skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The big success of today's capitalistic system is indicated by the fact, that it even draws profits from the calamities of the people.

When I add the "globalization" situation (marginal wages for poor people in poorest countries, that oftentimes even are at the limit of starving in these countries, for the production of our goods), than it is not even seldom today, that this system draws its profits from poorest peoples.

It is said, that Henry Ford understood that for him to succeed, he also must help others to succeed. He and other big entrepreneurs laid the foundation for today's wealth of the western nations. Currently the system seems to have changed, by teaching people how to let others fail for the own success.

I don't think, that the current system is sustainable. Even Warren Buffet said that his class is winning, but it should not.

I think, in the long run, we will all loose this way.
Yep, that's what I use as well!
I switched to using Spacemacs from vim a couple months ago. I find it's a huge boost to my productivity; letting me use vim modes/hotkeys that I'm used to, and adding the handy features that emacs and plugins can provide.
A caveat of the popular "would you invest in this company?" question: it's not a good litmus test for "should I work at this company?" because you're not a VC. If you're considering employment, it strongly suggests you don't have as much money as an angel or VC, which puts you in a different position. Losing $100,000 might not make a VC with $100MM of other peoples' money bat an eye, but what about you?
CTO is not technical.
Simple function annotations like

def foo(x: int) -> str: ...

have been available since 3.0, and editors like PyCharm already use them for typechecking.

For new PEP 0484 features like generics, MyPy supports Python 3.2 and up, but PyCharm support seems to be work in progress: https://youtrack.jetbrains.com/issue/PY-15206
As a clarification, I just want to make sure that by "gamblers" you were referring to the various Wall-Street one-percenters who repeatedly rape our economy. I don't mind millionaires (or billionaires) who actually produce something but it's aggravating that someone can take such a large percentage of the profit by simply shuffling money around.

I don't buy the "it creates market liquidity" argument for one minute ... we'd find the liquidity the market needs elsewhere.
NSA bulk phone records collection to end despite USA Freedom Act failure
Ask HN: Quotes that made a difference in your life?
Some quotes are distilled wisdom. I really like:

"You can't be a prophet in your homeland"

What quotes are you always recalling?
Supply and demand. Build more high density housing and it should help alleviate demand.
They are sorta trendy here in the Bay, since they offer the appeal of home ownership (of sorts) without the hassle of, you know, buying an actual home.

I lived in one in Sunnyvale with a roommate for a few years, and my experience was a bit mixed. The biggest beef was that the gate next to the light rail stop locked both opening and closing, so if you lost your key, you had to walk all the way around to Tasman (paranoid suburbanites about crime).

That said, I still think a condo or townhouse is a better deal.
most people do. and we all kind of look down on them with a mix of pity and sympathy, just like you.
The article also provides an explanation for this: "Uber, which started its business taking a 20% commission on all rides, has raised and lowered that rate in different cities depending on the supply of drivers and rider demand."

It seems that one way to deal with over-supply of drivers is to lower rate the rate even further, but they probably don't want to screw around with rates too much. Lowering them drastically might discourage drivers long-term, to the point where they find a different full-time job and swear off Uber.
I wonder what Michael O'Church's response is to this? I bring this up more because I'm sure others accuse him of excessive self-promotion. I used to think so but after reading more of his stuff, I think he just really likes to write.
he sent a letter to every tenant at that park in Grapevine, Texas, telling them the rent was going to more than double but was still below the market rate of $325.

“If you don’t like this or you think you can do better, here’s a list of all the other parks in Grapevine and a list of the owners,” he said in the letter. “Go ahead, call them if you want to move. How many customers do you think we lost? Zero. Where were they going to go?”

Says it all. When you've got a captive market, you can squeeze them for every nickel they have. You only have to leave them with just enough money such that they won't give up completely (although that's worth doing a few times; if they do just give up, you evict them and replace them, and the new tenants are paying the higher rate, and soon enough you've covered the costs of eviction and are making a higher profit).
> An example is the radish, cod, ginger, olives, tomato and green onions pizza.

actually this sounds similar to a lot of seafood crudo dishes i've eaten in many major cities.

olive, tomato and onions is basically a bruschetta topping or a basic tapenade/salsa type mixture (to go with the bread or the 'pizza crust'). radish goes well with protein. think horseradish on steaks, sushi, etc.

i think that dish would taste pretty good, if you ate it like bruschetta. or you could eat the toppings with a fork and dip the crust in olive oil. or just fold it up like a taco and dip the whole thing in olive oil.

i think the primary advantage of watson is it isn't constrained by pre-conceived cultural combinations that humans tend to stick to. also why 'fusion' can taste amazing, or be really horrible.
Wow, this is a great article!
I'm as big a capitalist as anyone, but, boy, reading that made me want to go out and buy a bunch of trailer parks just to lower the rent and lessen the squeeze on these poor folks. Sad!
I'm so torn on this.

So, if I understand this correctly, this is how to get rich off renting to poor people: (1) Buy out a property where a bunch of poor people live, (2) Jack the rent up, (3) Justify it with superficial renovations.

It works because (1) the cost of moving is so high, and (2) all the other property owners are doing the same thing -- In fact, that's probably why they're doing this "university" to begin with.

On the one hand, this looks totally immoral. Poor people are forced to move out, or become even more impoverished, as a result of what you're doing. And it seems like the renovations are really just superficial -- they're designed to make people think "Oh, well they're doing renovations, so the property is worth more." Rather than a genuine, good-faith attempt at improving the properties in a way that the poor tenants can afford.

But on the other hand, this is capitalism. Oftentimes in capitalism, things look really, really bad. But from a macro point of view, things work out better in the long run. Could there be some kind of better long-term effect that I just can't see?

And yet, criticisms aside, I don't know if any municipality in the country has figured out a good solution from the regulation side of things. In fact, I'm skeptical if regulation can solve this problem. It feels like greedy slumlords are just going to be greedy slumlords no matter what rules we put into place. Maybe the real solution is to just, like, persuade greedy slumlords to think of tenants as real, living, breathing human beings instead of cattle.
Reader YC must be one of the apps I use the most on my Passport. Thanks for creating it :)
I took a globalization online class from Wharton and the professeur made the same predictions: Africa will see a huge rise in population and importance in the world.
What did ultimately happen with the badBIOS saga?
"It's better to be a pirate than to join the navy" - Jobs
Rent control for mobile home parks.
Few of us here "hate" finance, or big banks for that matter.

Likely the reason this article is upvoted is that it truly boggles the mind that after years and years of blantant fraud and rigging there is yet one banker to go to jail and instead the politicians, judiciary, regulators and central bankers happily cover for, or even join in on the manipulation and rigging.

If markets were to be un-rigged and allowed to function, banks were to stop getting hand-outs and fraud started to be persecuted, this would only be a good thing for 99.9% of people involved in the finance industry.

Maybe this knee-jerk "anti-finance" climate you speak of would even disappear.
So now two popular dynamic languages have type hinting of a kind: Python (unenforced annotations) and PHP (declarations). Great!
The only thing I'm presupposing is that more people want to live there, than the area can fit. Maybe too many even if they built lots of high density housing, which SF won't allow anyway.

It won't happen on a purely group vs. group basis, that's just a simplification for the purpose of forty-word internet comments.
Well, the real problem here is inane downvotes, not that I pointed it out.
Every day. But then I look at my children, remember the work I've done that I'm most proud of and stuff like that and I shrug it off.

Sure, I would love to be more socially engaged in my surroundings, but whenever I'm in doubt about my life I reevaluate my priorities and usually discover that I'm pretty happy where I'm at. It's my life and I get to define the optimum, and so far viral content, insta-fame and richness hasn't gotten close to the top.

Caveat: I'm not famous, haven't founded a start-up or famous for my twitter debates. But it works for me.
Meanwhile in other banana republics:

Guatemala: http://www.theweek.co.uk/middle-east/48250/banker-bashing-ir...

Vietnam: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2013-11-12/ex-bank-ex...

Iran: http://www.theweek.co.uk/middle-east/48250/banker-bashing-ir...
What you are seeing is a different form of the facebook highlight reel. There was a study that correlated Facebook use with higher rates of depression or something along those lines. The rationale for this was that you are comparing the 100% of your day to day activities with the cream of the crop activities that your friends were posting about(and possibly fabricating)

Not every day is a highlight reel.
With two hours to go before my test,
I got obsessed with the idea that
there should be an easy way to write
notes in Markdown and view them as
compiled HTML instantly.

pandoc ??
House of Secrets: Who Owns London's Most Expensive Mansion?
Open Source will never be for consumers
The Open Source world is fully of egos and attitudes. These are mostly passive aggressive individuals and control freaks who think they know what's best for others.

They seek not to serve consumers (users) but to strengthen their own sense of power and stature.

I have been on the fence for years, I'v seen those who do have a consumer focus in the Open Source world; I've also seen these same people more in the closed source world. This seems like it's opposite to how one would think things would actually work.

The one difference I can still see is that with Open Source it's still possible to go around the egotistical blockers.
We advise people to submit one function at a time, this speeds up the process and makes it easier to incorporate feedback. If there is a high quality merge request for an EE feature we'll probably merge it. We hope that instead of duplicating work that has been done most people will focus their efforts on the 180 features marked accepting merge requests http://feedback.gitlab.com/forums/176466-general/status/7964... By the way, some people in the core team https://about.gitlab.com/core-team/ do not work for GitLab the company.
I had no idea Watson was being used for recipes. It reminded me of the genetic algorithm recipes from xkcd (https://xkcd.com/720/).

I wonder what else can Watson suggest. Vacations? Clothes? Gadgets? ... Dates?

This has so much potential it's not even funny. Computer inference plus human common sense seems like a match made in heaven, and dissipates some of the Skynet-scenario fears.

Go Watson!
Hopefully now OpenSSH (and the SSH RFCs) will drop "diffie-hellman-group1-sha1" from the default list of allowed KexAlgorithms.
So what's the surprise here? The economics of a trailer park are lucrative for landlords?
For vector animation, as well as optimised bitmap animations Flash was blazing fast and GPU accelerated. Granted the plugin in general was bloated, and lots of Flash objects on a page slowed your browser down, but once it got going (for example in a full screen game or whatever) Flash was very efficient. I'd say the web platform has not yet caught up.
Swap your CTRL and caps lock keys. It will make it a lot easier to use.
Is aging a disease? :)
On the surface this is a story about trailer parks and the rich profiting from captive renters, but I think the bigger story is this:

"He quotes US government statistics showing that in 2013, 39% of Americans earned less than $20,000 – less than the government’s poverty threshold income of $20,090 for a three-person household."

39% means (Edit: 48,000,000 not 125,162,700, thanks @beachstartup) Americans are living below the poverty line! When you don't have options then you will be taken advantage of.

Our system is failing us, our government is failing us, our fellow Americans are failing us and we the community of Hacker News are failing us.

How do we disrupt poverty (in the USA and globally), disrupt failing governments and disrupt failing communities?

It seems as if our biggest downfall as humans is we don't see how what we do as individuals impacts everyone else and we are all dying deaths of 1b stings. "my carbon doesn't matter", "my investments don't matter", "my food doesn't matter", "my lifestyle doesn't matter", "my impact is so finite", "I'm just one person", etc.
When considering a tool with which one will work for many hours a day and many days a month over the course of years, for some people it makes sense to use expressive power rather than initial ease of use as the primary criterion for choosing among alternative sets of bindings. In the case of a tool like Emacs, the user is always likely to encounter new alternative work flows or to invent them theirself. This is what Emacs offers as an alternative value to Vim's Unix philosophy based idea of doing one thing and only one thing well.

There's nothing wrong with Vim, and nothing implicitly wrong with using Vim shortcuts in Emacs so long as one is aware of its Fortran in any language style limitations.
How Minecraft Inspired Jewelbots, the Programmable Bracelets for Tween Girls
I'm not sure, but it remains a pretty strong indicator of why we need good multipartisan cooperation in any good society.
Backblaze's design, by their own admission, is good if you have low IO usage. Internet Archive has a much different usage set, where the instantaneous IO needs are higher, and thus, the backblaze design would be way too high latency for them. Things like caching and ECC are much more useful when you have the hot spots that Internet Archive tends to have.
Well if we "cure" aging, it will have the awkward consequence that every life must end with an accident, disease or suicide.
Millions of barrels of oil are about to vanish
I'd be curious to know what a modern day IBM mainframe can do, just out of idle interest.
PC UTILITIES PRO DRIVER PRO 3.2 PORTABLE Full Version
On the other hand, proprietary software is made to up to your very own specs, of course.
I've been using Pencil for some years now to pre-visualize new features for our Saas app. It's a great piece of software. Before that I used Balsamiq mockups and I'm glad I changed over to Pencil.
"Watson seems to work WITH you rather than for you."

Absolutely right, and that interaction is the most interesting part. This also reminds me a talk about Palantir at GovCon. The speaker tells us two stories.

The first story was about Advanced Chess. We know that human and computer both are good at chess for two very different reasons. We also know they these skills can complement each other. So in Advanced Chess, instead of playing against each other, human and computer form a single team and fight against another team.

It's easy to think that if we take the single strongest chess player and the single most powerful computer, they might dominate the tournament. But that didn't happen. The team that won the tournament was a modestly skilled chess player with a regular laptop running freely available open source chess tools. So how did this happen?

It turned out there was a third factor nobody consider. It was the quality of interface between the man and the machine. How easy it is for a human to develop the strategic oversight, the guidance and to rely on the computer for tactical component. Focusing on, on what they are individually good at.

The second story is about Paypal. At the time of Paypal, several other companies were trying to get involve in online payment industry. The other companies were CitiBank, eBay, Western Union. But one by one they folded back where the Paypal succeeded. What happened?

It turns out large corporations were trying to develop a better system to automatically verify transactions. But Paypal went the other way around. They tried to increase the effectiveness of their human analyst by providing better computing service. Everything on the computing side was to empower/help the analyst to explore his data faster, detect anomalies and to make a quick/better decision. It's the man not the machine that had the final decision in Paypal.

I think the core idea of these two stories is how differently can we use our computing power, and how we are doing so far. I think most solutions are trying to develop a set of fixed answers, and hoping their answer are better then their competitors. But I think, it should be the other way around.

Computers are here to assist us. The design of a system should not be reaching a fixed the goal, instead it should help us; acting as a guide providing necessary information helping to make an informed decision. And if used properly, human can already attain superpower.

And I am really curious to see how IBM Watson fits into this bill!
I live in the UK and care about CCTV because three guys on bikes snatched my iPhone in central London and it wasn't covered. Install some more as far as I'm concerned. Also one time in Ireland I had a different three guys thinking of beating me up and then reconsider when they figured I was on camera. There are loads of cases of CCTV catching or deterring criminals. Is there a single case in the UK of someone innocent being harmed by the use of CCTV?
Since you want more housing...

Trouble is what people really want is for nothing at all to change. Prices stay flat, no new housing is built, nobody gets evicted, no new people come to town.

Sadly, since they want to have their cake and to eat it too, nobody seems to be approaching it from the POV of:

We are up against an inexorable force of change; how do we channel that change in a way that is most acceptable?

Instead they demand the impossible and lose all control of where that inexorable force is going to take them.
I responded to Sephr's comment. We think the open source project is better because of our open core business model. More than 80% of the company development efforts go into open source code. Many people contribute new features, but the work to make installation easy, release management, fixing bugs and performance regressions, investigating security reports and updating dependencies is for the most part done by GitLab the company. I recognize that the open core model requires a careful balance. But I think it is working very well for GitLab and is one of the reasons GitLab became more popular than the 100% open source alternatives.
Its a cause of death. We like to avoid those. And we know multicellular organisms exist that can maintain their telomeres and avoid senescence.

We are almost certainly going to be able to genetically engineer that into future people at some point, among a lot of other useful things. Dunno if we are going to manage to get gene therapy that can alter living humans so drastically before they die, though. And who knows when it will happen, just that it almost certainly will, unless we blow ourselves up.
I have an answer.

Buy the trailer park. Sell it to the tenants. Their rent payments become mortgage payments, in effect. When they finish buying the property en masse, it becomes controlled by a tenant-run cooperative.

This is, obviously, a money-losing proposition for whoever buys the trailer park in the first place. That's why it should probably be a government entity.

If the trailer park residents can do it by themselves -- and in several locations, they have -- that's great. But it would be preferable to have self-owned communities over slums, even if you have to have the government provide the initial loan and organization.

Is it socialism? Sure. The good kind.
"They’ve got to live somewhere, so you combine them in a certain place. They don’t go out to hurt people. I think it’s a community service, because if not they will be in your neighbourhood. Now they’re all in one place, you can watch them all in one place. And they pay well and won’t mess things up. I mean, why would you not? I think it’s a brilliant idea."

The surprise here is that the ghettoization of identifiable groups is not unintentional; in fact, it's planned.
To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.
Don't do it! :)
NPR tried really hard to take him down. I thought it was going to be effective but it seems like he still got his point across.
But on the other hand, this is capitalism.

Is it? Capitalism is the private ownership of the means of production. Is somewhere to live a "means of production"? Sure, it's necessary to live, but it's not "producing" anything. There's no partnership involved. Capitalism is about someone owning the "machine" [1] of production, and someone else being employed to operate that machine, and the owner and operator splitting the profit. In theory, the two of them working together in this way produces more than either would on their own, so everyone benefits.

I see the sort of thing in this article referred to as "rentier capitalism", although it's generally meant to be derogatory; a way of marking it out from the beneficial form of capitalism.

Oftentimes in capitalism, things look really, really bad. But from a macro point of view, things work out better in the long run.

I think you're confusing capitalism with exploitation and rent seeking. They're not the same thing. Not at all.

As an aside, I'm sure this use of the word "capitalism" is something Chomsky used to talk about. Now that it's very broadly accepted that capitalism is ethically good and correct and there is effectively no discussion about capitalism, people can gradually move bad behaviour into the definition of capitalism and society will protect that bad behaviour, even against its own interests.

If we do want to redefine "capitalism", that's fine, of course, but at that point we have to re-examine its status as "ethically good" or "correct", and judge it in light of this rent-seeking exploitation that produces no value or wealth. In my verdict, under this new definition, "capitalism" comes up bad.

[1] Which of course could be an actual machine, but could be just any form of capital that is necessary to produce the output goods.
Developer of the AI, used by the author, gave details of the code on Stack Overflow

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22342854/what-is-the-opti...
I encourage all use of the type system to ensure program correctness, but once you've had Hindley-Milner inference, it's hard to muddle along with something like this.
Digital Journalism: How Good Is It?
It seems to me there is a fine line between providing a valuable service for low income people and being a slum lord.