skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that telescopic empathy is often more self-serving and less helpful than it appears, I would make the same claim of calls to "step out of the game," finite or no.

There are rewards to being first. On some axes, it is better to reign in hell than to serve in heaven.

Further, in some cases humans actively create finite games for others to play. You used to be able to hunt buffalo and live off the land. Not anymore.

I'll make some not-so-brave statements, and then I'll make some brave (and, in my opinion, useful) ones.

Not so brave:

1. Life is a finite game. Over the long term, and on varying resources, Malthus was right.

2. We've gotten a lot of great stuff from having humans play finite games. This "market" one is pretty neat. Idealists imagined the rectangle I'm using to type this, but pragmstists financed its development.

3. Finite games can do horrible damage to people, causing them to starve, isolate themselves, and harm others. That's the short list.

4. "People" should "find" a "balance" that's "right for them."

Brave(r):

1. A finite game can sometimes be transformed to an infinite game by projecting it over time. Startups perform this alchemy all the time by considering lifetime customer value rather than just initial revenue. Horatio Alger, as long as he spends less than he makes, is a source of infinite money.

2. In a unpredictable and uncaring universe, one should carefully guard one's main source of sustenance---even if that's a finite game, save value, and then make small risky forays into more desireable territory. This is the operating principle of the financial world.

3. Sometimes big investments are necessary (so, maybe not so brave).
I would vote for something like StackEdit beta [1]. It is really nice in the way it keeps the syntax (markdown) in a WYSIWYG-style editor.

[1] http://stackedit-beta.herokuapp.com/
Xiaomi Is Moving International Users Data Out of China
My Learning While Building a Bootstrap Startup in India
I tried some stuff with Meteor a while back. I was very excited about the concept and really felt on board with the 'new way to write apps' stuff. It is pretty cool, but I was trying to implement a site where people could post stories and have an author badge appear on the page.

This requires joins. Mongo doesn't have joins, and Meteor doesn't even have fake joins, like Mongoose's 'populate'. There has been a lot written in the Meteor community about faking joins, as it is a persistent problem. First, I tried template helpers, but these are impossible to put into a nested template.

I looked at 5 different open source packages for serverside fake joins, but ended up doing a clientside solution (to get a feel for the 'basic' way to do things). This solution involved several functions on the clientside router, that would be called several times, with different data available each time. It is a convoluted thing to do, no matter the method.

Another thing I tried to do was purely clientside databinding, to populate the author badge in real time as the user fills a form. It's trivial to bind data to the database and have that update in realtime, but I wanted to hold off saving anything until the user hit the save button. Again, a simple task got weird. I ended up using an un-synced database collection, then saving to an identical, but synced collection.

I'm not writing off Meteor completely, but I ended up moving away from it. Node.js and a solid frontend framework have slightly more boilerplate, but are generally very flexible for whatever it is you want to do. In retrospect, one of the best things about Meteor is the one-line auth setup. This is usually a big pain, and it was nice to have it be so easy.
"Ready for export in 2022", it says. That's a lot of countries you can't sell to if you have to rely on snow all year round.
> I'm also not sure why buyers of luxury cars in the US in particular want "powerful" sports cars in a country where the maximum speed limit we get is a kindergarten level 70-75 mph

Because handling and acceleration are useful and FUN even if you aren't red lining it.

> than spending, say, $60,000

The original author specifically denigrates BMWs, which you can purchase for less than $60k.

It's all relative, I guess.
> For example, I love angular, but migrating away from angular after using it for one year would doubtless be a very painful process.

I wish AngularJS’s dependency injection/forced modularity and HTML augmentation/templating were somehow independent and not requiring each other.

> if I outgrew this, how difficult would it be to migrate away from it?

I'm becoming successful at fighting my urge to migrate my projects away from things I outgrow. I reason that changed preferences alone should not constitute a reason to rewrite an existing and working solution. And in case costs of adapting existing solution are higher than costs of rewriting it from scratch, then this is probably due to some unfortunate design decisions or obscure libraries/frameworks used, so these are the things to avoid.
> Could it instead be just that Google scans Google Play apps for a string in the binary that matches the Flatbuffers version string format?

Of course that's what's happening: https://github.com/google/flatbuffers/blob/master/include/fl...
I was also somewhat skeptical of the author's claim that the barrier to entry for Wikipedia editors was the editor itself. I've read a few papers concluding that Wikipedia contributions are declining because of the community pushing out people who don't understand the many rules that have been developed[1], or in other cases because editors have gotten into turf wars over articles they feel some sense of ownership over[2]. Meanwhile, I haven't read anything concluding that the editing environment was a strong deterrent (although I haven't been looking, so I could be willfully blind).

Edit: more articles identifying interpersonal friction as the leading factor deterring would-be editors [3,4]. At this point I'm suspicious of the author's due diligence in studying the problem, making the proposed solution more dubious.

[1] Suh, Bongwon, et al. "The singularity is not near: slowing growth of Wikipedia." Proceedings of the 5th International Symposium on Wikis and Open Collaboration. ACM, 2009.

[2] Thom-Santelli, Jennifer, Dan R. Cosley, and Geri Gay. "What's mine is mine: territoriality in collaborative authoring." Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. ACM, 2009.

[3] Kittur, Aniket, and Robert E. Kraut. "Harnessing the wisdom of crowds in wikipedia: quality through coordination." Proceedings of the 2008 ACM conference on Computer supported cooperative work. ACM, 2008.

[4] Halfaker, Aaron, Aniket Kittur, and John Riedl. "Don't bite the newbies: how reverts affect the quantity and quality of Wikipedia work." Proceedings of the 7th international symposium on wikis and open collaboration. ACM, 2011.
Nowadays the way to demonstrate you are a good person is to express sympathy and empathy for various approved groups.

Uh, modern people prove they are good in a variety of ways with PC-politics being just one, feel-good charity another, tough-love realism another and so-forth. And modern people also prove they are strong and successful and sexy and what-all else, it's a Vanity Fair out there.

But a clever jump from the problem of envy to the problem of "sympathy and empathy for various approved groups."
Am a writer (fiction) and a blogger (SEO), & I suffer from headaches if looking at a screen too long.

This thing would save my life (and productivity).

Damn. I want one of these RIGHT. NOW. :)
The difference between exercise/sports and training is the goal of getting the most amount of measurable impact towards a specific set of goals with the least amount of effort and time invested.

It may be the case that playing sports (particularly soccer) will yield some progress towards your targets, but that will be with greatly reduced efficiency than if you put focussed effort to specific goals.
> Having huge stockpile of artillery and armoured vehicles it is very difficult enemy to have.

The media went on and on about Iraq having "the 4th largest army in the world" during the first Gulf War. In the end, this amounted to a lot of people in uniform dying when the bombs collapsed their shelters or blowing up in their Soviet-era tanks. Having land-based vehicles doesn't amount for much nowadays if you don't have air superiority as well.
Ah yes, that's possible; I'm not sure why I leapt to that conclusion. In that case, an app which uses this library and is only published on the Amazon Android App Store would not be tracked I guess.

I actually find it kind of interesting that I mentally turned "tracked" into "calls home".
Keep in mind that Poland's immediate threats are militias, irregulars, mafia, gangs, and assorted bashi-bazouks. A ground weapon with an aesthetically intimidating presence has value in this context.
I refuse to take seriously a typography site that looks that awful. Go take a look. Wince.
Good idea, as latex editing can be incredibly slow, but the math support failed on my first test case: $$A = \sum_{n=-\infty}^{+\infty} f(x)$$
An IDE looks like a solution for developers by developers. I'm not sure it will appeal to most people. I consider the Visual Editor to be a good solution for non-techie newcomers. They are more used to visually similar tools.
It's not so bad after all. http://codio.com, on the other hand... ;)
Implementation of Apple Pay in-app payment crypto
Whisper: Setting the Record Straight [pdf]
The concept that playing zero-sum games is socially unacceptable needs to come back. This would not have been a strange concept to a businessman of the 1950s.
LG INTRODUCES COMPANY’S FIRST MOBILE APPLICATION PROCESSOR
Yeah so let's just redo all those thousands of hours of work... for one specific format that has literally one use.
It doesn't make you a weirdo but you are throwing away the baby with the bathwater. I can't tell you how many times I've looked at a proof or a solution to a problem and thought to myself that it just feels wrong and ugly and that there should be a more elegant approach. And sure enough after a bit of digging and thinking there is a better and more elegant approach.

That feeling of ugliness is not formal or logical in any way. It is a visceral and emotional reaction and there is no specific set of formal reasons I can point to that gives rise to it. The history of science and mathematics is full of examples of such emotional insights so seems to me your theory of "enlightenment" is incomplete.
It's ironic that you mention diminishing returns, as many automobiles in the $200,000+ range appreciate in value, rather than depreciate.

A $60,000 car is still, by all objective standards, a luxury car.

Mercedes-Benz, founded by the inventor of the automobile, Karl Benz, has consistently been the leader in automotive innovation, particularly in safety features. http://www.mbusa.com/mercedes/benz/innovation

Top speed is not the only desirable attribute of a powerful car. Accelerating to 75mph in 4 seconds is an enjoyable experience in its own right. Additionally, does the speed limit actually stop people from driving as fast as they want? Where I live, the speed limit most accurately describes the lower limit, not the upper.

"Everyone" may, perhaps, be construed as an overwhelming majority, but not a simple majority. A majority of voters selected Barack Obama as President of The United States in 2012. It would not be accurate to state that everyone selected Barack Obama as President.
Objective-C is here to stay, just like C.

NodeJs is great,it's really,really powerfull and easy to use.I mean i did some crazy messaging/parrallel/realtime apps with that. At the same time, i'm not a big fan of javascript itself. It's not bad,it's just that I like more rigid,typesafe languages. I was a big fan of Actionscript 3 which is in my opinion some kind of compromise between dynamism and "statism".I'm glad i began programming in it by the way,or I would have never been able to learn java or C# afterwards.
I'm all for beautiful and better typography... but for a site that laments the lack of feature awareness, it sure didn't use the opportunity to teach me something. I don't know any more about those features than I did before reading it.
I've been living out of a suitcase for the most part, but recently I've been developing my hobby of cooking, and now I'm anchored down by a huge pile of heavy, expensive kitchen items.
The basic reason that Wikipedia editing is down is that most of the job is done. The goal was to produce a reasonably comprehensive encyclopedia. Mission accomplished. Most of the important articles were written years ago. Take a look at new articles being created. They are mostly about very minor subjects.

This was typical of the paper encyclopedias. The initial creation of the Encyclopedia Brittanica was a huge job. The periodic maintenance update was a far smaller one.
I've been thinking recently that Twitter is rapidly becoming a tool for people to claim Moral Superiority. There's all sorts of culture wars being fought, and both sides seem intent on showing how much more Moral they are.

That's always been around, but it feels like it's become much more intense online over the past year or two.

I think it may have been an inevitable phase of moving the world online, when I step back and try to look at it objectively. Suddenly billions of people are talking to each other and getting a sense of their place in the world. Naturally, they're trying to establish an identity in that mass of humanity. Staking out their territory.

Part of that is aligning themselves with a tribe. Some of the old tribal leaders (politicians) are extremely adept at that game and have been successfully pulling people into the highly (and quite intentionally) polarized divisions that serve the leaders' goals. You can see this at work when you see the masses parrot whatever the approved outrage of the week is (and this applies to all extremes on the political spectrum).

The key point is that these outrages are specifically selected for their ability to divide the populace into neat little tribes. A lot of political issues are chosen for focus because they serve as a Sorting Hat, if that makes sense. That benefits the people who are already in charge of those Houses.

I'd like to think this is just a phase, though. We're very early on in the game. People are just getting used to an idea that they can establish their identity in the big global world, and so far they're leaning on the old structures. Maybe in years to come they won't have to, maybe they'll find other ways to establish identity. At least I hope that's the case.

Anyway, this is kind of rambling. I should try to organize these thoughts a little better.
You win. This is the correct answer.

Our car was in the shop for the better part of a month this summer and I was considering just buying a new one. I'd heard lots of good thing about the BMW 3 Series but hadn't ever driven one. Hey, since I need to rent a car anyway, why not grab one o' those for a week to see it I like it?

So I find a national chain that advertises them. I get my rental confirmation with a big picture and the words BMW 3 Series on it. I call the local office just to make sure they'll have one ready for me. The answer? We don't rent BMWs.

Yes, they have a couple. But no, you can't have one. They're reserved for a special program exclusively for bmw owners. No BMW, no BMW rental.

But that doesn't stop them putting a picture of one one the homepage of their site or 'renting' one to you.

Awesome.
*By using browser storage instead of hijackable session cookies, CSRF attacks are impossible.*

Cool, but it makes way harder to scale up without websockets support for load balancing, since it uses SockJS, which requires sticky sessions.
A culture of envy? Maybe. But in a world where the top 1% controls 50% of the global wealth, what is surprising about it?
what happened to the balloon?
Outgrowing Meteor is a valid concern. It's intertwined with your backend and db, so it's definitely a lot of work to migrate off of.

I just want to make the distinction between that and JS frameworks that don't try to own your whole stack. Migrating from Angular is no more painful than migrating from Backbone. They're all frontend frameworks that talk to a rest api. When choosing between React, Backbone, Angular, Ember, etc ... it seems to me that migration effort shouldn't even be a consideration since a complete UI rewrite will be required in any case.
Write in Go (ScaleAbility 2014)
Ah, good -- numbers will clarify the situation considerably.

Personally my preference would be to argue that for applications that aren't terribly performance-sensitive, log time in general just isn't that bad. Even binary trees are quite usable for many purposes. (I believe the Linux kernel uses red-black trees for various things.) For a general-purpose sequence data structure that will be used in a variety of ways, a very good case can be made that it's worth accepting log-time lookup in order to get log-time insertion, subsequence, and concatenation -- operations that all take linear time on an ArrayList (and linear time will kill you far sooner than log time!).

On top of that, Hickey, following Bagwell, has done a great job at keeping the constant factors down, as (I presume) the benchmark numbers will show.

Another point I would make is that true random access into a seq is not the only way elements are retrieved. Often this is done via an iterator. I presume the Clojure seq iterator takes amortized constant time per element (it should); if so, I think it would be worth pointing that out.

All that said, I guess I could live with "practically O(1) for non-HPC applications".

Sorry I was so combative. I had not looked closely at Clojure seqs, so I do appreciate this series of posts you have written.
Using a degree as a filter tells me the company in question is absolutely horrible at hiring. Grab a dart board. Just as effective.
More Common Trip-ups for New Rubyists
I imagine a bug in a CAS software can be a few orders of magnitude more difficult to solve than just figuring out how to use python debugging tools. Software development is usually a burdensome task, have some humility, please.
Such fictitious places appear in all derived (and original) maps, and is not by itself an indication of ripping off - it's only used as evidence when someone claims that their map is not copied. It will also show up for everyone who has legitimately acquired the map data.

In particulal, the original article mentions an acquisition path how most likely that map has made it's way legally to google.
> Nope, you are confused about the difference between comparing and equating.

You can compare Apple to Oranges, they are both fruits. You can compare Donald McDuck to an asteroid if you like. But that doesn't make it meaningful just because you said so. Same with a social network and a military state.

> What do you think? You made the claim, it's not my job to provide the evidence.

I didn't make a claim, I just stated the obvious. Any similar, privacy-oriented social network that has then less 10% of Facebook's adoption is obviously not doing well as a FB competitor.

> Just read this thread for examples? The most obvious example: Some people who value their privacy are excluded from some parts of social life due to network effects/social pressure from facebook, even where the loss of privacy is not an inherent part of the respective activity. That's a loss for these people at the very least, and not unlikely to also be a disadvantage for society as a whole, if such people are effectively removed from the social fabric of society.

I understand what you're saying, but you're whining about a choice because you don't like either outcome :-) ... That's a pretty much standard situation and applies to virtually anything I can think of.
I agree, but that is all outside the context of the article. The article specifically takes issue with China's export restrictions. I argue that limiting exports to produce political pressure is fair play, as it is not exclusively a tactic of the Chinese government.
Show HN: Cheese 0.6.6 – a flexible, reactive JavaScript web framework
Inevitably we are working with a lot of assumptions. But the Drake equation is one of the simplest expressions of our reasoning in this area imaginable. There is nothing contrived about the equation itself. You might choose to put in different variables, but the result would be the same.

At this point we do have a much better idea about the individual factors than we had when Frank Drake first wrote it down. We now know that planets are common. We know that tool-using intelligences arose independently several times on our planet, our civilization just happens to be the first on the local stage. We know that AI and nano technology have the potential to vastly increase the amount of time during which civilizations have a detectable output (hence the drone argument). We know there is nothing in principle preventing a civilization from colonizing the galaxy, even if speed-of-light restrictions always apply. So the argument goes that some species should already have done that. Given the age of the universe, it also seems unlikely that we're simply one of the first civilizations to arise.

While you can easily argue that it's all useless speculation as long as we don't know the exact value of every single factor, the sheer volume of scenarios pointing to the WTF-ness of the Fermi Paradox should absolutely bother us. We're not exactly a cautious or rational civilization (yet), so the odds of us ignoring something fundamental in this area might be quite high.
Molecular biology student here. I've never heard muscles producing (synthesizing) testosterone. It's synthesized in male testicles and adrenal gland. Care to elaborate what do you mean?
PanGu iOS 8 will avaialable to jailbreak iOS 8iPhone jailbreak
on a military radar he probably looked like a ballistic missile warhead :)
Some syntactic sugar for Clojure's threading macros
Apparently Cap'n Proto doesn't build with MSs compiler[1]. Does it build on Windows (where the benchmarks were performed [2]) at all?

[1] http://kentonv.github.io/capnproto/news/2014-06-17-capnproto... (see feature matrix)

[2]http://google.github.io/flatbuffers/md__benchmarks.html (introduction/top of article)
I just did a distance ride (100 miles per day) on my mountain bike loaded with camping gear on dirt paths. Average pace was 10mph, there are more than just carbon bikes on flat roads...
Can you elaborate? Most editors have SyncTeX (http://mactex-wiki.tug.org/wiki/index.php/SyncTeX) support and most viewers can handle that. You can pretty easily build on every change. Also, when the document becomes long, you can split it in multiple parts that only get rebuilt if they change. That's a sane way of organizing things anyways.

I never had any performance probs.