skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>Small seems more efficient. //

Small seems generally less efficient to me.

Where I am in the UK there are lots of small councils, people being paid to make the same decisions over-and-over again when there could just as easily be amalgamation - or to be honest a general regional or UK policy - that would save a lot of time and money.

For example, across every council area above a certain size has a sports centre. Instead of deciding the best way to run them centrally - with leeway to establish better methods - they're each run as a separate entity by a non-specialist council (or more recently being farmed out to companies to try to run at a profit). The UK should have a team that does sports centres and manages them all, that would be more efficient. You don't need 1000 different HR policies writing, 1000 meetings about lifeguard wage levels, 1000 separate contracts for chlorine delivery and testing, etc..

Similarly every major town or city has it's own bus service. They all do the same things, but separately and so with none of the economies - like regional servicing centres, group buying, centralised timetable control, centralised ticket purchase, centralised driver and personnel training.

Sure there are differences across the UK but there are far more similarities. I've lived in Wales, England and Scotland and the people types and their demands are largely the same so far as I can tell. Healthcare, education, housing, transport, ...

The UK gov is running a train service at the moment because none of the other myriad of train companies would touch it, they're making billions of profit. There seems absolutely no reason that same government-company can't do the same thing with the other rail areas - instead we have lots of companies all do the same thing and all failing to communicate well and integrate their transport policies.

Education - we have a dozen companies writing exam papers and then there's more effort to ensure the exams are equal standards; then there's competition to win schools based on which exams will be easiest. Instead we have the skills in the teaching workforce to simply write one paper centrally. Needless duplication.

I won't rant on [more]. Some systems do have a natural medium or small scale that is more efficient I'm sure. School class sizes should be small. Schools can be small, but the education authorities that manage those teachers and schools are doing the same thing that the other education authorities are doing and scale brings efficiencies and focus of skills.
Dice Wants to Be the First Gig Ticketing Giant That Music Fans Adore
Forget Tesla, the future of electric vehicles is the city bus
That's beautiful. So Ellison is Hurding Catz now?
Corporations get taxed ~15% + 14% hotel tax.
Individuals get taxed ~30% already on their Airbnb income (plus Airbnb charges the guest 6%-12% and the host 3%).

If they're going to charge 14% hotel tax to people renting out rooms on Airbnb, wouldn't it be more fair to tax that income at the corporate rate instead of the individual rate?

(Yes, I understand the taxes go to different places in each scenario. But from the "take home" perspective of the person/entity doing all the work here, hosts on Airbnb are already having their transaction taxed significantly more than any hotel chain).
Alibaba Raises $21.8B in Initial Public Offering
Yes. Sorry about the mistake.
That is true but Genetic Engineering has largely been limited to cross-breeding plants.

You truly lack imagination if think that roundup resistant crops represent the pinnacle of Genetic Engineering.
Of course not. Who with any knowledge of Europe thought it might be?

The thesis is that the presence of the EU, which can provide military and economic support, makes independence more likely.

However, Ireland became independent without any infranational system, as did Finland. More recently, Czechoslovakia also split up, into the Czech Republic and Slovakia, and again without looking towards the EU or other larger protective system, and without being a regional reaction to the main capital city.

Then there's the independence of the former eastern bloc countries after the fall of Soviet power, the independence of Malta from the UK in 1964, and of Montenegro in 2006.

The thesis doesn't do a good job of explaining all of those historical independence movements. Why should we expect it does a good job of explaining future movements?
Wow, I think they fixed that escaping problem a few minutes ago.
From my experience these types of programs frequently don't work for the same reason outsourcing articles to non-native-English writers often doesn't work -- most times, the end results don't "read" like a native English speaker wrote them, making it so only someone with English as a second or third language wouldn't notice the various awkward phrasings, etc. English is extremely tricky. If these programs do catch on, either we'll need more editors, or we'll move to a different, more creole form of global English (which I doubt).
Show HN: Our new gamedev asset store
Bands don't do these things themselves. When they're starting out they don't know how, and when they start to catch on, it's a waste of their time. The small labels do a lot more than you think. And album sales have been an important part of financing all that. As album revenue has declined, something had to give. Labels are doing less these days, which makes it harder for new and small bands to succeed.

Piracy makes for great exposure. You can't eat exposure though. At some point a band has to make money if it's going to make a living, and piracy has made a big dent in that, even for small labels.
If Airbnb hosts want to be taxed as a corporation, is anything stopping them from simply forming a corporation?
> but I have yet to see an explanation that truly seems to work

The 70's was when energy started getting expensive again. And we did nothing to deal with the problem, not even now.

The 50's and the 60's (and the 70's, 80's, 90's, 00's...) were marked by huge growth in govenments worldwide. Something that we simply never experienced before. It's quite possible that we reached an inflection point by the 70's, and it become almost impossible to inovate.

This guy[1] has some interesting theories about the way administration evolved at the XX century. A world dominated by corporations is a new thing, and it may be true that the natural evolution of a society dominated by them leads to a period of stagnation like we have now.

All of the above explanations have data backing them (but less backing for the third), and people on the net eager to push that data to anybody that asks. Any of them alone could explain a worldwide stagnation of a few decades (or longer for the first). All of them seem to be happening, but causation on a system as complex as humanity is hard to stablish. Maybe we need to technological revolution on system analisys...

[1] http://michaelochurch.wordpress.com/

EDIT: Another possibility is that we reached a level of development where going forwad is really that hard. And we have a lot of work we need to make on tooling before we see fast widespread development again.
A 70-year-old starts a new career as a CTO? If only other high tech companies were this open-minded about employing seniors.
I love the tension between the "OMG Robots will do everything, even write code!" and "Technological progress has essentially ground to a standstill" camps.

It's refreshing to see something from the standstill camp; thanks to self driving cars the former has been enjoying its day in the sun.

Especially so since it fits with a nice cultural narrative about the haves and the have-nots; the theory being that all the robots will take all the jobs and leave only a small elite to live in hyper-luxury (see: Elysium).

It's nice to see the counterpoint. There was a time (ca. 2008) where oil price rises were predicted to continue to $500/bbl or more by, er, well now. There was this crisis of resources, of which the technology to extract them had peaked... (speaking of, how can we ignore fracking?).

Anyway the bubble burst and the narrative changed. Google's self-driving car gained a lot of hype and suddenly people were worried about automation again (think of all the drivers!).
To be fair, a lot of people are capable of becoming that type of employee after gaining comfort at the company, and after building relationships with their co-workers. To expect someone to do that in front of strangers while under pressure doesn't necessarily correlate with a programmer who can evolve into such a person.
Those and thousands more listed here:

https://research.microsoft.com/en-US/about/techtransfer/defa...

Just click the years on the sidebar.
Home Depot’s lengthy security breach exposed 56M credit cards
I like this take. Last century we built many amazing bodies, this century we give them brains.
Just want to mention another great publisher of Chess analysis on Youtube - Daniel King.

https://www.youtube.com/user/PowerPlayChess/videos
There was a bunch of great Algorithmics research coming from Andrew Goldberg's group at MSR SV. I expect the fruits of their labour are implemented in Bing Maps.
This is new technology entering the market. Of course neither the startups nor the slow moving legal systems are well prepared to operate in sequence. Why be critical of either?

I don't expect existing laws to be instantly relevant to new industry. The typical approach of trying to hammer old regulation down a new hole is dangerous and non-productive to society.

There wouldn't be AirBnBs if we constantly crippled every new business with old regulation before we fully understood its worth and risks.
That's only because you're unaware of innovations that have happened in other sectors and their consequences.

In oil, there've been huge breakthroughs in fracking, horizontal drilling, and oil shale and tar sands mining. As a result, U.S. oil imports have fallen by a third since 2008 [1], and domestic crude oil production is up nearly 50%. We've pulled out of Iraq and Afghanistan because the Middle East is no longer strategically important to us, saving thousands of lives in those wars. Oil is expensive now, but the price is relatively stable, meaning that we can plan ahead for the future (like buying a fuel-efficient car instead of an SUV) instead of being at the whims of global politics.

In finance, it's now possible to get funding for an idea without being a grizzled 30-year veteran of an industry. If you have a creative project or even something plain-old crazy, you can go on Kickstarter and crowd-fund it with pre-orders. Microfinance is commonplace enough that it's driving down returns, and it's lifted millions of people out of poverty in the developing world. You can accept credit card payments with just an iPad.

In education, you can take courses online with world-leading professors at elite universities, all without leaving your living room or paying tuition.

In travel, you can take virtual tours of places you might want to visit on your computer, map out on itinerary, read reviews, and book flights, hotel rooms, and activities within minutes, again all without leaving your living room. I'm just old enough to remember travel agents. Remember when you had to drive to meet one, have only a vague idea of what country you wanted to see, take the options they give you because you don't know what else is available, and pay through the nose for all of it? The first Google-assisted trip I took, back in 2004, was a revelation, and that was before Maps or StreetView or smartphones or Kayak or Yelp or the universal ability to book things online.

Most of the time when I hear folks say "Things have gotten worse than they used to be", they don't mean "things have gotten worse", they mean "Argh, things have changed and I don't know how anything works anymore and what's my place in the world and how will I support myself and everybody else seems to be doing better than me!" Much of which is an illusion, because everybody else is equally insecure about their prospects and place in the world. But the opportunities are out there, and objectively speaking, we are so much, much better off than we were when I was a kid in the 80s.

[1] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_move_impcus_a2_nus_ep00_im0_...

[2] http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/pet_crd_crpdn_adc_mbbl_a.htm
Feel free to tell me if I'm reading this wrong, but we're talking about Lua as a platform for re-implementing elisp, not as a replacement (completely ditching elisp is a non-starter for obvious reasons). And not having dynamic binding, no native support for the full numeric tower, not having a native list type, etc. would be serious road blocks for running elisp on the Lua VM that aren't there in Guile's case.
Bandwidth are indeed a bunch of bright folks that do good work and we work with them on a number of products, but to be clear we are not reselling their messaging.

Lot of effort by a large crew of committed developers and the helpful participation of our carrier partners are what brought Twilio MMS to market on US phone numbers. Were MMS as easy as wrapping another product in a HTTP request, I imagine it would be a more common offering.

Want to make sure the effort of the Twilio engineering crew is given its due.
Hear, hear.

There are some kinds of stories this can work for - ie, the earthquake bot - but this is not a good general solution. Modern users are sensitive to low-quality content writing as an indicator of product quality. Crappy writing is spam, high-quality writing in an authentic voice is someone worth listening to.

I'm not staking out the claim that this will never be possible, but I've yet to see it executed well.
I'm having some trouble understanding what your product does exactly. The blue check isn't an official verification is it? It's just one chosen by bluecheck, correct?
So did everybody else. That's why we got online payments.

I wonder if much of the angst about how the future hasn't turned out the way we wanted is really "We got everything we wanted and it turns out what we wanted is this?" Markets are really good at fulfilling peoples' desires, but the problem is they fulfill people's actual wants, not what they wish they wanted. So it's like turning a spotlight on our desires and realizing that hey, we're all nothing more than human.
Malicious eBay listings redirects iPhone buyers to phishing site
How can you target ads if people are anonymous?
Would be cool to have an API. Could be useful for mass address book creation.
Abundance; great book that's insanely optimistic about the future. Sure it cherrypicks the "what went well" part of our history, but a lot more has went well compared to a couple of failing industries.. http://www.amazon.com/Abundance-Future-Better-Than-Think/dp/...
But while poker is, at heart, a simple game, easy enough to grok that you can strategize along with Phil Ivey when he plays on TV, a grandmaster-level chess match is totally bewildering.

---

Just as my brain is hopelessly puny next to Magnus Carlsen’s, so is Carlsen’s compared to that of a modern chess-playing machine.

I don't like these rhetorical techniques that debase one thing to show how great another thing is. There's a certain dishonesty in them, as if the author were qualified to make these observations.
MongoHQ / Compose – Service Disruption
Hi, I run some apps on oceanic.mongohq.com. It's offline right now for over 5 minutes. Anyone experiencing this?
There's also electric cars, which are basically already here and can't be stopped at this point. Solar panels, which have crossed the $1 per watt barrier a while ago.

I believe that relatively soon we'll have genetics-driven psychiatry and medicine. Depressed people won't automatically be prescribed SSRIs, but what is deemed most suitable based on their genetic profile. Nobody will need to ask you if you're allergic to penicillin or anaesthetics, those mistakes won't happen anymore.

Then there's deep neural networks. We now have computer programs that can recognize what's in an image more accurately than human beings. Domestic robots might well happen during our lifetime. They're going to be basic at first, but you can't stop progress.
I am a big fan of Pathery ( http://www.pathery.com/ ) - based on the K most vital node problem : https://cstheory.stackexchange.com/questions/11375/generatin...
That's odd, I've been using Django for 6 years now and to me it seems like the documentation has improved.
> The guarantee is with the No vote. More of the same right wing policies

The UK has entirely socialised health care, relatively high taxes and a large population on welfare. It is hardly a right wing country by international standards (you need to look at the USA to see what that means).

The reality is that compared to many countries and even its own recent past, Scotland is not doing so badly. That's the status quo offered by the no vote. In the event of a yes vote absolutely nobody knows what's going to happen because Salmond and co haven't thought it through at all. Anyone who asks him difficult questions gets labelled a biased bully. Anyone who suggests that separating a tightly integrated part of a country might be a teeny tiny bit complicated is labelled a scaremonger.

This absolute refusal to fill in the blanks means that the Yes campaign has instead let people fill in those blanks with their own hopes and dreams, indeed, Salmond has heavily encouraged this. Yes has come to represent everything to everyone regardless of what their actual underlying beliefs are. But that's not a foundation for a country or even a political party.
I've been taking a similar journey in my blog, where I talk about the difference in thinking in FP and OOP. ( http://tiny-giant-books.com/blog/real-world-f-programming-pa... ) I use C# and F#.

I was at a Code Camp a few years back where one of the speakers was introducing F#. He was looking at a map function or some such on the screen and muttered something like "Well, you know, you can see the C# this compiles down to. It's all just a while statement. So there's really not much here."

At the time, I was concerned that he missed the point.

It's tough moving from 20 years or so in OOP over to FP. Whatever you do, you don't want to give folks the impression that you're just a fanboy for some new latest whizbang tech eye candy. Yet it's important to convey that there's something different going on here too. Yes, it's all just ones and zeroes, but while true, that observation is not important.

You reach a point where you say "You know, an object is just a function with closures. A function is just an object. It's all the same"

Yeah, it's all the same. But it's not. Just like that C# guy, you understand that at the end of the day all we have is state machines, but you missed the part about how thinking about things in various ways is better or worse for creating certain types of solutions.

This author tries to make the case for FP by taking apart the wild and wooly world OOP has become, where you're not just coding a solution, you're creating a extension to the type system for your very own stuff. Very cool stuff. But I think once you go down that path, you're arguing the wrong thing.

Thinking about problems in pure FP leads to small, composable functions. These group into small, composable executables. These can be scheduled and pipelined across many different O/Ses, networks, and machines. This land of unix-like coding has a multi-decade track record and solid tools that any administrator can use and understand. Thinking in terms of object graphs almost inevitably leads to very complex and nuanced solutions, with lots of hidden dependencies, that only work under certain conditions, and where you may need an expert or two around to help out when things go wrong.

FP is not nirvana. Nothing is. But it is very refreshing to have it solve the same old problems in a much less complex way. I don't see any future except for pure FP -- although my money says it might be 20-30 years until the industry catches on. Now's a good time to get an early start!
“We've been acquired and Twitpic will live on”
iOS 8: Apple Finally Fixes Its iPhone Weather App
I really hope that just because something sounds foreign programmers aren't willing to at least give it a passing glance. New frameworks are going to do things in radically difference ways and we need to be willing to learn.

That said, I easily get turned off by something if it isn't obvious within 10 minutes how it works. This really isn't that complex. I think people who read my post can overcome the weird word once they see how simple it is.

There's a large group of people where it helps to have the clojure connection; I'll keep posting practical examples of how it works and simply teaching. A name is not really that big of a deal.
I didn't say every Android out there, just every one I've used. I've used Galaxy phones, an HTC, a Galaxy, and various display phones at cellphone stores, and I've used friends' iPhones. The Androids always felt more comfortable to me. The iPhones always felt too small, unnecessarily thick and heavy with a metal casing instead of a plastic casting, and their home buttons were harder to press. The new iPhone apparently has a larger version at least. iPhone power and home buttons also seem to wear out faster. I've had two iPod Touch devices that I used a few years each and each ended up with an issue with the power button going bad to some degree, and this has happened to other iDevice owners I know, but I've never seen it happen with an Android device, including the ones I had for longer stretches of time than I had my iPod Touches. Small sample size but I believe I've read about this happening elsewhere.
24/192 Music Downloads Are Very Silly Indeed
This is interesting, considering just two weeks ago (to the day), they had announced they were shutting down. Wonder who bought them, if it wasn't Twitter.
Oh I'm sorry. You're absolutely right. Hold on for just five years while I perform a study to find the correlation, then after that we can argue about the causation until we both die.
Queue to the Apple store in Sydney for the iPhone 6
Cool, next time you spend three years and literally thousands of hours bringing a product to market, I'll be sure to assign the credit to someone else
I'd add two things here:

> You can raise money at any time without having to worry about creating tax risks and without having to mess up your equity pricing.

If you raise a note with an $8M cap, it might not have the same impact on tax and equity pricing as an actual equity round at an $8M valuation. On the other hand, I wouldn't say the impact is zero. A share of stock in a company that's raised a convertible note is arguably less risky than one with no cash period. And while you're not necessarily legally obligated to raise above the cap, it certainly anchors expectations for future rounds. Even if there isn't a cap, there's some anchoring going on based on the amount of money raised -- i.e. if I raised $2M in notes, it's going to feel weird to raise less than that in a Series A. And to the extent that investors have expectations about the percentage of a company they want to own, anything that affects the amount you expect to raise affects your Series A valuation.

> Basically, there is a whole different dynamic in using notes/SAFEs versus doing an equity round.

Note that the dynamic is technically orthogonal to which instrument you use to raise. You could (probably) draft a simple seed stock issuance that functioned similarly to a SAFE with a cap (e.g. preferred stock, 1x liquidation preference, and pull-up rights) in terms of transaction costs, flexibility, etc.

Practically though, this doesn't happen often. Again, the issue is really about anchoring. If you're going to issue preferred seed stock, you have to put some kind of language down about the rights of that stock. And while this language can always be amended, what you put (or don't put) down has the psychological effect of anchoring the Series A discussion.