seriously, it is too easy to find lots of researchers on the dynamic side.
exactly! I like FIFA's app but it's so complicated. Too many views are making me feel lost in the app. Plus there is no video highlight as far as I understand.
I am not saying we should not try again. I think that the arguments used by Larry Page reminded me of what French socialists were saying in the late 90s, and the effectiveness of these measures has been zero.
Python's syntax is a breeze to get ahold of without any experience making it ideal for introducing people to CS and algorithmic thinking without overwhelming them with theory or syntax.

Also, a lot of colleges (at least the best ones) offer functional programming in a second semester intro course (Berkeley does Scheme I believe). My own institution uses SML.
At first I thought this was a 3D scanner smartphone app. Depth of field from multiple aspects. (I was pretty excited..)
Even programmers and system administrators get taken by well-crafted spear phishing and other security-related goofs. If you really want to invest your hard-earned money in some unproven start-up, go and pull down $200k for a couple of years, or increase your net worth.
> long-standing owners paying pennies on the dollar in property taxes

Proposition 13?
> To me the allure of RPG-style games is that they can be story vehicles.

For my game, I'm not using it as a narrative vehicle. (Or, I am, but I want the narrative to be the player's experience, and not a story the game immerses them in.)

> There are generally tons of tool-using monsters in fantasy settings that aren't even humanoid.

Sure, but if you're going for realism, that still founders on the "how come my seven foot barbarian always fits perfectly in goblin armor?" problem.

Personally, I love the general fantasy environment. Dragons, trolls, swords, wizards. I dig the whole trope. But I'm not hung up on making a detailed, coherent fantasy world. Ultimately, I'm trying to make a fun game. The fantasy stuff is just trappings on top of abstract pieces. They are hugely important because they give the player some intuition about gameplay, but if I have to pick between a fun mechanic and a realistic one, I'll pick the fun one.

Real-life members of the clergy are perfectly capable of walking due north, but no one hates on chess for being unrealistic because bishops only go diagonally.

> Not every mob needs to drop riches, especially if the loot doesn't make sense within the story.

Sure, but the rarity of loot is orthogonal to how you pick loot for the mobs that do drop something.

> so your view is clearly commercially viable

I'm not trying to make a commercial game. I'll be open sourcing it. I'm just trying to make a game that's fun for me to play.

I don't have a lot of free time now that I have kids, so huge immersive detailed games with big stories aren't that appealing to me. I don't have time for that kind of commitment anyway. I want a game where I can drop into the dungeon for ten minutes, get a guaranteed sense of accomplishment from getting some XP and maybe get some great rare loot or kill something cool.

(Of course, the irony of spending an insane amount of time creating a game that is intended to not take much of my time to play isn't lost on me... Maybe I just like coding more than playing.)

> My point is that I personally think the choice between fun and realism implies a false dichotomy.

Absolutely right. Where I can make it more realistic I do. I think realism is really important for usability. To the degree that the game world is consistent, users can predict the effects of their actions.

For example, if you get hit with a cold attack in my game, you get "frozen" and your speed is lowered until it wears off. If you take fire damage after that, it will warm you up and cancel out the cold status. I think that's a nice little bit of edge case behavior that may delight a user when they see the game world following (sort of) the real world's rules.
Use of net wealth, rather than a wealth-oblivious measure like skills/certifications, to disqualify people from an important part of the economy should be rejected on economic-rights grounds.

Currently you could be professionally certified to advise and manage a millionaire's money, and put it into private ventures, but not be allowed to invest even token amounts into those same ventures yourself, 'cuz you're poor.
Who says I have to invest anything even close to my last dime? What if I just want to invest my first dime? Does the SEC also want to step in and tell me what I can or can't eat for lunch today, because I might overspend?

There are no guarantees of return on publicly traded stocks, either, and that same allure of high payout can still exist. The SEC did a bang-up job protecting everyone when they let Facebook IPO at a grossly overinflated value.
BBC staff ordered to stop giving equal airtime to climate deniers
Arh no sorry :). This is a very simple way of producing beautiful images from your 3d models.
> We let you filter your inbox with the exact same criteria as the search criteria (Ethnicity, Body type, Height, etc). This is mainly for women who normally receive a lot of messages on other sites.

The problem is this, that most people don't really know what they want.

Pretty much all the dating sites have filters on them for allowing you to chose which profiles you wanna see.

The outcome? Any woman who uses these filters message the same set of guys, tall, making decent income, same ethnicity, same religion, good looking(if you use OKC looks filters), etc etc. Most women I have dated, would never even find my profile on an online dating site(ethnicity, religion and height would disqualify most of them).

Similarly as a guy, if you qualify for most of these filters, then you end up staring at pretty much every girl out there. If you are just in it for short term dating, then its fine, but sooner or later you get fed of not being able to meet a girl you can talk to.

Yes, most people while looking for a partner look for these fixed attributes, but what most profile-centric sites miss is that most people do not actually end up with a six ft tall $100K+ making blond, blue eyed european model. When I meet a girl at Phish concert, she is not just another person who fits all my checklist, she is a person I found appealing, and I met her at a Phish concert.

Some sites such as HowAboutWe are kind of doing it right by moving away from profile-centric nature to activity-centric(but they still leave something to desire). I wish you understood that profile-centric sites(or rather MOST dating sites) are still hugely disappointing to men/women, attractive/average, straight/gay etc people alike.
Self-hosting your e-mail is really not much better, from a security point of view, than letting gmail have your e-mail. Google has some of the best security people in the world, if your mail is safe anywhere, it's safe with Google. The problem, of course, is that Google is definitely going to try to read your mail, use and retain your private data indefinitely.

The problem is that if you host your own e-mail server, you dramatically increase the chances of some unpatched flaw or tiny messed up configuration file causing the Russian mafia to get access to everything on your e-mail server. You probably don't even particularly decrease the risk of the NSA getting your e-mails.

This is a problem that could be fixed by new models for e-mail that utilize encryption so that you inherently don't need to trust third parties in order to make use of their services. Avoiding third parties entirely is very likely impractical and unwise.
As a followup, what about a PhD in Computer Science? I've got a pretty solid job right now that pays a nice amount of money, but I don't really have the time or opportunity to learn some of the really cutting edge stuff out there while working 50+ hours/week at my day job. Is there a reasonable ROI for a PhD in the industry?
Hey, so what is the difference between my setup and figs? I assume it is just that all the port forwarding and folder stuff from the virtual machine is made easier?
"For example, why not allow relevant certified professionals, such as CPAs and CFAs, to automatically qualify as AIs?"

This strikes me as an incredibly bad idea. The bar for CPA is painfully low.
Are you developing for iOS? Swift seems to introduce a lot of FP concepts.
rust? please. maybe 3 years from now, once it matures. python is good for teaching programming because it's easy to read - a feature that not a single language you mention can brag about.
Typhoon Neoguri Threatens North Philippines, Japan
There are many areas of the law which have been untouched for decades, and only starts now to create new cases because of how the internet works. Couchsurfing for example. Also scamming has never been so easy with the internet.

I'm not saying you really need laws, but regulations might improve the situation. There's nothing really illegal there, but it would be nice to see google being liable for its data if it reach a certain size of audience. In this case it's false advertising of defamation (unintentional).

Google map is a product, even if it hides behind a free thing "use with caution". Most people can get along with it, but if it starts to have a big impact on society, people will indeed become wary and learn, but not everyone will do.

I guess you can say "let the nature do its work", but that's not always how government see things, and that's not why the government exists. Strong government can do big improvements, I think. It depends, that's a balance to find.
Your comparison between Switchboard and Inbox is solid. Switchboard is being used for tasks like sending "new email" push notifications to mobile clients, or uploading attachments to dropbox. I haven't used Inbox yet, but I'm excited to try it out.

It's great that Inbox is also built on top of IMAP. The new Gmail API is great, but an application which takes advantage of it is locked into using only Gmail. By building from the standard, Switchboard and Inbox are cross-provider.
Thomas Tungz - http://tomtunguz.com/
I can only speak for my use case, but I've heard similar things from other people, so I don't believe it's only me. I agree the overlap is small between those groups, but I think it's pretty painful when it does occur.

I've done quite a bit of freelance web development, mostly in the telecoms and infrastructure sectors, and there was often a requirement to integrate with a third party. This "integration" almost always took the form of periodically receiving spreadsheets from them, manually importing them into our database, and then also handling the periodic updates. And the apps I was building only needed to query a few rows each day! Sometimes they'd eventually create an API, but most said they couldn't or wouldn't due to time or complexity. Sheetlabs is my attempt at removing some of these barriers.

Anyway, that was _my_ itch, and this is how I'm scratching it!
I had to scroll down 7 comments (on the TC site) to find someone who wasn't pointing out inaccuracies in this article.
Better they manage someone else's money than their own?
Is your name Bob Harper? :)

Functional still isn't that popular, in spite of a few vocal supporters. Even MIT went from scheme to Python for their sicp training.
I think it depends heavily on the city and the way the roads have been planned. There are places where cyclists most definitely do slow down traffic, and that can be pretty unsafe for the cars.

Houston, where I live, is an example. I don't dislike cyclists at all, but when a long string of cars encounters a single cyclist going at half the speed, at most, it really does cause problems. There are no bike lanes here and it's illegal to bike on sidewalks, so cyclists have no choice but to ride in the middle of the lane.

What happens is, if there's enough traffic, a single cyclist can cause a mini traffic jam, because every car will try to switch lanes so they can pass, but there are too many cars for everybody to safely switch lanes. So one lane basically comes to a stop behind the cyclist and the other doesn't go much faster because of people trying to merge into it (which isn't safe due to the volume of cars).

This is far from the worst situation that can happen on the road, but this is what happens with probably 90% of the cyclists I encounter in Houston while driving. In a city like Houston where everything is spread out, it is truly not practical to reduce all car speeds down to bike speeds.
Midbulk transport, standard radion-accelerator core, classcode 03-K64 --- Firefly.

Just had to.
That's a false comparison.

If a machine is kernel dumping, and Red Hat is trying to diagnose and fix the machines, nobody said your sysadmins will automatically just go home.

Instead, they can use their time more productively: making a secondary/workaround, or figuring out ways to re-architect your solution around the failure points.
His book Clean Code would be a good start to what he has to say. The SOLID principles are important.

Then I'd move on to Domain Driven Design and probably Refactoring and Growing Object Oriented Software, Guided By Tests.

Those four will give a good start to what enterprise/OO people are expecting in design.
IIRC, this was actually launched a while back but I think it keeps going under when, say, it gets posted to HN and the servers get crushed. So maybe try tomorrow.
I'm pretty sure you're right about what she was talking about, but to be clear about terminology, all blocks are "mined". To quote the Bitcoin wiki, "Mining is the process of adding transaction records to Bitcoin's public ledger of past transactions."
> I've already "invested" money in Pebble, Reading Rainbow, and a few other business ventures I've seen potential in, but I'm not allowed to benefit from those investments in certain ways because, why, exactly? For my own protection?

Yes. The rationale is that when you "invest" in crowdfunded projects, you're really just purchasing a product in advance or making a donation. The law trusts that you can rationally decide what a product is really worth or how much money you should donate.

What the law doesn't trust you (as an unsophisticated investor) to decide is what the expected return on a speculative venture will be. The concern is that as soon as someone promises you a high rate of return, you're not going to think about this rationally -- i.e. you're going to think of this more as gambling than an investment. In the specific case of crowdfunding, there's not too much worry that someone is going to blow large amounts of money on a Kickstarter if all they're getting out of it is a couple of Oculus Rift headsets. But if that Kickstarter could promise 1000x returns, that might be bad news for someone's college fund.
Over here in the UK we don't seem to have this restriction.

There are lots of other laws about it, but you don't have to be rich to sink some cash in private equity schemes. We even seem to have sprouted a kickstarter for equity in the form of Crowdcube. Which I rather like because kickstarter always felt a bit wrong. If I'm micro-investing, surely I ought to be micro-profiting too, if the company takes off?