skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A man named Thomas Malthus proposed an explanation why this is and will always be the case, back in the early 1800s.

Populations will always grow, even if there aren't enough resources for the next generation. As a result, some catastrophe must happen to keep the population in check: war, disease or famine.

These days we like to think that we've escaped the malthusian limit, as first world nations tend to have a naturally shrinking population.

Of course, we haven't solved any other of our philosophical vices, I'm inclined to think this isn't any different.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malthusian_catastrophe
You're again depending on your partner being truthful. That's fine, but assuming people are truthful is horrible science. Statistically speaking, 50% of everyone cheat on their partners. The number that serves some white lie about their sexual history is probably way higher.
You got me banned, really irresponsable linking directly. I didn't look at the url and thought it would be a regular post..
What is a country?

I'll just keep on turning it around - why would some folks in New York, for instance, decide for people living in Alabama, or Wyoming?
The EU will not change those treaties, because it has no real reason to.

And especially now: How do you refuse something to David Cameron's UK (a big member state), but hand it to Switzerland (a small non-member state)?

In the case of the UK, it would demolish the very core idea and foundation of the EU. This UK parallel makes it very, very unlikely that the EU would give anything to Switzerland that could even only hint at flexibility in this matter.

The "best" outcome Switzerland can hope for (unless they repeal that immigration reform) is a state where Switzerland is in breach of the treaties, but the EU looks the other way, either on purpose, or because the member states cannot agree on a way to handle the situation. This couldn't last forever, though.

And by the way: Trying to have a treaty re-negotiated has already worked out not so very well for Switzerland in the case of Zurich airport. ;-)

Although I have to admit, we Germans basically did the same thing to Switzerland in the case of the CDs with tax data. It is a shitty thing to do.
Well, nothing, but that's bug hunting: you try it and see. Whether or not this helps to recreate the problem on demand, you know more than you did before.
I agree. One of the most cringe-worthy parts of this post is the author's multiple references to bond funds. Owning bond funds is not the same thing as owning bonds and every bond investor should know the difference.

Bond prices have an inverse relationship with interest rates. Bond prices fall when interest rates rise. When you own individual bonds, you cannot lose your principal if you hold to maturity unless the issuer defaults. Most bond funds do not hold bonds to maturity, so investors in bond funds have significant exposure to interest rate risk. This is especially true today given the interest rate environment.

There are other ways to address interest rate risk with bond funds, especially if you have a longer horizon. You can buy short-term bond funds, and there are even defined maturity funds. But you don't find any mention of those in the post. It's just bonds = bond funds.

It all comes back to your comment, "put the time in and you'll be rewarded over the long term." Even seemingly simple financial advice ("buy a bond fund!") is insufficient because it requires more time and effort to execute correctly than most people are willing to put in.
Indeed.

It's much easier to be a web contrarian than to build widely-used solutions that don't have limitations, drawbacks, inconsistencies, or other issues.
GCC hasn't really had a great track record here, things got so bad back in the day that EGCS became necessary (https://gcc.gnu.org/news/announcement.html)
I've been trying to understand programming for a while now. I know some Python and Clojure, but don't consider that programming knowledge mostly because its just syntax and syntax is just a triviality. So, instead I am trying to gain a better proficiency through programming close to hardware because I heard there are programs(for example, Assembly) that are in one-to-one correspondence with the underlying hardware they are written for. I've been recommended the books(and many more), but I am not sure how to group them thematically. I am not scared of math parts - just there's an huge volume of text to digest for just an intro to "programming done right". I am not in a rush to learn JAVA and go dev somewhere. Thanks.
Ask HN: Supporting patients with cancer
Hi, I am exploring and working on how to support patients with cancer in a better way. I am still in an idea phase but I wanted to get a feedback from the HN community.

How do you support your close relatives/friends with cancer?
When supporting them, what did you do that make them feel better?

Thanks! :) Have a great day!
From what I have seen, that is not at all an unpopular opinion. Minecraft is widely considered, even by its own player base, to be a resource-hogging, poorly-built mess.

It is really fun, though.
Because hoarding a nearly worthless mineral makes some people sleep better at night.
Ask HN: How can I get unbanned?
So, someone posted this on HN. Do NOT click on the link hooked to the post. hxxps://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8676812

Basically it's a jsfiddle with loads of img tags linked to HN causing loads of requests. I didn't think when clicking, and my home IP got blocked. Emailed PG but I know he gets tons of emails and not sure if he'll even see my message. How can I get my IP unblocked?
The problem with OO - and this applies to Smalltalk too - is that class hierarchies are a bad fit for a changing business environment, being hard to refactor when previous assumptions change: inevitably some new case will come along which requires changes to the structures that were originally defined, and OO is harder to deal with in that context.

That said, I do think OO is good for problem areas that actually have fairly static interfaces, like GUI libraries, for instance
I've been pondering doing one of these as a startup weekend suggestion for next year. I like where you're headed so far!
If you'll excuse my curiosity... what was it? I've never heard of a multi-day trip, and I've been around my fair share of drug users and abusers.
Show HN: Memfinity.org – Social, spaced-repetition web service
> I'm in some programming class in france. The teacher argued that OOP and encapsulation makes programs more secure. It really felt like a political statement.

Really depends on what he meant by secure.I'm french too.Encapsulation isnt about shipping proprietary binaries.You dont need OOP for that,furthermore,almost anything can be decompiled so your point is moot.

You'll understand when you work with a team,you'll understand the value of encapsulation, and forcing every developper to work with well defined interfaces that cannot be violated.Encapsulation makes communication easier,testing easer,it makes everything easier.

> Templates are a good extension of OOP, but it's not used that much, even while the STL justifies the existence of templates.

I would argue templates have little to do with OOP.It's a tool that allows genericity.You could have generics in a non OO language.

> It's just a coding practice, it's not some grand way to think and construct applications.

No it's a feature not a practice.The alternative is ugly stuff like in javascript where you put _ before prototype methods to express an intent. So much that ES6 comes with symbols because it shouldnt be just an intent.A developper should be able to express what he means,no just an intent(still possible in ES5,with priviledge methods but noT compatible with prototypal inheritance).

OOP is a tool,encapsulation is one of the most important things in OOP.Wether a language implement explicit encapsulation or not is of course an implementation detail.
correction: it was fM(N) where N=[0..1000[ and constant M=20 (i think; 20 didn't take too long for 1000 iterations). results were added up and printed at the end and outside the benchmarking loop.
Rust borrow and lifetimes
Ask HN: What are some simple things people can do to be more secure (online)?
Basically, what are easy things that everyone should be doing to keep their information secure?

Things that the average user would be able to do (and should be doing), but wouldn't be so burdensome/onerous that the average user would choose to not do.

2-Factor authentication is an obvious one here.
Complex passwords/not reusing passwords would be another.

Things like that?
> Why does Google not provide this information in their privacy policy?

Most likely because they prefer the policy to stay at a length that it's feasible to read. Unlike the questions which are answered there, which put upper limits on things, the questions you've listed are ones that would require significantly more detailed answers to have any value, since the answer will often vary across products and circumstances, and there are a lot of Google products (not to mention even more circumstances).
Ask HN: Accounting for a brand new startup
Just co-founded a company with my neighbor - more on that later... How are you handling accounting now? What's the most cost efficient way for 2 partners to have simple income and expense tracking so tax time will be easy? Still in R&D but we've closed the first sale (we already have a check and no bank account yet).
An alternative explanation is that they (or maybe 'we'..) voted to preserve the statu quo. A quick look through historical vocation results will tell you that this is as strong a predictor as it gets.
I mostly call it The World Trade Center, but sometimes I use Freedom Tower in a sort of pejorative way.
It's hard to imagine one existing without the other
I remember reading from an SVP/UDC official that they picked the black sheep imagery not because it is racist, no no, how dare you, but precisely because the expression works in all national languages.
That was a very interesting read - but is there any evidence that the cognitive deficits of middle age are due to having to perform more data processing on incoming information?
Link: https://github.com/skorokithakis/gweet
From http://www.ycombinator.com/contact/ there's http://www.ycombinator.com/faq/#q45 which says to check https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4761102 which describes how to unban yourself using the following URL

http://news.ycombinator.com/unban?ip=<ip address>
Racket is "mostly functional" which means that very few "impure" data structures (mcons, for example) and operations are marked explicitly (by convention).
Ironically, they're guilty of an anti-pattern. The point of all these patterns is to only use them when they actually solve a code smell. If you introduce them early, then you have Needless Complexity, as they like to say.
That said, my preferred method is to live in a low cost area and work in a high cost area (telecommute).

yes but it also depends how you consider in your calculation the costs of telecommuting (costs of travelling, time lost etc..)

I'm thinking about this right in these days, as I'm living and working in a quite rich but expensive country (Luxembourg) where real estate prices (rent&purchase) have grown a lot in the past years, and are still growing (two digits increase of prices yty), while you have surrounding border areas (Belgium, France, Germany) that are way cheaper (half or even less per square meter) but are located 30-40km away with really congested roads or slow public lines (at least 45min per trip, easy to become 1-2hours in case of accidents or traffic jams)
I've recently been playing Minecraft on 2b2t.org. The server has a regular lag which can be very annoying when you are starting out. In chat the other day, a player commented that he loved the lag saying it was 'part of the experience'. I started thinking about that and realized that the lag, if you assume it is always present, can be used as a tool. If you know lag is coming, you can do things that you know will be 'unwound' over the next X many seconds. That means you could fall into a hole and see what's in there, then when you lag warp back to where you were, decide not to go into the hole because there was nothing in it of interest.

Imagine if we had that ability here.
"Son, have you been playing Minecraft on my iMac again?"

"No way, Dad"

<feels white-hot top of unit>

"Go to your room."

(This is an actual transcript from last week)
Headline is somewhat misleading. The referendum was rejected but it was a rather harsh measure. So even those wanting to slow down immigration may have voted no.

From the article:
The country voted in February to re-introduce immigration quotas, in effect opting out of an EU free movement agreement.
Send an email to hn@ycombinator.com (it's the "Support" link at the bottom of the page).
oh, that is clear. but that, let's say, "new economy" talk has been around for a long time and simply does not vibe with history, capitalism, human nature.

human beings that strive for greatness are ruthless, that necessary focus and willpower come with a price. it can be seen everywhere - politics, the military, arts, sports,...
> OOP and FP are not in opposition to each other. FP considers objects to be at different granularity than your typical OO language does.

well FP purists would argue that objects(a unit that has properties and methods, and can pass messages to collaborators)have states.AFAIK "pure FP" is about getting rid of states,using immutable datastructures, and describing operations on stateless units,rather than writing imperative code.

I personally believe that being a FP purist or OOP purist doesnt make sense.Both paradigms can work together thus be orthogonal and not in opposition.
Can you explain a bit your strategy? Something like MMM?
The party that I think he will be referring to is UKIP, which is pretty much like the current government just with more extreme attitudes to government.
Who is this "cat -v" guy anyway, they have a lot of badly written bad opinions on a lot of stuff.

( http://harmful.cat-v.org/society/gay_marriage http://harmful.cat-v.org/political-correctness/girls-in-CS http://harmful.cat-v.org/economics/fair_trade )
"We aren’t racists, yet we buttress a system that acts in racist ways... This occurs partly because of deeply embedded stereotypes that trick us, even when we want to be fair."

That made me think.
Steven Pinker: Why academics' writing stinks
Like it or not, these bugs become integral parts of the game. The whole Block Update Debacle was a bug that came from events not being sent to diagonal blocks (or something like that) and now there are thousands of youtube videos about how to exploit it.
None of that is going to happen anytime soon. Market forces (oil prices are down now, but in the long term they will go back up forcing us to move to cleaner alternatives) as well as the beginning effects of global warming (flooding) will force us to change long before the planet becomes uninhabitable.
You are right, is not only trust, but visits every six months to the gynecologists (something every woman past 30 should do) confirms it.

> but assuming people are truthful is horrible science

Is not even science, but what are we? robots?
Thanks!! I didn't notice that, email sent!
The statement "if you are not promiscuous then your chances of getting an STD virus are near zero" is wrong.

It is wrong because 1) even if you only have sex with one other person, that other person might have one or more STDs, 2) viral STDs are passed by more than sex; babies can get an STD congenitally, and STDs can be passed through other fluids including kissing, and it can be passed through blood transfusion and needle sharing, 3) those who are raped can get an STD even though they have never otherwise had sex.

About 80-90% of American adults have herpes simplex type-1. It can be passed by kissing, sharing toothbrushes or utensils, etc. Many people carry the virus and don’t even know it. (See https://www.health.arizona.edu/health_topics/sexual_health/k... as one of many sources.)

So no. Even someone who has followed a vow of chastity and has never had sex still has a not-near-zero chance of having a viral STD.

To be more precise you'll need to quantify what promiscuous means. Certainly for someone with 4 or so sex partners in their life - by nearly all measures this is not promiscuous - do not have an "almost zero possibility" of having a viral STD.
That does nothing to talk about imperative versus not, though. Does it? The entire for* and let* class of bindings are imperative, in that the order matters. Same with (begin and friends.
No problem! For reference, I spent almost 2.5 years buildings my company basically an identical clone of Collins, but in Python with Django / Django Rest Framework for our internal server and asset management.
9th way: say "no," say what you think, and continue whatever else you're doing.
No I mean the fact that they neutered the spire. The original design called for a tapered spire. It ended up being built as simple antenna, seemingly with platforms every few stories. It looks unfinished. For a long time I was hoping it was simply unfinished. Turns out it was changed to save $20 million.

http://online.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527023045439045773...
Part of Minecraft's popularity is it's history of bugs and hacks. It's what makes it all interesting isn't it?
If everything worked perfectly from day 1 and every feature were part of the core there would be no sense of ownership, as people would understand the limits very quickly and would move on to Dwarf Fortress.
Of course there are some actual bugs, but sometimes those bugs are a lot of fun! (of course i am just guessing, i am not a player)

Edit: It's fascinating how difficult it is to intentionally engineer something with the purpose of it being hacked on by people.
I can use the same technique with MS Word on the Macs in our house. They feel broken if someone has used Word recently. Restart required. 2013 MacBook Airs.
I'm reasonably convinced that inheritance is a bad default/privileged operator for a language. Composition is a better default.

I often find myself suspecting that the hate OO gets is primarily a result of this early error.

The remainder is of course the way OO was promised to be the end-all of programming paradigms, which has not happened. Backlash is fully justified for that.
haha.

not adjusting your employee's wages based on their work location, which company is that delusional?
Thanks, this did the trick!
I've admired this building throughout its construction and reading this critic's postmodern teardown really irked me. I'm a hardcore modernist in that I think a building's elegance is measured by it's functionality. This structure has multiple, in many ways contradictory functional requirements, needing to simultaneously be a supertall office building, monument, and fortress. This is no simple task.

Given these requirements, I think SOM did an excellent job - the building manages to simultaneously be reverent and purposeful. It's clean, modern, and evokes the Twin Towers without parroting them. True, it doesn't have the postmodern panache of the Shard or some rippling Gehry building-sculpture hybrid. But I for one don't admire such deviations from function. Insofar as the critic values postmodern features, that is a matter of taste, not objective civic merit.

Furthermore, I think it is incorrect to conflate its design with other, unfortunate circumstances surrounding its construction (delays, budget, security, politics). The broad strokes of the design have been in place since 2005 (with the admittedly unfortunate scuttling of plans for the base and antenna array).
The History of IRC
Do you personally know Paul Graham or are you basing your belief in him on stories in the media and in his writing? If you haven't met him, how is that any different than me believing in these media reports?

Do you refute any of the reported stories? Do you believe Paul Allen was lying when he said Bill Gates tried to screw him? Do you think all the negative stories about Jobs was just sour grapes over his success? Do you believe there was no sexual harassment at Github? Or that the actions of Uber's executives to this point have all been with the purpose to spread love across humanity? If you can't refute any of the stories other than by saying the media is biased or negative news gets more clicks, then you have your proof that Paul Graham is wrong.

Your only argument is that PG knows better than I do without actually refuting my argument that PG only sees what his position allows him to see, the founders being nice to him and around him. Instead of taking PGs argument at face value and just saying I'm wrong, why don't you try to prove his argument correct, or prove my examples are either wrong or outliers.

And my point has always been Paul Graham is meeting these people as peers (and so is his wife). These people are going to be nice to him and around him, giving him a false sense of the founders true character. But over time a person's true character will reveal itself or be revealed by stories of those who worked with them. I believe we have enough stories to posit PG is wrong.
> The fact that erlang is better than all the generic untyped OO languages suggests that yes, FP is better

What criteria are you using to determine this "fact"?
I don't think bonds are really a good investment for most people. They basically have the same edge case volatility as stocks(1) without the upside. If you have a diversified portfolio the worst stock market crashes where only an issue if you used leverage.

(1)As in if the issuers fail you get nothing.

PS: Granted if bonds where still paying 10+% that would be another story, but after taxes there only slightly ahead of inflation.
Yeah, but judging from Google's etymology of the word it seemed to suggest plananan as greek word for planet, and not planetes.

I went for the more similar sounding one.
They share a currency.

The US federal model is considerably more devolved than most regions in most countries. The EU nations, particularly the so-called Eurozone where currency is shared and economies are tightly bound, are closer to US states than most other independent countries are. There's a spectrum.
I'm not sure if you are trolling or not but erlang is not an object oriented language. Joe Armstrong said it quite clearly in the article where his quote was taken

> As Erlang became popular we were often asked “Is Erlang OO” - well, of course the true answer was “No of course not” - but we didn’t to say this out loud - so we invented a serious of ingenious ways of answering the question that were designed to give the impression that Erlang was (sort of) OO (If you waved your hands a lot) but not really (If you listened to what we actually said, and read the small print carefully).

http://harmful.cat-v.org/software/OO_programming/why_oo_suck...
I have used an 'on-call' system, where friends sign up on a shared calendar to be the backup person for a given day (when they will be in town and available). This means the patient always someone they can call for extra help, without feeling like they're dropping the request on someone who may have something else planned. Helps lower the bar for asking for help (needed in this case) and also lower the disruption to those who want to help.
cool. am I the only one who gets weirdly blurry text though? win8.1 latest chrome
Function Oriented (~ OO: Object Oriented)