skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The original article referred to here is this one, with the unfortunately esoteric title:

Syriza and the French indemnity of 1871-73

http://blog.mpettis.com/2015/02/syriza-and-the-french-indemn...

I really enjoyed reading this as it puts the Eurozone's current crisis in historical perspective. It dismisses the unhelpful rhetoric about financial probity which has come to dominate debates over Greek debt and which has obscured the real structural problems faced by a federal state which has monetary but not yet political union. One of his most important points was this:

An awful lot of Europeans have understood the crisis primarily in terms of differences in national character, economic virtue, and as a moral struggle between prudence and irresponsibility. This interpretation is intuitively appealing but it is almost wholly incorrect, and because the cost of saving Europe is debt forgiveness, and Europe must decide if this is a cost worth paying (I think it is), to the extent that the European crisis is seen as a struggle between the prudent countries and the irresponsible countries, it is extremely unlikely that Europeans will be willing to pay the cost.
Really cool. Now I must figure a way to add this as an emacs mode. Good job!
The point you're missing on this website: it's frequented by a disproportionate number of millionaires, millionaires who are carefully investing their money to become billionaires within 10 years, and even present-day billionaires. Any posts addressing concerns of "rich people aren't the best thing ever" often get downvoted.

Maybe also related: a lot of startups take VC funding and current VC funding has shady origins. Some funds are powered by illegal russian investment money hidden through one or two layers of LPs, some is money of different questionable provenance, and some is actually clean money from sources you would expect. but, free money, so who cares if your startup is built on peasant blood money?

Once you've taken VC funding, you're not just in startups anymore, you're in politics of money. Money politics are the worst kind — it blinds you to anything illegal or immoral as long as the money keeps flowing.
Don't know why your comment is being voted down. It's been known that the Reddit administrators will delete any and everything criticizing tumblr-esque sjw. It's been a long time coming but the mental image I had of Reddit was tarnished.

Ideal world: Reddit admins would only delete things that are illegal according to the local laws where their servers are located. Then they would only focus on making sure the platform works and leave the content policing to moderators of individual subreddits.
Yeah, I agree. /dev/random and it's usage is an very important topic.
Life inside a secret Chinese Bitcoin mine
The post at the top of this chain makes it abundantly clear we're talking about the United States.

And, as an epidemiologist, the ready availability of antibiotics without any interaction with a doctor is something I'd be pretty comfortable classifying as inherently irresponsible.
Ideas are cheap. Implementations are what matter. If all of your competitors know your idea, but you implement a better product (or have better pricing, marketing, etc), you will win.

Luck is also a factor
This was my thought, too. I spent countless hours hiding inside of boxes as a child. I always found it comfortable to be "held" by the box, and loved the notion that I couldn't be seen by others.

My cats did not join me in the box.
Agreed, this is a highly correlative study.

However even if meditating doesn't have a direct effect on the brain (it is in some forms just sitting there) it encourages the type of self-reflection that leads to healthier choices.

The moments where you go "Oh, activity X is unhealthy and makes me unhappy so I should stop" cause a healthier more balanced lifestyle. So there is a completely non-woo mechanism for why meditation could be improving long term health.

Also noteworthy is meditation is a practice that's thousands of years old and there are many different types of it and just because one of them is beneficial doesn't mean they all are.
That's why I love the start up I work at. We work 9-6 M-F. No weekends. No long nights.

I feel like places that have a "show up at 10 and work till its late" are immature and fooling themselves thinking they have gains in productivity.

Properly managing your time is a skill and one that management should help you develop. I shouldn't feel pressured to stay late because everyone else was fooling around all day. It also sets clear expectations of how hard and long you should work. There's no "Oh if I don't stay till 9 tonight will my manager think I'm not working hard?" Everyone is on the same page.

Before I started working there I was one of the people that would stay up all night sometimes to finish something. come in groggy the next day and get nothing done for that day. When in reality if I spent 8.5 hours the first day working on it and 8.5 hours the second day, I would have had full mental clarity when working on the project and the added bonus of mental and physical well-being.
Great. Your website says, "Response times from our Support team are fastest from 9am-6pm ET, Monday thru Thursday. Support requests submitted outside those times may receive delayed responses." How is the "delayed responses" part handled? Do you rotate 'on call' people, and if so, what are those hours like?
Thanks, hoping that I can help you out!
The cost argument seems rather weak to me. It doesn't need to match on price, it needs to be lower, because less service is provided.

In the UK, a country with very high fuel taxation, cars are rarely the cheapest option when all costs are accounted for unless you have a particularly odd commute.

We also have small cities that generally lend themselves readily to public transportation, cycling, etcetera. (The implementation may be lacking, but the density is there).

Yet 75% of households own a car.

Plus points of owning a car:

Instant availability
Portable persistent storage (not lugging a backpack around everywhere)
Fun
Private (a self-driving car would also be private - but you could own one)
Known-good, can decorate the interior

As far as I can see, against all of that, the main inherent advantage of hiring a car as opposed to owning one (self driving or not) is avoiding parking fees and potentially having a higher quality/smoother ride. Maintenance too, but that's just another cost angle outside of clunkers really.

Otherwise it's all down to cost against all of the advantages of car ownership.

Don't get me wrong, self-driving hired cars are awesome, but I think this idea that ownership will just die is nonsense barring heavy regulation that decides people can't be trusted with maintenance etc.
Why does this matter? Reddit isn't exactly the kind of company that holds any important data worth a transparency report.
Show HN: Offline Linux kernel metrics analyses
We changed the url to the original source instead of http://ftalphaville.ft.com/2015/02/06/2113951/michael-pettis..., which is a summary of it. It's a good summary, though. Both pieces are worth reading.

In addition, since Varoufakis has been of interest to HN for a long time, some of you might like this interview that Pettis links to: http://www.zeit.de/wirtschaft/2015-02/yanis-varoufakis-greec.... (The other articles that Pettis links to about Varoufakis' proposals are behind the FT paywall.)
How about a Sublime plugin :)
It's just your idea, it's not "idea behind PHP". Almost all of my PHP code is covered by tests, for example - it's far from "just works".

And PHP is very far from ugly initial creature of Lerdorf.
We could have a healthier, more rational discussion here on HN if we all could be more critical of popular libertarian dogma[1], and not take it as self-evident that private ownership of land is both a right and good economics[2][3].

-

[1] By “popular libertarian dogma” I refer to popular dogma that isn’t necessarily supported by and may even contradict true libertarian principles.

[2] For a critique of private land ownership, read about Georgism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Georgism) and Geolibertarianism (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Geolibertarianism). Are you a Real Libertarian, or a ROYAL Libertarian? (http://geolib.com/essays/sullivan.dan/royallib.html) makes the case against land as private property very plain.

[3] If you believe in the free market and it's ability to find the "right" price for everything, even the abstract (e.g. the time value of money), then how can you support a government enforced system that allows a finite amount of money to purchase an infinite amount of something, which is what ownership of land in perpetuity amounts to? How can $10,000 or even $10,000,000 be the price of full rights over a plot of land for an infinite amount of time?
In theory, nothing is stopping a lead developer from opening up their own shop.

In practice, unless you are comically shafting them or making it readily apparent you aren't going to help them achieve whatever exit they're looking for, the additional effort required to strike out by themselves is easily outweighed by the benefits of staying put.

Also, if your business is more at risk from employees than competitors, I think you need to seriously reconsider either your treatment of your employees, your business model, or your market analysis.
A Night in Los Santos (GTA 5 Movie)
What is wrong with outsourcing software?
That's a good point. I'm all in favor of people spending less hours at work and more of it working productively and getting paid the same.

It's not just startups. In my experience, most people spend a good portion of their time playing around, chatting, doing stuff that doesn't matter to appear busy, etc etc at work. Then they come home tired. It doesn't really make sense.

I think the fear is, if hours were reduced, people would still would tend to do the same types of things. So, it appears the standard setup is underpay, overstaff, keep everyone there more hours than they need to be, and assume at least some of the people are working some of the time.
This is very good:

"Third, it makes no sense to blame the recipients of the capital inflows for causing the crisis. If enough money is sloshing around willing to invest in any stupid idea, you shouldn’t be too surprised that a lot of stupid ideas get funded. When, for example, Wolfgang Schaeuble, Germany’s finance minister, says: "The reasons for Greece’s problems can be attributable only to Greece and not to actors outside the country, and certainly not in Germany." As he did during the press conference following his meeting with Yanis Varoufakis, his Greek counterpart, we have to remember that Schaeuble is talking nonsense. It’s logically impossible for excess borrowing to occur unless there is someone sufficiently reckless (or stupid) to provide the financing."

And this is also good:

"I am hesitant to introduce what may seem like class warfare, but if you separate those who benefitted the most from European policies before the crisis from those who befitted the least, and are now expected to pay the bulk of the adjustment costs, rather than posit a conflict between Germans and Spaniards, it might be far more accurate to posit a conflict between the business and financial elite on one side (along with EU officials) and workers and middle class savers on the other. This is a conflict among economic groups, in other words, and not a national conflict, although it is increasingly hard to prevent it from becoming a national conflict."

The German government, in collusion with the German business establishment, has wrecked Europe, first through its irresponsible lending, and then, later, through the pressure it put on the ECB to raise rates despite the weak European economy. The German government can try to blame others for the problems in Europe, but the driving force behind all of these problems has been Germany. Germany had a trade deficit at the end of the 1990s, and they wanted to develop a trade surplus, and they did so through a series of irresponsible measures that have done great harm to Europe.
I don't know why this is down voted. It is pretty funny. I guess it could be seen as rude but its to funny to get mad at.
To my understanding, there's been problems in the past with people soliciting feedback for ideas here, and some overseas shops seizing the idea and throwing more resources at it quicker and either being quicker to market or with more features functioning. Ideas aren't always cheap, but public ones are not not cheap, they're free.
Best comment in this entire thread.

Infinite ownership of land and "I got here first, screw you" mentality doesn't work when everybody wants to live in the same place.
It's less than $17. Just buy the damn book.
Bitcoin's 7tx/sec limit is too low for any mass adoption.
This, I like. I'm interested in seeing a progression towards client-side code assembled around libraries like intercooler.js rather than frameworks. I'd like to be able to pick and choose libraries to handle DI, routing, templating, HTTP et cetera in a manner that allows me to tweak/override as needed. I'm fine with foregoing the prescriptive structure that a framework like AngularJS lends to an app - structure is something you will spend time thinking about framework or not, and enough tools exist to let you write modular client-side code without being prescriptive
We package moreutils in GNU Guix, and it's much more preferable to download a source tarball than have to clone a git repo, so we download the tarball from Debian. We clone the git repo when there's no other choice, but it's far from ideal.
So, explain to me who gets to live and who doesn't?
> Globalism, the casualization of labor (replacing full-time employees with contractors and part-timers) and a zealous fixation on profits above all else have left the American middle class in shambles. That's a dangerous thing for a consumer economy.

The ruthless MBA short term metric builders and long term value destroyers are still at it. People having money to buy is a good thing, not constant cutting back.

Quality work suffers as there is less money to do it, meaning quality products suffer, eventually there is no product and no need for sales/marketing or the CEO because all the grace of current/old innovation dies out. It is very hard to find quality these days except at companies that do somewhat value employees and/or engineering/product over finance (as the product brings the revs, not the revs and cutting).

One day we will return to the value of building quality products and value the people that do it as the engine rather than the financial part of the company as the engine. You can't have financial success without happy workers and thus good products being produced. After globalization is more baked in, it won't be as easy for companies not valuing quality work. We don't want to finish that stage with a depleted consumer base.

The minimum wage also should be locked to inflation in some way. Minimum wage triggers raises throughout the market. Eventhough it just rises all boats, it sends ripples through the economy from the bottom up when there are downturns. In downturns there is too much money locked up in the 1% backdrift as it has to hit rock bottom for investment to start again. Minimum wage auto increases every 3-6 months would keep a consistent lower end ripple that would eventually make it up to everyone. If you want a raise, support minimum wage. When you give to the rich they keep it, when you give to the poor they give it right back but at least you have money moving.

This is relevant today: http://www.theonion.com/articles/company-to-experiment-with-...
So are people expected to work 40 hours/week or not?
Ask HN: What resume projects would you like to see?
I just got laid off, and have two years' experience as a software engineer (mainly python and JavaScript, but others as necessary). I don't have a CS degree, and my portfolio only includes little JavaScript doodads that don't illustrate a wide range of skills. What kinds of projects should I work on adding to my portfolio? Should I stick with Python where I'm comfortable, or start learning Rails or something else? I'm looking for full-stack and front-end positions.
And a video of someone demonstrating this by putting a Proprinter back together:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=spDYSKl3kmo
We used to rotate, but now we have one awesome person on support Friday to Monday to make sure our students always get great support with a quick turnaround.
Agreed! I'm definitely going to lift some of this code for some Alfred workflows too.
A box plot is another - I think better - way to represent the variance in a control group A. See http://www.mathworks.com/matlabcentral/fileexchange/screensh...
And inevitably, if one were to construct such a box the cat would not use it.
Relatedly you might enjoy this collection of sysadmin-tools:

https://github.com/skx/sysadmin-util
Interesting! Does that (partially) obsolete this answer [0]? Do Ruby programs see Java objects as a separate kind of Object, or is it seamless? Is there a translation layer anywhere? Does JRuby-Rack have to use wrappers for Java functions?

[0] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2752979/using-jruby-jytho...
For the Skeptics: Why Divest?
And yet there are tons of those subs around, how's thar work?
"No framework"... so here is a framework. Uh hu.

Anyhow, move that "use strict;" line into the IIFE. If it's global, you can't merge that file with other files. Some of the code out there breaks in strict mode. That's why it isn't enabled by default.
Michael Pettis is the Tony Stark of economics for those unaware. He has a scary accurate track record of predictive accuracy, he has influence in many central banks, perhaps most notably among Chinese decision-makers. Pettis has a rare accounting-based approach to classical economics which makes his analysis fresh, but also accessible to non-economists (me). That would be enought except Pettis, also a musician, owned the most successful music club in Beijing (D22), until he closed it at its peak. I have Elon Musk and Steve Jobs playing cards like everyone else, but my Michael Pettis and Vernon Walters cards are my most cherished.
User count - yes; revenue - I honestly don't know. There are quiet periods for restricted stock units for when you might know more than the market. When then quarterly numbers are out the blackout period ends and you can trade your stock. It's been like that in every publicly traded US company I've ever worked at.
> Also, if your business is more at risk from employees than competitors, I think you need to seriously reconsider either your treatment of your employees, your business model, or your market analysis.

You are always at more risk from employees because they have multiple ways to hose you. Labor disputes, billing issues, intellectual property ownership agreements, etc.

This is why we have things like NDAs, Confidentiality Agreements, Patent Assignments, Stock Agreements, etc.

You don't have to be treating your employees badly for one to cause you issues. Even a disagreement about how much to sell the company for can cause problems, and that's not even a malicious reason to disagree.
I don't understand how that is even supposed to be useful. The output is still digital HD video. The higher the quality of the video the fewer compression artifacts there are going to be and the less having to re-encode once will make any difference whatsoever. And it would only have to be re-encoded once regardless of how many times it's played back or copied subsequently. If they're hoping for some kind of VHS-style degradation of the video quality they obviously haven't actually tested it.
I think the best balance is to allow remote working anytime, but only hire local. The focus of management should be on results, not on hours in the office. This system has the best of both worlds.

Remote from anywhere in the world has a lot of issues. The benefits are well known. Time flexibility and it forces management to focus only on results. However, doing face to face meetings is extremely difficult due to distance. Even tools like skype and hangouts are not effective when big time zone differences exist. Face to face communication has a lot of advantages and it's missing in this kind of workplace.

Forcing everyone to be in the office everyday also has a lot of issues. Going to the office and staying 8 hours or more regardless of productivity is a waste of time. There is also the wasted time commuting and it allows management to be lazy by focusing on hours in the office instead of actual results.

Allowing remote anytime anywhere, but hiring only within 50 miles of the office has the advantages of both. Face to face meetings are easy to schedule since everyone is only 50 miles away or less from the office. There are no time zone issues so skype and hangouts are very effective. It also allows all the flexibility of working remote.
> To my understanding, there's been problems in the past with people soliciting feedback for ideas here, and some overseas shops seizing the idea and throwing more resources at it quicker and either being quicker to market or with more features functioning.

My standard quote about this is: "If 4 guys and a dog in the Ukraine can do this, what's the business?"
That presumably also explains why this post has rapidly vanished off the front page, unlike the cats in boxes story. I know, someone will tell me it's algorithmic.

Indiscriminate down votes have to be met with indiscriminate up votes. What a daft situation.

Edit: Ah! That also explains why explanatory comments aren't required for down votes - preferential control. I didn't realise how rigged this is.
> Hackers think of themselves as dangerous.

The other day a work colleague of mine described me as "so meek and mild", and I couldn't agree more.
I need to find a nice and cheap fanless mini computer to use OpenBSD again. I wish there was usb support on that octeon model.
I'll be honest, I'd be much more receptive to you doing a show hn over pimping the framework in the comments of every js post.
Irrationality
We use mostly PHP at work but lately I have been using my free time to learning Ruby because most good job offers around here ask for Rails knowledge.

I'm not saying there are no PHP job offers, there are, but they are mostly for maintaining old codebases that have none of the good features that modern PHP has. Or they are for web agency jobs that consist of mass producing cookie cutter web sites.

I think Laravel 5 looks very interesting but I feel I can't afford to explore it because I need to learn Ruby if I want a better job.
I guess if you omit the civil war, ww1, ww2, the great depression, the financial crisis of 2008, racial strife, 1970s stagflation, and any number of major disruptions from the historical record, youre right.
Drones Replace Waiters at New Restaurant
Owning pointers, regions, arenas, etc, are various ways to take advantage of special cases in the correlation of object lifetimes. But here's no general solution that isn't GC. For example with arenas, you won't be able to reclaim any memory if your memory graph has nodes with uncorrelated lifetimes.

Consider, for example, a double-linked list that grows to a certain size, then every second a random node is deleted and a new one is inserted at the beginning. You can't represent the double-linked list with owning pointers, and while you can represent the list in an arena, you can't reclaim any memory until the whole list is deleted.
Pretty good circuit breaker library – c#
Less than $8 on kindle.
Who really wrote this? Some sort of Nasa lobbyist? I'm a fan of manned spaceflight and think it has some scientific validity, but who else could write such an article without any mention of alternative approaches, the political history of the ISS or the very valid criticisms of the program?

Also...
"...17,500 miles an hour, 10 times faster than the average bullet leaves a gun."

Who is that sentence meant for? Certainly not the scientific community. Certainly not an international audience. It is meant for those who control Nasa's purse strings.