skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Interesting perspectives, so here's another volley.

I think "users prefer ads to paying" is not a full explanation: I did include "paying is painful". If that's all there were - just upfront cost, how do we deal with the trend of connected software (Diablo III, etc) and devices whose primary developer feature is DRM?

The internet totally is the WWW. Well, it's an analogy. So no, it's not. But the analogy is useful in its most spirited form. There is no truly enforceable law and criminal and conspiratorial enterprises run abound. It's questionable whether the Feudal lords are making it better or worse. (One way they make it better is by having direct accountability.)
Pretty awesome and good instructions on how to start!

What would be nice to see when the next battle will start (probably localized) :-)
re "Surely there's a current generation" - there are many current generations, with different flavors, distributed all over the political spectrum, ranging from militant atheism to new cosmic religions... the gravity center that holds this galaxy together is the idea that radically changing the human condition via advanced technology is both doable and good, other ideas can differ wildly among different groups.
It's hard to spend money that is hidden from local tax offices. Local authorities can even blame you if your lifestyle is higher than your declared income.
Yahoo layoffs; India operations will be reduced to support functions
Url changed from http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-watch/wp/2014/10/07/o..., which points to this.
Humans Need Not Apply
http://motherboard.vice.com/read/why-automation-today-is-lik...
Solar usually generates the most supply when there is the most demand, when the air conditioners are on in summer.

It think this is a pricing problem. I run my dishwasher in the middle of the night because I get charged the least for electricity then. If I got charged less I would run the dishwasher in the middle of the day.

If a timer could turn my freezer down in the middle of the day, then used the stored coldness for both the freezer and fridge the rest of the day that would be cool too.
And the Millennium Technology Prize in 2006. Its award is 1 million euros.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Technology_Prize
Makes a lot of sense: reduces generated code duplication. Just needs one "release" block per scope.
> operation of these plants that are vital for steady, dependable electricity supply

Maybe.

http://theconversation.com/baseload-power-is-a-myth-even-int...
Well, you know, until recently, 'my data fits in RAM' just didn't happen at a scale worth optimizing for.
Re: threads uber ref-counting.

Hit one of my hot-buttons: Threads have got to be one of the most massive WOMBAT boondoggles of the last few decades.

Pro) none of this slow inter-process-communication stuff!

Con) EVERYTHING is now dangerous. (not quite, but close)

But the industry (?) decided "TOTALLY worth it!"

I forgot to mention that threads start a little faster than processes (well, quite a bit faster on a particular shitty OS in widespread use), but not so much faster that you won't need to pool and re-use the threads anyway. I think this is one area where Erlang (actor pattern), for instance, gets it right: pretend tasks run in their own process, and use an IPC proxy to send messages between the tasks/sub-programs, even if implemented with threads instead of OS level processes.
Cutting the High Cost of Prison Phone Calls
I spent about 20 minutes throwing this together, so it's VERY rough, but maybe it will turn into something useful. I'm primarily a java programmer but I've been wanting to teach myself more ruby, so here it goes.

https://github.com/stevenspasbo/Hackernews

EDIT: I should say, I started on this to create word clouds, but if anyone has any ideas, contribute!
He seems to be doing quite well.

http://ssleec.ucsb.edu/nakamura
Fascinating dive into the data-really appreciate the sentiment analysis of comments made about women and diversity.
Elasticsearch.org Playing HTTP Tricks with Nginx
>I don't think micropayments ever really worked out

becaue no one ever implements MICROpayments, we always end up with macropayments. Have you seen a program or a game that asks you for 0.5 cents for a hat? or 0.001cents for a bullet?

The closest I could find is world of tanks, where you can buy bullets for 0.006 Euro for the smallest tanks, and 0.06 Euro for the most expensive ones. Hats (camo patterns, inscriptions) still cost ~ 1 euro each tho.

Most games simply milk you $5 and up per "micro"payment.
Hm, it seems not that many HN people fail or at least they are shy about this :)

Anyway, thank you guys who replied, very interesting read!

As for me, I've been thinking to start "somethings" for a long time but I'm afraid that it will fail... i.e. I do not risk to invest a time.
Memo to Warren Buffett: Actually, women are better than men at managing money
How about feeding the top 20 into Bingo Card Creator?
Looks like total units: http://www.bayareacensus.ca.gov/counties/SanFranciscoCounty....

Though I was actually surprised it was so high. That's units, not bedrooms, and it's only a city of ~800k people. I guess there's a lot of 1-person households to bring down the average despite all the families and twenty-somethings in 2-4 bedroom units with at least as many inhabitants as bedrooms.
All the best to the people affected with this decision. We have some interesting problems and are always open for talented people to join us - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8396376
Original headline/title was "Once you’ve dehumanized drug offenders, it’s easy to steal their identities". Just got changed to "Government Set Up a Fake Facebook Page in This Woman’s Name"
Thomas Friedman on ISIS, Boko Haram and Batman
I found below point is interesting:
>How to start a startup is just a subset of a bigger problem you're trying to solve: how to have a good life.

I would love to hear discussion on how to have a good life if don't start a startup
>One needn't have been a recording artist to criticize a song, nor a published author to criticize a book, nor a president to criticize whoever's in office.

It might not "need to be" one, but it will help his criticism be more informed.

A person can have any kind of wild off-base ideas about what artists, authors or presidents do. At least those that have done it have some experience and basis in reality.
This has been flagged pretty quickly by pro-government forces, I guess. 27 votes in one hour and on the second page...
What helps me is to focus on finishing small projects or tasks. Whenever I want to learn a new technology or tool, I first come up with a tiny project I want to accomplish with that. The project has to be small and have the appropriate level of difficulty.

That way I continue to be productive, and actually using something (instead of just reading about it) makes it very soon obvious if I like something or not. Then it's just a matter of following whatever interests me.
As a new immigrant to US and Bay Area I am totally amused to see that there is so much vacant land everywhere and yet so little housing. Dont see why cupertino, MV, Sunnyvale cant have 10 floored housing complexes.
What iOS developers should know about Apple Pay
True, I looked up the adjusted amount and it's $16m.

But it semantics, as Thiel's point was to contrast the value he created with the value he captured.
I think you misspelled buzzword.
The DEA has no purpose other than to enforce drug laws. The public has consistently shown that it wants drug laws to be more liberal, but to the DEA, that's an existential threat. The DEA has a vested interest in the drug police state. It's a monster. What a mess.
Hills might be common, but suitable geography for creating a dam out of them is probably less so.

Not to mention that such geography frequently tends to cover farmland and rural communities who are less than likely to want their land flooded.. they may also tend to vote on the conservative-side of the spectrum which cares less for renewable generation such as hydro.

The construction cost of dams isn't insignificant either!
Might be more because of the source, Buzzfeed. HN seems to penalize some sources pretty heavily these days.

Personally I think that's a change for the worse. I've seen a number of interesting stories with a decent vote/age ratio be buried a number of pages back. For me, it's decreasing the value of visiting the site.
This was just a brief price spike into negative territory for one 5-minute period. It just means that some plants are slow to shut down. Within 10 minutes, enough generation had shut down to bring the price back into positive territory. It's unusual to see this in the daytime, but it's not that unusual late at night. Areas with a lot of hydro power often get into this situation when there's extra water to be let out of dams. It's often easier to keep the generators running than to bypass them and shut them down, only to have to do a restart in an hour or two. The same is true of some nuclear plants.

One of the big issues in the power business is "ramp rate", or how fast a generating station can change its output. Gas turbines have very fast ramp rates; coal-fired plants vary, and some hydro plants are slow. Wind turbines have to feather and brake to a stop. Solar can be turned off quite fast if needed, because a solar cell is a voltage source and is unbothered by lack of load.

Read "PJM 101" for an introduction to how generation management works for the biggest grid in the US, the US east coast: "http://pjm.com/Globals/Training/Courses/ol-pjm-101.aspx". Load changes by about 3x during a 24 hour period, and huge plants start up and shut down every day to follow the load. So this is all routine. You can watch the PJM power grid operate at "https://edata.pjm.com/eData/index.html", which gives you a huge Flash-based dashboard intended that will make little sense until you've read PJM 101. PJM has a power glut at some times of the day right now. Their active messages include "PJM is issuing a Minimum Generation Advisory for the valley periods 10/04/2014 through 10/06/2014 . This advisory is being issued to provide advanced warning that due to mild weather and light loads, PJM may be entering into Min Gen Alerts and possibly Min Gen Actions during these periods."

In other words, a price spike into negative territory for a few minutes is a normal operational event.
It was originally Washington Post. It was changed to Buzzfeed by dang.
The Republic of Estonia will be the first country to offer e-residency
I just resigned myself to stay on the first page on HN.
I would be interested to see a how the "negativity index" behaves with other emotionally charged topics. What other sorts of topics lead people to use a more emotionally charged vocabulary? What if instead of titles containing (women|female|diversity), you did the same analysis with other topics associated with toxic discussion? Maybe:

(israel|palestine|gaza)

or

(gentrification|rent control|eviction)

or even

(windows|microsoft)

The data seem to indicate that people use more emotionally charged words, both positive and negative, when they talk about something emotional/personal like diversity. I wonder if other topics lead to the same asymmetrical increase in negativity?
Once you’ve dehumanized drug offenders, it’s easy to steal their identities
How often is the enclave validated? Could modified DRAM be used that would return one set of data to the enclave validation, and another the rest of the time? What would have to be done to the CPU cache?
"Everything which is not forbidden is allowed" is the principle of law under which our citizenry exists, FWIW.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Everything_which_is_not_forbidd...
Actually we have since spoken offline and he has agreed to take me up on the offer and the whole job search will be posted to this hacker news thread, so I put my money where my mouth is! :)
Thanks for your response. To make that clear: I'd be very happy if people in Cuba could experience more individual freedoms.

If it's the latter (which I'd guess), then it's not really a restriction on individual freedom.

That perhaps is the main source of our disagreement :) 'Freedom' (or similar concepts like justice) an be approached from to angles. The first is the deontological, or institutional approach, e.g. freedom is what the laws provide. The second way is the consequentialist approach: freedom is what the individual actually experiences. Both ways have advantages and disadvantages. I personally lean more towards the latter, because that approach makes it possible to differentiate between classes of people inside a society.

Another anecdote :)
I live in the eastern part of Germany, which as you know was socialist 25 years ago. People could not really vote, dissidents didn't have it easy etc. The current Germany is definitily more free from an institutional viewpoint. Yet, when I look out my office window, I can reguarly see people searching for food in the dumpsters. In the dumpsters! Thats a thing that was unthinkable in the former Eastern Germany. We now have children coming to school without having breakfast because of poverty and mismanagement of their parents. That, too, was unheard of before (schools provided breakfast in those cases, there was no mass unemployment -> way less parents were like that, without hope and self-regard etc.)

People like me definitely practically profit from the new institutional freedom, people like them don't. From a consequential viewpoint on freedom, their score dropped significantly.

I've read a really nice book about the theories of freedom and justice from Amartya Sen, it's called The Idea of Justice. Highly recommended, it's both informative and approachable.
"And our email validator is totally broken"
It does for me. But probably not for a lot of folks. Most people dont care.

What does speed adoption is to have a very well designed command line interface. Here go and npm excel.
>> In strongly typed languages, you can expect an exception rather than an implicit type coercion, when you pass an argument or operand of the wrong type.

Scala and Java's + operator also do implicit conversions to string. Do you think Scala and Java are both weakly typed?

You said that you think Ruby and Python are strongly typed because they don't do these implicit conversions. But they do: Ruby's Kernel#puts and Python's print convert to string.

Also, is 0.5 + 1 ok? One of those operators is a float and the other an integer. In almost every language we get an implicit conversion from integer to float. Does that mean all these languages are weakly typed? Or is conversion to string some kind of exception for some reason?
I'd argue that being ripped off a couple hundred $ on an auction platform, or an e-commerce site is in a somewhat different category than getting your apartment ransacked by speed freaks, or you being attacked by a mentally volatile driver with a hammer.
He prasanth,
So we spoke privately by email, and we agreed to do the whole job finding process publicly for everyone to see that it works. If it fails and I walk away I pay you USD $1000. If you walk away or fail to take the steps then the deal is null and void. If you reply to this commment publicly then we have a deal and we will start today.

Thanks
Zubair
A Silent Web – Audio as a UX Component
Oh wow, really? That's crazy! I'm so sick of WaPo. I'm glad they're letting Radley write, but they're a rag.

edit: Wow, what happened? It's now not even Radley's piece?!
There don't appear to be any engineers involved in those predictions.

Their predictions require many other changes: "The baseload issue can be solved by reducing baseload demand,having some renewable energy sources that can supply baseload power and increasing the proportion of flexible peakload plant in the generating mix." Who should pay for this? Price pollution properly, and you will see the push away from natural gas and coal to nuclear, not "renewables" at far higher prices ($7-10 billion AUD/year for Australia, according to this article).

In summary, if you change the goalposts (reduce baseload) and pay lots more, "renewables" are totally doable according to somebody with no engineering experience.
So I should move to Beijing if I want to have a startup related to finance?

What benefits do financial capitals even offer other then finding companies if you are looking for life/health/car/etc insurance.
The most common situation seems to be one where it is legal for Airbnb, the business, to exist and do what it does, but where the majority of the people listing their places to rent on it are violating some law/regulation or clause of their lease by doing so.

Sort of like how running a user-generated content site is legal, but people who upload movies/albums/etc. to it in violation of copyright are on the wrong side of the law.
The problem with wholesale prices driving towards zero is how do you recover costs associated with security of supply. It's great that solar makes wholesale prices zero throughout the day. But if generators can't recover the cost of their investments, then they'll eventually decommission those plants.

There are different types of power plants such as Peaker Plants (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peaking_power_plant) that can start quickly (within minutes) to provide security of supply against renewables. However, they are quite a bit more expensive to operate, which means wholesale prices will need to increase in order to make money with them.

Source - I work for one of New Zealand's largest electricity generators.
You just rolled out a self-service system. Now What?
I kept mine in my back pocket while at a wedding reception, last weekend, and when I finally pulled it out to use it, it had warped, and would no longer lay flat. While it still seemed completely usable, I'm definitely going to return it, right after I post to Youtube.
It just takes a lot of water and space to make any meaningful dent in the power supply. There are hydroelectric storage facilities near Niagara falls but they produce something like 50MW for a very limited time.

If you take for instance an elevation of 100m, to produce 1000MW of electricity it would take about 1000m^3 of water per second (before losses). In other words a pipe of a diameter of 6ft would need to need to move 20.8ft of water through it per second, which would be enough water to fill an Olympic sized swimming pool in about 2.5sec. That's 5760 pools for 4hrs of 1000MWh of electricity, not an insignificant amount of space.
Before that, people probably drank beer, spirits, or soda. But when it became more well known that these things are not healthy, people began to desire plain water instead, and everybody were used to the idea of buying drinks at the store, so bottled plain water appeared.
Good point. I'd be curious about the person-hours worked on both the problems in the comic.

My first reaction was "you'd have to explain some things are easy cause there's libraries/tech that does that". I guess the real explanation is " countless hours and dollars spent by others who came before us make this easy...".
The Curse of Increasing Marginal Work Utility, or Why I Work So Much
YC App – Should Responses Still Be 120 Words or Less?
I was just looking at Drew Houston's application from Summer 2007 and saw that they asked applicants to keep all responses under 120 words. Is this still the case?
Oh wow!

It blows my mind that the author of htop and gobolinux and luarocks are the same person. Much respect. I use htop every day. And Nix and GoboLinux are architectural inspirations.

What I am saying about luarocks is that all code pulled over the wire should be signed and or encrypted to maintain the chain of trust. Maven just went through this, as it was only accessible over HTTP unless users paid a fee.

http://www.infoq.com/news/2014/08/Maven-SSL-Default

I could setup a MITM on a local wifi network (hacker space, coffee shop, school network, etc) and installed backdoors via luarocks because the traffic goes in the clear and the packages are not signed.

Luarocks should be secure by default. I found it really hard to activate SSL in luarocks.
Seriously, I found a few of the conclusions drawn from the data here to be pretty odd. I was hoping for some interesting insight but the article is really disappointing.

> "The language in the former is more neutral and about the content of the article (apparently Hacker News users really like to talk about Open Source software), while the submissions about gender and diversity trend to talk about tangent topics."

Does the author _really_ find it surprising that combining all topics will lead to, on average, more "neutral" language than a topic that (ostensibly) doesn't require any expertise/knowledge of esoterica? It should be obvious that the number of people who have an opinion about diversity in tech will be higher than the number of people who feel the same way about "Show HN: Virtjs, an ES6 emulation library " or "The amazing progress of LEDs" (both from the front-page right now).

Note: I'm not suggesting that the latter two aren't as _interesting_, but that contributing a comment of substance is obviously going to be more difficult and thus have less people go ahead and do so.
And not portable (or safe, for things like path manipulation). But sure, you can still use os in small scripts.
If it can be shown that it makes more economic sense for a society as a whole to ship bottled water to its citizens instead of having a water supply network for potable, drinkable water, then sure, why not.
The Power of Performance Support for Dynamics CRM Users
More data here:

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2013/08/thoughts-on-i...

http://theinvisiblethings.blogspot.com/2013/09/thoughts-on-i...

".. the processor automatically encrypts the content of SGX-protected memory pages whenever it leaves the processor caches and is stored in DRAM. In other words the code and data used by SGX enclaves never leave the processor in plaintext."

"..once the key is obtained, it is available only within the SGX enclave. It cannot be found in DRAM or on the memory bus, even if the user had access to expensive DRAM emulators or bus sniffers. And the key cannot also be mishandled by the code that runs in the SGX enclave, because remote attestation also proved that the loader code has not been modified.."
> The minimum average points score of any given comment was about 2 points, meaning that all comments received atleast 1 upvote on average. This trend has been increasing until 2011 when it peaked at about 4.5 points. Since then, the average has trended downward, with a particularly large drop starting at 2014.

> Therefore, starting in 2014, both quantity and quality are on a downward trend.

The conclusion is unwarranted, because there are other changes in the system and access points. Most significantly, points are no longer displayed and the shift to mobile devices. This could affect voter's behaviors over time.

For example, people may be less inclined to vote when they do not see points (the numbers could trigger voting in some cases). Voting on mobile phones is also a pain as arrows are very small there, and a lot of mistakes could be made (clicking down arrow when intending to vote up).
I think you should read up. There are multiple such facilities in the US with power over 1GW and capacity of several hours. They were built decades ago with decades-ago technology.
no- check out the muse's yc app https://www.themuse.com/advice/the-muses-successful-applicat...
If you pay attention to the video, the card sends a notification to the phone with the transaction amount & merchant information.

Knowing the transaction amount is not possible from the "sender" portion of a magstripe. You're simply handing over a credit card number. The credit card amount is negotiated over the phone/internet between the bank & merchant.

This means that the Plastc card likely has one hardcoded number that switches payments serverside. Similar to the Wallaby card or Google Wallet card.

This works perfectly fine with chip & pin. The merchant charges the Plastc card which in turn forward the transaction to the correct bank.