skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I found that really difficult to read. It was as if he spent far too much time hunting for unusual adjectives and nouns.

"each turn in the road reconnoitred in advance", "...the once tedious Mr. Nuttall had been injected with an ebullient charisma", "prostrate yourself before the altar of benumbing technology", "windswept promontory"...

Perhaps an explanation can be found in the that I am merely an unlettered ignoramus too adherent of simpler writing styles.
The price of really valuable goods (housing, education, health care) is steadily rising. Cheap trinkets in the form of silly websites, iPhones etc. are just a distraction from the fact that the majority of the population is worse off than 20 years ago.
>Uses one or more of: files on the device such as images, videos, or audio, the device's external storage

Nope
Nice, but the answers being phrases ruins it for me, because you start seeing the answers without needed to check the regular expressions.

Really nicely designed though. Clean UI. Wouldn't mind if it was enlarged to use more of the screen real estate (tiny fonts are hard to read). I had fun with this.
People might be becoming more narcissistic, but mostly they're just finding it easier to permanently share the anecdotes they'd otherwise be doling out only to those in their immediate company at any given time.

When the author argues that "Instead of taking time to absorb and consider, many people seem more inclined to travel quickly, tick off the ‘don’t miss’ highlights and form broad-brush assumptions based on the bare minimum of immersion" he's miles off. People have been targeting the 'sights' since the notion of overseas travel as a source of pleasure began aeons ago. If anything, the web actually encourages immersion, because the "sights" themselves can be enjoyed from all conceivable angles in the comfort of ones own bedroom.

What's changed is that when travellers and tourists do visit the "highlights" - often called that for good reason - they'll inevitably feel the need to share selfies with their entire social network afterwards.

The same goes for the photos shared as a permanent record of their night out at the bar down the road in Clapham rather than Tanzania, or the people who actually do go to Eastbourne and feel the need to check-in to show they've been to the actual pier. Or people sharing their pithy observations on the football, or approval of the latest Upworthy video.

Actually, the most narcissistic act of all has got to be blogging, because I'm sure there's a time that travel journalists spent their time in between the tough grind of churning out freelance travel articles exploring the world around them rather than eloquently excoriating their usual audience on medium.com to broadcast how much more worldly they are than all the other holidaying proles.
Also on occupation. Low property taxes are an incentive to hoard properties.
Most of CEOs you listed are of the biggest companies selling in the very competitive markets. It means that they succeeded because, in the first place, they were able to fight off competition. I don't think PG thinks about this kind of activity when he writes about startups. He writes that the amount of wealth is unlimited [0] so acquiring this kind of wealth actually does not involve "stealing" it from others. If you exclude the top and non-innovative companies I think that what PG writes about is true.

[0] http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
How to Find Your Prospects’ Most Painful Problems (and Avoid Nice-to-haves)
I'm not arguing that IQ doesn't measure anything, my point is simply that it is a one dimensional measure of something for which we do not know how many dimensions there actually are.

I score very highly on IQ tests, but I've worked with a great many people who I would guess do not score more than slightly above average but nevertheless bring a lot to the table that I cannot.

I guess my point is that using IQ as an authoritative measure of "intelligence" is missing the forest for the trees (well I suppose to best fit the metaphor it would be 'tree').
I'm assuming they don't have the $14K, but have $7K.
Part of the problem is that people don't really grok the point of Markdown. There's a reason it doesn't support tables, or a syntax for making the kind of language used in a code snippet. The point of Markdown is to mimic the conventions of ASCII-text email, both to make writing it as natural as possible, and to make Markdown pleasant to read in both ASCII and HTML.

If you want something more featureful than Markdown, the problem isn't Markdown; it's that you're using the wrong tool for the job.
My conference presentations became much better once I learned to practice them a few times. That takes well more than an hour. The presentation takes about a week to put together. The research behind it can take months. So ... yes, I need more than an hour.

That said, that's not the post's point, which is that many one hour deadlines (and I assume these are real deadlines?) leads to better and quicker progress than a single 6 month deadlines.

I think the use of "an hour" when it's actually "a series of short deadlines" to be a bit dishonest.
Just in case anyone isn't aware and might find it useful, Jetbrains software is all free for students. https://www.jetbrains.com/student/
That permission is required for saving screenshots of your final score, if you would like to share it with your friends.
Why? Hypothetically, would I not have a better impact if I used the same time to take up extra work and instead donated that money? I would imagine the price per hour to hire labor for, say, a food drive could easily be funded multiple times through the price per hour to hire a software developer. Would I not make even more an impact if I chose to donate to an organization that operates in low-income countries? And why would locally matter? Are people in need not people in need regardless of where they're located?
Ahh, that makes sense. This project was a really interesting case study in how people move through the web. We had quite a bit of publicity for this early on, including some write-ups in print publications, major blogs, television, and radio shows (offline media generated virtually no apparent traffic). I also posted a link to r/economics when we first launched the site. Despite all that, one of the most enduring sources of traffic (other than university web sites, where professors post the link on Blackboard, etc.) has been Marginal Revolution, which is a relatively niche blog. I'm not really sure why.
It's obvious in many cities, not just Detroit, that government has not been able to hold up its end of the property tax agreement by providing and properly maintaining essential services such as water, streets, sewers, schools, fire and personal protection, and countless other "promises".

Why should homeowners lose their homes to non-payment if their streets are falling apart, their schools are sub-par, their personal safety is non-existent, their water pipes are 100 years old, and their government declares bankruptcy?

Selling off in tax delinquency court, homes with deeds that are free and clear, is an insult worthy of sustained organized protest. The fact that it doesn't happen is remarkable.
Interestingly his last name apparently means "little piece" of something in Polish.
Yeah, I want to hear about the exceptions! -That's- the piece I want to read. Not this broken down travel writer complaining about himself.
120 Nights Later: Confessions of an Airbnb Host
> uncomfortable, wasteful, filled with boredom, preposterously expensive and over far to quickly to develop any deep appreciation for your destination

You and I have had vastly different travel experiences.
> The game uses Ken Silverman's VOXLAP engine

> Silverman

Nazi using a game engine developed by a jew?
tweaks needed it you put mysql database files on zfs linux:
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/2872
and:
https://github.com/zfsonlinux/zfs/issues/224

other than that: awesome!
Yeah, it's tricky. I guess I should amend the suggestions to be:

A) start by understanding the tools and libraries available to you, and how to integrate them to build product/features faster.

B) start to understand what is going on under the covers in those libraries. it's not uncommon that, as awesome as these libraries can be, you'll have to look at their source code eventually to work through some unintended behavior or corner cases.
PayPal’s Bitcoin Integration and the Future of Digital Currency Adoption
iOS 8.1.1 Jailbreak Released
Markdown. Is. Not. A. Language.

Markdown was never intended to have any particular standardized syntax -- it was simply a script that took a common syntax used for a long time when formatting plain text and convert it to formatted HTML. The attempts to standardize it are misguided, as there is absolutely no need for that -- there are numerous existing standards for precisely that, starting with ReST which follows a pretty similar syntax (in fact, any attempt to standardize Markdown will end up with something very similar, as it has to solve all the same issues).
I've been using Textile for ages, and it's much better than Markdown for just about anything _except_ footnotes (in MultiMarkdown) and pieces with multiple references to the same URL.

In particular, Textile has great table syntax, which I use extensively in pages like http://the.taoofmac.com/space/infoviz (markup at http://the.taoofmac.com/media/infoviz/index.txt). But over the years I became so used to Markdown (largely thanks to the profusion of editor support it spawned) that I mostly gave in.

Still, Creole might be a good addition to my next CMS/Wiki: http://github.com/rcarmo/sushy (already supports Textile, Markdown and ReST).
A nice thing about "hello world" applications is that you can always use them as the starting point for any other.

The first step forward would be to change it from "hello world" to "hello {{name}}" and have the user input their name and the application show a custom hello.

Having this minimal input / output, now you can invest some time to make your app secure. This will teach you a lot.

Then you should feel ready to allow users to register, log in, and log out. This will teach you DB stuff and a lot more about security.

Then you should feel ready to allow users to add a profile with an uploaded picture. This will teach you about sophisticated UI issues, and even more security.

Then, except for scalability, machine learning and a few other special but mainstream technologies, I think you should feel ready to learn anything else.
came here expecting to see a discussion of how those who fall within the statistical mean of society (which dimensions?) have a higher-than-average failure rate (according to which measures)?
According to http://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/MEHOINUSA672N the median US income adjusted for inflation is up over the last 20 years.

The median worldwide income is up a lot more, but I do not have an easy graph for that.
Probably because of beauracracy and paperwork. The 'random person' both knew how and was willing to deal with the hassle of the city's tax auction. The owner probably didn't know they could, didn't know how, was unwilling, or otherwise unable. Arbitrage works :-)
No, not really. At least, I hope not. I do think that travel has helped me to view the world differently, but I don't think I am better than others because of it.
How HubSpot Transformed into a Product Driven Company
That's the trouble with mob justice, allegations equals guilt, and disagreement is socially indefensible.

My purpose in all of this is not to "prove" that these are all nice people, but simply to point that you are all speaking with great confidence about the characters of people that you really know nothing about.
org-mode in emacs supports tables, and it's ASCII-based.

Here's an example, displayed exactly how you would see it marked up in org-mode syntax in emacs:

|-----+-------|
| Key | Value |
|-----+-------|
| 00 | foo |
| 01 | bar |
|-----+-------|

org-mode can export to HTML, and many other formats.
I apologize for the lack of focus in my comment.

What do you think about that appcache solution to controlled updates?
What do you mean by become? If you are a deep love with your self, everything you do is wonderful and exceptional by definition. The only thing to bother about (otherwise naive self-deception will be broken by cognitive dissonance) is that it must be not easily obtainable or achievable for, you know, "other people".

We had one web designer hotshot in Moscow who years ago said proudly in his blog - "I have been in 77 different countries" (we wished to comment "but haven't got any smarter", but let it pass).

Nowadays it is about "difficult (read - expensive) to reach" places and/or "having that ultra hi-tech gear", but that is just another form of exhibitionist consumption or "consumption as way to distinguish oneself" (what nonsense!).

Have you seen these modern Everest climbers? it is all about money and expensive stuff. There is mt.Dhaulagiri which is only few hundred meters less of height and much more difficult to claim - no one is there - one or two professional teams per year at most.
The home team is disruptive, but benevolent (to stakeholders). The away team is ruthless, and mean (to competition).
The taxi monopoly is really more of a government monopoly than a business one. This is especially true in NYC. Sure, big companies own groups of medallions and single owners hadn't been able to get one (until this year) for 20+ years, but medallions are very illiquid assets. The resale value on them is much less than what the city gets for new ones issued at auction.

There's tons of state-controlled monopolies out there if you look hard enough.
>There's a reason it doesn't support tables

I don't see how the inclusion of tables violates the ascii-like readability of markdown. Github has implemented a table syntax that is natural to read/write and makes it easy to include tables in your document. Example: https://github.com/Defconbots/2015_target/blob/master/hw/boa...
> I find that vertical aligning is great if all the lines (variable names) are of similar length.

I agree that when a few variable names are very long that it can actually make readability worse.

I vertically aligned for about a year to see if it helped my code quality. In the end, I found that reading a value right next to a variable was easier.

The other think I did was to vertically align related variables/values, and put a blank line between unrelated vars so they had their own alignment.

In the end, I did not find any improvement in my code (just my personal experience).
That's insane. Perl and Python are both general purpose programming languages. This reminds me of the days Java developers used to call Ruby developers "script kiddies."

So if C and C++ are the only true programming languages, we're all just script kiddies? :/
I don't have access to the complete article, so I have to guess. The virus have many parts. They probably copy one of the proteins of the surface of the Ebola virus in the flu virus, not the main infectious code. So it "looks" like an Ebola virus, but acts like a flu virus and only give you a mild flu.
Yes, but it's nice to save my code and have it formatted "the official way". It gets old debating over which standard to use. Who cares what you like. Just pick a standard for every language and get used to it. It's really not that hard.
It's a nice essay, but the fact is that PG is no philosopher or historian.

He treats "mean" as a known and monolithic entity that can be attached to individuals. "Mean" is a vague term that people might be sometimes, and not others. Sometimes being "mean" works to make you more successful.

Was Bill Clinton mean? Richard Feynman? Dan Quayle? Gerard Depardieu? Baudrillard? Did they fail? Succeed? Reducing people to binaries of mean / not mean and successful / failures is absurdly reductive.

Newton was a pretty mean thinker (in at least two senses) and is a good counter-example to some of these arguments.
(Author here) You're right, it is contradictory. We'll never reach a perfect blend of universal readability an personal preference.

That said, I like the alignment of your first example. It depends heavily on the context of those variable, naturally.
The issue with giving cash like this directly, is that at least in my city some people have chosen to beg instead of getting a day job. That's because if you know a good place, it pays off way better than a full time job.

Still it could be that on average higher percentage of that cash ends up in the hands of those who really need it, than when giving it to some organization.

Speaking of organizations, I'd like to give a shout out to http://www.givewell.org/ which is the most rational one I know.
Sooooo.... The US Patent office doesn't have an internet connection???

The irony is that I did a Google search last night for emulators for my tablet, and found, shall we say, just a bit of prior art.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_video_game_emulators#Ni...

How can the Patent Office be immune to their seemingly utter incompetence? (or am I pulling a "reverse Hanlon's Razor" here - ascribing to stupidity what is really evil)
As others have said, Ecto is the layer you would use to connect to Postgresql. It's pretty different from ActiveRecord, not necessarily in good or bad ways. It's just different.

Rather than try to give examples, take a look at their Github page: https://github.com/elixir-lang/ecto
Proud to see this kind of project coming from a Brazilian university. Congratulations !
Not to mention the insane amounts that municipalities are paying towards the massive pensions and benefits for retired workers. How many existing police officers are cut in order to pay the pensions of the previously retired?
Are you asking about the best laptop or the best laptop for Linux or what. Seems like any Intel laptop will work with Linux (if wrong state which don't would be useful from someone). Using Ubuntu 14.10 seems fine if you don't like their wanna be for touch screens etc style, Google 'classic menu' and '14 things I did after installing Ubuntu 14 etc.' There is also Linux Mate which you can install over Ubuntu 14.10 for traditional desktop. Also you can install Linux in a Virtual Box Machine if you are running windows something or other. Separate Video card would be nice but not necessary. Linux will recognize your multiple processors in you Multi-Processor CPU unlike Windows which in many cases comes from the store set to default of ONE! <--outrageous.
Where can I join your protest?
Ask HN: Asking to co-own a web app with employer
Got hired as a marketer. Wrote software during my free time, job related. Brought that software into my work to do things faster/easier/smarter, team adopted it and now its an important part of our methodology.

Now we are moving to make this concept into a SaaS offering.

I came up with the idea, made the first implementation (proof of concept), now I will likely be the only person doing dev on the SaaS prototype.

I told my employer I want to co-own it with the company.

Now, the question is - how would this be done? What type/amount of ownership should I request?

I believe I am legally the owner of this tool. I never signed any IP agreements, and I believe creating software is outside the scope of my employment as a marketer.

Any advice, thoughts, criticisms -- would be very helpful while I contemplate next steps here.

TL;DR
Made a software tool to assist with my job, now my company wants to make it into a SaaS offering, and I want co-ownership. Seeking advice, those with similar stories.
very cool!
I'll try this with my 4.5 year old - he's just about getting a hang of an internet as an 'abstract invisible something' - that like electricity is out there; that it can be turned on and off. And when it's on he's able to see pictures of lion tiger and other animals on our tablet.
I might just start by replacing car gif with a lion. Lion on wheels - should be fun heh! :D
Creating 50k jobs a month (http://mashable.com/2014/09/08/uber-ceo-techcrunch-disrupt/), reducing transportation costs for millions and reducing DUIs. That strikes me as "not mean". But I guess I'm willing to look at the facts rather than sensational headlines written by people with a vested interest in an Uber competitor.
> Perhaps you don't agree with me, but imho this is the most bizarre essay I've read by pg, and I really don't agree with most of his political leanings, so for me that's saying a lot.

Of course this is a weird post. I think he wanted focus on the aspects of flattery involved in praising technology. You are providing counter-examples to a theory where his evidence is "my friends aren't assholes", which, while surely true, has a potential confound he doesn't discuss, and "people YC likes do better than those that we don't like", which isn't surprising for a SV power nexus.
Yes, exactly. There's no way to construct a value of an arbitrary type -- outside of non-termination[1] (which doesn't really produce any values) or abuses of unsafeXXX functions. I think I perhaps should have been more explicit in my example. It could also have been specified as

f: forall a . [a] -> a

which would make it more explicit that the function has to work for any given 'a'.

[1] ... which I think I should have actually specified. The function type given does not preclude non-termination in Haskell. (You can specify such things in Idris/Coq/Agda, but the effort of implementing f can be much higher if you have to prove totality.)
I don't like any of them. Markdown, ReST, various wiki/forum dialects of "simplified" text formatting. They are all as complicated if not more complicated than just writing HTML. They all have a bunch of rules and special cases. I'd rather just write in HTML which I already know.

I don't understand the motivation for any of these "alternative" markup formats. Normal non-technical people want Word (or at least, some kind of WYSIWYG text entry). I've been on projects where they tried to get non-developers to use ReST and it was an abject disaster. The tech writers revolted and refused to use it. So then a developer had to be sidelined to convert their Word documents to ReST so that we could produce HTML.

Yeah HTML is not perfect, but neither is any of these other markup languages. If you like one, fine, but don't wonder why none of them has really caught on outside of small niches of highly technical people.
Uber essentially needs to destroy an industry in order to shake it free of its long entrenched ways and rebuild it. Of course it's mean.

My only hope is that uber doesn't take down too many innocent bystanders as it steamrolls taxi industries across the world.

Unfortunately it's not in uber's, as a business, best interest to give two fucks about innocent bystanders (I think, -we'll see how the "nicer" new taxi company replacements do over the next decade).
Coincidentally, I wrote this about cynicism a few weeks ago. Lots of same messages. https://medium.com/@timrpeterson/cynicism-21258dc48246