skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
If we assume people, even good people, will generally discard morals at the first sight of money and power what can we do to make the system work anyway? Would some way of forcing transparency fix this underlying problem?
Those last two points really resonate with me and several other people I've spoken to about the topic.

I live next door to a hotel in downtown, so getting a taxi is even quicker and more convenient for me than calling Uber or Lyft. However, the incredible rudeness of cabbies and repeatedly being driven to an ATM because their credit card reader is mysteriously "broken" have pretty much dissuaded me from ever taking a regular cab again.
This is a really great answer, I appreciate you taking the time to thoughtfully address Doctorow's issues.

2.5-2.7 are really hard problems. I think that lots of people working in the field get lost on these by trying to achieve some sort of perfect model, or by trying to aggregate every possible option into their model, but neither of them have really been terribly satisfactory or provide the kind of subtle decision framework that humans feel comfortable with.
[Probability is in the mind](http://lesswrong.com/lw/oj/probability_is_in_the_mind/). It's a reflection of our limited information, not reality. There really isn't anything inherently probabilistic about startups. If we had the right information and enough reasoning ability, we would be able to turn the dials just right. That's in theory.

In practice, it's hard to acquire enough information. This is where luck comes into play. You need luck when your information is limited.

But in practice, I don't think we should be overly humble worshipers of this "luck". Yes, it's pretty important, but I think you could reach a point of having enough information and reasoning ability where luck is a notably smaller component of success than skill. I think that we have a ways to go in terms of improving our information and reasoning ability.

* For example, startup ideas are rarely strategically chosen amongst carefully thought out alternatives. They usually just emerge from a side-project.

* And founders really struggle to [isolate](http://lesswrong.com/lw/bc3/sotw_be_specific/) what it really is that gives them a competitive advantage over their competitors.

I think that in 50 years, people will have gotten "good enough" at startups such that luck is a smaller determinant of success than skill.
Well, you don't necessarily need to build a blockchain on proof of work, and you don't necessarily need to use a proof of work algorithm that's easy to parallelise.
I've thought about having a sort of collaborative dictionary, updated in realtime with entries weighted by how frequently people use them over a certain period of time. I'm not sure how practical it would actually turn out to be, but it's an interesting idea.
It can't just be "used". You're under oath during a deposition. Lying under oath is perjury.
The unpredictability of driver arrival time is starting to turn me off as well. I'm finding it highly inconsistent, in multiple countries.

The common driver also seems rather clueless lately. It used to be that you were getting guys who had a day job as a limo driver and they did Uber to make some extra cash. So, they basically knew their way around and how to handle things. Recently I get more drivers that are nice/helpful, but ultimately clueless about how to navigate the area they drive in effectively.
I don't see where the gotcha is in 1 and 2. The meaning is pretty clear if you're familiar with the two languages. Simula is a procedural Algol-style language that includes a class-based OO system, analogous to Java or C++ today. Smalltalk is completely based on message-passing. The distinction between the two approaches is reminiscent of the ML/Haskell divide (strict+impure vs. lazy+pure).

3 and 4 is a statement of principle _preceded_ by an acknowledgement that the definition the book uses is not universal. 5 seems uncontroversial to me; the need for automatic memory management is a secondary outcome of other aspects of object-oriented systems, not a primary quality. And 7 doesn't seem to follow from the quoted excerpt.

All the quotes are from a single 33-year-old copy of Byte magazine. They don't conflict nearly as much as the commentary implies. Together they suggest that an idealized OO system consists strictly of objects passing messages, but that other languages blend OO and procedural features. The same is true today.

EDIT: retracted an unnecessary implication.
Json-sass: Transforms a JSON stream into scss syntax Sass
freebase.com is a real thing: along with DBPedia data, freebase.com is a major input for Google's Knowledge Graph.

I agree that wolfram alpha rocks - I wish it were less expensive to use though.
Just getting out of my daughter's Halloween party today (30 kids aged 3-7, science experiments + sugar = boom!).

I accepted Avi's apology and responded to his email here:
https://twitter.com/Jason/status/526531089355927552
is it possible that dark matter is regular matter, just so diffuse that we don't notice/see it? could it be hydrogen atoms just floating in empty space, at such low densities we would never notice but in the grand scheme of things add up?
Edit: I dont mean to propose a potential solution here, it was more a question of why it must be unknown matter, why can't it be normal matter.
> The author happily compares these companies solely on cost, with no reference at all to quality in any way, shape, or form.

Do these ride-sharing companies even have quality metrics in any meaningful sense? Surely the quality of service you receive is a function of the individual driver-subcontractor, not of whatever mobile app you happened to hail them from?
Brief history of JavaScript
Brilliant book. In it, Rick Chapman also states how there were some things MS should have done differently, but the general opinion that MS "killed" competitors' products and was strongly monopolistic is quite wrong.
You really need a minimum of 16-key rollover to do steno properly. Otherwise you're just really constrained in the number of chords you're able to write.
I've read the Culture series (Ian will be missed), and it certainly is very utopia-like. But at the same time, you have to wonder if the Minds are actually the ones in control. While most of the ships are on the up-and-up, the ones that are members of Special Circumstances seem to be much more pragmatic about achieving their desired results.
In Microsofts case it may have meant undocumented. Features only Microsoft knew were there, since they wrote them
Neurosurgeon Says He Went to Heaven in Near Death Experience
AI won't be hindered by cognitive biases, experiences and emotions which distort human thinking. It'll be better off not being as complex as a human.
Yea, very similar to rolling out Salesforce in financial services...
Yes. The majority of the energy is spent maintaining the network's security. Once that security has been obtained, additional transaction volume -- assuming it's within the network's constraints -- will add little to no additional cost.

To expand, Bitcoin's security is maintained by the miners, who also expend the majority of the network's energy. Transaction volume for the most part is borne by all the network's full nodes, which use relatively little energy.
I have used an Olympus E-P2 and Sony RX100. These are good cameras, but not great, and not approaching a Leica M for one reason: the viewfinders (or lack thereof).

An optical viewfinder is an essential feature which connects the shooter to the subject in a way that cannot be matched by an LCD. And while the beloved Fuji X100(s) has an optical viewfinder, it has a pathetic 90% coverage and 0.5x magnification. This makes a big, big difference in the active, engaged, photo-journalistic work that Leica is known for.

For six years I shot with an Olympus E-1 DSLR. It's lame by today's digital standards, with only 5MP, but it was far better as a tool for making images than any of these no-, small-, or electronic viewfinder cameras.

Example work from one afternoon with the 5 MP E-1: https://www.flickr.com/photos/jzwinck/sets/72157594149676636...
Anyway if you need an invite to try it out: http://www.tsu.co/jsanto
I have no clue; I've never used them or been involved with them. I'm simply pointing out that comparison on cost without even the attempt to analyze quality is a recurring theme that encourages lower prices without consideration of any other factors.
Get Notified When You're on Product Hunt
> About the only advantage of UTF-8 is that ASCII maps to it reasonably well.

Yep, and it's a HUGE advantage, I think it accounts for much of the success of unicode adoption.
Ditto. I've got an M6 TTL (though I don't use the built in meter, in fact, I've never put the meter's battery in, I use an external incident meter since slide film is rathe unforgiving and ... I'm not very good) and I would never buy a digital Leica.

That being said, the Mamiya/Sony digital format rangefinder rumor [0] sounds interesting but what has really piqued my interest is David Hobby's [2] preview of the Fuji X100T's Classic Chrome (read: Kodachrome), Velvia and Provia modes [3]. If I go digital, that's probably the first camera I'd look at.

[0] http://petapixel.com/2014/09/30/rumor-sony-mamiya-release-me...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Hobby

[3] http://petapixel.com/2014/09/10/classic-chrome-film-simulati...
Summary: Hey, I run an awesome company and look at my face on this magazine.

Actually, I really am impressed, and it looks like Carson has good reason to brag. That's cool. But I don't feel like there is all that much substance here.

For one, I think Carson himself is discounting that the difference between doing nothing and making $450K on the sale of a business is actually bigger than $450K and the $100M business he's building now.

He's living proof that there is more to it than luck, but he's saying the opposite.

I guess what's really bugging me here is that the message here is meant to be valuable -- "Anyone can do it." But paradoxically, when Carson and others like him give themselves no credit for their success, then there is nothing we can learn from them. It's like participation trophies -- they don't really teach anybody how to search inside themselves and find the way to win.
I use a standing desk for work, the majority of the time I sit on my chair. But around 2:30pm, the ability to stand up for the rest of the day is a life saver. I know if I had a standing desk thorough high school, my 5th & 6th block classes would have been much easier to stay awake through.
[I was not available to respond as this thread developed so I'm commenting "for the record" to several peers here.]

I offered that link because gives the background that lead to a real, practical metadata standard. The "semantic web" has evolved to be linked data tied together on the public side with JSON-LD and on the private side by whatever implementation technologies.

Manu beat incredible political odds to bring the basic intent of the semantic web forward. One strategy of the linked data community has been to distance itself from "semantic" because the word triggers such rage, as evidenced by the tone of argument in this topic.

It is a mystery to me why these developers waste their time with straw-man hyperbole, offended by a decade old proposal. Those contributing to the "noise machine" are doing a disservice by casting doubt in the name of a no longer operational goal.

With JSON-LD the "semantic web" won. JSON-LD is basic - the basis for whatever one wants to create with linked data. It is not "partial". It is comprehensive and superior to other metadata documents. It's the only solution worth adopting, and it's a standard.

The opportunity, today, is linked metadata for day-to-day applications, which solves a real problem and is getting significant adoption.
No, it is not possible. Cosmological models are actually tightly constrained by data. Even in the late 80s, when we did not have such good data, I remember being amazed at the fact that primordial nucleosynthesis calculations together with observational data were enough to conclude that the number of light "normal" neutrino species was 3, while there were still speculations in Particle Physics that we could have more than 3 generations of particles. The data accumulated over the last 30 years has constrained things even more.

If some other explanation than invoking some new type of matter that can not be seen was possible to explain the observational data, don't you think that Physicists would use that instead of coming up with postulating that the Universe is dominated by "dark matter" and "dark energy" which we have not seen yet?
You trust software written in the US, Europe and Australia? Do we read the same HackerNews?
Thank you for framing this in the way you did. There are so many ways to arrange human affairs. Some people thrive in certain environments and despair in others. Genetics plays a role in how we respond to different stimuli, but we're not finding out as many immutable facts of psychological character via genetics as your parent commenter thinks we do.
Yep, I put it up again because we had a major update where we were able to intro a very rudimentary chat bot, so ppl who sign up and don't yet have any friends to talk with can still see what it would be like to receive real time (RT) texts.

A lot of people have a bunch of presumptions about RT but have never used it, so they wouldn't know the benefits of it. They just go by "what it sounds like". It's new technology, so people are justifiably wary.

As for g wave. Yes, i'm aware. This hasn't been done in an app however, so thats #1. And #2, we introduced a unique "beam in" mechanic that allows people to actually respond, comment (interrupt even) on point, as far as I'm aware, noone was able to solve this problem, of 2 people talking at same time, before (solve it well that is).
Lots of people say that cameras are just light-proof boxes :)

Part of the Leica/Leitz history is that they single-handidly popularized the 35mm format. Before that, if you wanted decent photos, chances are you were dragging around a large format rig with bellows, ground glass, etc all on a tripod.
Balbuzard Malware Tool (python)
We really want to bump it up to 6 months, and the decision all hinges on a slight mystery we have surrounding "data churn". In a nutshell: we aren't sure we can afford to bump it up to a 6 month retention without changing price, but we need to do some additional analysis or tests to make sure.

> I suppose I might not be profitable so maybe not worth fixing

No no, you are (one of) our target customers! Here is why: you post to ycombinator and you are technical enough to understand the implications of the 30 day roll back policy, and you are actually evaluating software on merits - this alone puts you in something like the upper 5 percent of technical computer society. Yeah, maybe we lose a dollar a month on your backup, but if you are using Backblaze you'll probably recommend it to five other people we make money off of. Your recommendation is GOLD to us.
The research is pretty clear. Any amount of time sent standing is better than that amount of time sitting. Your muscles stay in use, your heart works more efficiently, and you burn more calories, than sitting. So no, sitting + walking breaks is not healthier than always standing.

Cost shouldn't be a factor if you really care about treating your body better. It's super easy to ad-hoc your own standing desk for free, or spend some money to get something built for standing. Remember, if you're doing it for 8+hours a day, that's 1/4 of your life. It's worth the money you spend.
> when Carson and others like him give themselves no credit for their success, then there is nothing we can learn from them.

That's the whole point of the post. There aren't any quick tips, todos or silver bullets I can give you that will help you. The post isn't meant to be ultimately affirming. It's just reality as I see it.

> Summary: Hey, I run an awesome company and look at my face on this magazine.

I'm sorry that's your takeaway. I've failed to communicate to you the reason I wrote it.
Took about a year to work most of the mistakes out. Lots of typos. An unimaginable amount of typos. I don't consider myself any more proficient. Typing dvorak is a bit different: I type word by word, instead of letter by letter. I still type on qwerty (who doesn't, at work?) but that feels more like stringing together an infinite sequence of letters. Dvorak tends to make words a bit easier to type in single fluid motions. So when I actually start typing fast in dvorak it gets crazy fast pretty quickly. Hence the typos.

It took at least a few years before I could type dvorak with just my right hand, which is tricky seeing the other letters when I'm staring at a qwerty keyboard.

I regret nothing. (:
To start off, nothing about dark matter contradicts GR. All contemporary cosmological models of the Universe, which are constructed from GR, include dark matter.

The "surprise" that is attributed to the discovery of dark matter involves estimates of the mass of a galaxy due to contributions from stars, gas, etc., that fall woefully short of mass estimates obtained from observations of galaxy rotation velocities (kinematics). That is, we know how much mass there is there because of our understanding of gravity, but other methods of measuring the mass don't come close to this figure.

At galactic size scales GR adds virtually nothing to the Newtonian kinematics, the general relativistic corrections are substantial only when the gravitational field is very strong (e.g., binary neutron stars/black holes, very very near super massive black holes). GR is used in cosmology to model the universe on very large scales; scales so large that the "clumpy" universe that we see comprised of stars, galaxies, galaxy clusters, actually starts to look very, very smooth. Again, even within galaxy clusters, modeling the evolution of the mass in a cluster via GR doesn't change much compared with a model using Newtonian gravity.

There currently exists no experiments which contradict GR, and a great amount of data (including observations of stars near the Milky Way's supermassive black hole) which directly supports it. Most people cite special relativity as the correction method behind time-dilation effects for satellites in orbit (e.g., GPS) but strictly speaking, special relativity is only completely accurate in the absence of a gravitational field.
>"I use Vi because I can type faster in it, a mouse slows me down!"

I use vim (or emacs) because the regex search/replace and macros mean that when I need to edit the same thing 5,000 times in a data file I don't need to fire someone in India for a week to hunt them down.

Typing speed has very little to do with it, but avoiding the mind numbing tedium of going from underscore variable names to CamelCase or vise versa is a godsend.

>I code on the terminal because it has less distractions,

I code on the terminal because when I use tmux I can have the equivalent of 30 IDE windows open each looking at a snippet of code I need. Until I have have a monitor wall I can carry around with me that can display a few dozen different windows there really is no comparison.

It's not about speed, it's about keeping in your head what you're doing. For example, there is a function call in a source file to fn_ive_never_seen(), in an IDE the best you can hope for is for it to dig up where it was defined, and maybe the header file if it's some C type language.

I can open a new window on the terminal, grep the whole source base for this function, see where it is used, where it is defined and with sed edit all those definition to take an extra variable I need by just stringing together a few commands in yet another window.

Again, it's not about speed, it's about getting a computer, which is very good at being pedantic, to make sure that every last mention of something is changed the way you want it to be changed.
> Regarding the Square-Cube law, I'm not sure it's that relevant here. It's pretty clear you could put two of those engines in a AMA sized model, so not exceeding 55 lbf. That'd give you a thrust-to-weight ratio of greater than 1.0.

Yes, a small turbine-powered RC aircraft can easily have a higher thrust-to-weight ratio than a full-sized aircraft, but it's not thrust-to-weight ratio that determines top speed; it's thrust-to-drag ratio.

This is where the square-cube law comes into it. If we take a full-sized delta-winged high performance aircraft like the Eurofighter Typhoon, we could very roughly approximate the difference in drag between that and the model to be proportional to the difference between the square of their wingspans.

I'm guessing the aircraft in the video has a wingspan of 1 m, and the Typhoon has a wingspan of 11 m, so the drag should be greater by something like a factor of 121.

However, the Typhoon's engines provide a combined 180 kN of thrust, which is greater than the 160 N thrust of the Jetcat P160 by a factor of 1125.

So, you can see that the thrust-to-drag ratio of a full-sized jet fighter is something like an order of magnitude larger than for a model aircraft like this, which is the main reason why model aircraft are unable to attain supersonic speeds.

Of course, supersonic flight for model aircraft would pose all the same problems it poses for full-sized aircraft; onset of compressibility affecting control surface response, engine inlet geometry and so on.
I was assuming you or others wanted something you could actually use today.
Slow clap :)

The main problem with the OOP community is that it has basically gone incognito. There are no edgy new ideological OO languages being pushed for mass adoption (like Scala, Clojure, Rust, or even Haskell); instead we have Dart and TypeScript as very pragmatic plays. Time to wake up.

And, as the article suggests, we all have completely different ideas of what OOP really is. It is all about the messages, or polymorphism, or classes/prototypes. Or maybe it is all about the nouns and object thinking. But as you suggest, the FP people have similar problems.
Anecdotally: I’m one of the worst procrastinators I know, and also one of the best mathematical problem solvers. Some of the most organized and diligent people I know are terrible at logical/mathematical reasoning.

I don’t think there’s a strong relationship. If anything, mathematical problem solving requires a lot of drifting around in the problem space and doodling that can be difficult for someone who approaches work/problem solving in a start-working-now-and-work-until-it’s-done kind of way.
Have you thought about using less/grep? What kind of analysis are you looking to do?
The Government Accountability Office (for the federal government, at least) does exactly what you describe. Too bad GAO studies are, at best, used as political footballs to make sitting politicians look bad at election time and at worst, are ignored completely.