skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The reforms are the only long term solution. They're reforms like, maybe Greeks should retire at the same age that other people in Europe do. Maybe hairdressing should not be considered a 'dangerous profession', thus unlocking various benefits. Maybe Greek train drivers should not be paid $130,000 a year to drive near-empty trains. Maybe Greece should be able to grow its own food instead of importing more than half of it.

Greece is hosed because, as the article points out, it is an incredibly screwed up and corrupt country. The EU is desperately trying to make it a few percent less screwed up, and mostly getting nowhere. Greece absolutely isn't hosed because of those awful European creditors who deserve to be punished for their naive belief that maybe Greece would improve.

I mean, just go take a look at the garbage that has been pouring out of Greece and ordinary Greek people about German in recent times. Allusions to Hitler seem to fall from their mouths every single day. The idea that maybe Germans should not be paying for Greeks is not fascism, yet they routinely act as if it is.

Greece has no real alternative but to adopt severe reforms and that means severe "austerity", whereby "austerity" of course what people mean is shrinking the Greek state to a size more appropriate to the size of its economy.
> You should always know where your kid is

This attitude is the difference. Children are human beings with rights, too, and they are capable of much more than contemporary American parents give them credit for.
The derivatives that underwrote the debt made it all ok though. Same thing happened with the mortgage bubble. It's an easy way to turn a bunch of garbage into a bunch of AAA prime credit stuff. When the whole thing collapses, all the bankers get 100 cents on the dollar courtesy of central bank printing and sticking it to the taxpayer.
To rephrase the question, how much of the lift is generated by high-pressure air below the screwdriver, and how much is generated by low-pressure air above?
This is absurdly wrongheaded, and perhaps one of the most misguided things I've ever read on HN. The medium, as the old saying goes and in many cases, is the message, and the way information comes into our brains fundamentally changes the context of the information, how we learn it, and how we're able to access it (for a trivial example, look at the connection between scent and memory).

How toy blocks are toy blocks, whether they're made of wood or abstract vertices;

No. Muscle memory and spatial skills are based on physical manipulation with the hands and arms. One cannot develop good body awareness/proprioception without actually using their limbs (this becomes even more important as we potentially move away from finger-based controls for computers).

how a novel is a novel, whether it has a battle engine or not

No. Control over the outcome and process of an artistic object fundamentally changes the object -- an appropriate analogy would be to an echo chamber where people manipulate art into forms they prefer rather than be challenged by it. Games can be art, but a process you engage with and alter is different from a process imposed upon you as a single vision by a writer.

how a war simulation is a war simulation, whether the bullets are made of plastic and paint or network packets

No. Physical reflexes and adrenaline responses operate in different ways when someone is perceiving real operations rather than an obvious simulation. Virtual reality may overcome some of these issues but it will do so by narrowing the analogue, not by analogizing bullets and packets.

and that talking to strangers is talking to strangers, whether it's on a playground or on Facebook;

No. Humans use an incredible number of feedback mechanisms to interpret person-to-person interaction, ranging from facial expressions to pheromones -- the idea that these responses can be coded into text or emoji in a coherent way is absurd (particularly given that many of them occur at an unconscious level).

The computer is not a place -- it's a manipulatory environment that currently engages the fingertips, the eyes, and occasionally the ears, three of dozens of sensory inputs that our brain uses to model the world. The brain is plastic in many ways, but it is not so plastic that these inputs can replace scent, visual responses to faces, physical action of the limbs, the skin's response to environmental factors such as cold or sunlight, and many more.

Messages are never independent of their medium, and this is never more true than when those messages are human experiences.
The notion that a country like Greece needs a different currency or fiscal policy to Germany isn't really true. Ultimately whether they print New Drachma and hyperinflate themselves into poverty or whether they accept massive pay cuts/import drops doesn't make much difference - they are two roads that lead to the same outcome.

Greece could become competitive without leaving the Euro. However, it means actually telling people they're going to receive large and frequent pay cuts. As nobody likes doing that, easier to ignore the problem until the whole thing comes crashing down. Then when salaries are redenominated in ND and suddenly ND becomes worthless, it's not the bosses fault see - the boss didn't cut anyone's pay. It's just the darn currencies fault.

Psychological tricks aren't what Greece needs right now though.
I think there are two separate issues here. One is 'just' another way of understanding or visualizing a concept or process: "look the problem over and see if you can understand the way it behaves, roughly, when you change some of the numbers". Isn't this exactly what you do with a debugger when you step through the code? Or if I'm designing a data structure or algorithm, I have to play around in my head, or with pen and paper, before even thinking about going near a keyboard.

The other issue is 'allowing' oneself to imagine and visualize these things (math/physics equations / software). I don't think the point is to restrict yourself to things for which you have physical intuition, it's more that it's easier to go from physical experience -> intuition about physics phenomena that are closely related to physical experience -> intuition about math /physics /software that don't have a counterpart in our physical experience as humans e.g. quantum mechanics
The basic idea:

BMW wants to sell more cars to greeks. Greeks don't have enough money so they can't buy. Deutsche Bank (DB) gives "free money" in loans. (And of course DB knows that greece isn't exactly "strong" economically.) We are talking about a greek population that never ever had a loan before, while the prime minister talks about the "powerful (economically) greece". They also thought that the world "stock markedt" was some kind of chinese recipe. Greeks, with "free money", buy BMWs. BMW is happy. Profits. Eventually, of course, TSHTF.

And then, would you expect that?

THE PRIVATE DEBTS BECOME PUBLIC.

That means the bad loans of DB become the burden of all the taxpayers of europe. Germans pay, greeks pay (decimated basically, with ~-20+% GDP, +5x taxation, etc), italians pay, french pay, etc. The TAXPAYERS.

To put it simply:

BWM: Happy.
DB: Happy.
Europe's taxpayers: F*cked.

The billions that greece "got" as "help", it never saw. They went ~98% back to foreign creditors.

Basically:

The politicians (cue, under the table payments for Mrs. Merkel, Mr. Schauble, Mr. who-was-PM-of-greece-then), took money from all european taxpayers, and gave profits to BMW and DB. (With their cut.) Now, they sell a nationalistic "those southern states are lazy".

PS: It was german and french private banks, and german and french industries. It's just that DB was the biggest, and BMW is big and symbolic.
Show HN: GoGoLuck – Gamble for charities
Tracking the Popularity of GitHub Applications
It may be more a case of "unknown unknown".

In essence people don't know what they don't know, thus they can't really evaluate what they have vs what they could have.

It is one of those things that drive me up the wall when i hear someone quote Ford about faster horses.

Its not that people would actually want a faster horse. But when what they know is horses, they will use those to describe their wants.

Similarly i recall a claim from the KDE community that to properly rethink how they did program launching they had to abolish the use of terms like "menu" as it would effectively lock their thinking into familiar terms.

Or perhaps "when all you have is a hammer, every problem looks like a nail".
> as mobile OSes have gotten more multitasking-friendly they've moved towards
> the "card" metaphor, in which each app runs in a card and there's some
> method for shuffling between them. And a card is really just a window
> that's maximized 100% of the time. (Which is how most general users use
> windows on the desktop, so they're not losing much.)

Meet the new boss, same as the old boss.

“Switcher,” written by Andy Hertzfeld, October 1984-1985.

http://www.folklore.org/StoryView.py?story=Switcher.txt

Developer’s instructions:

http://macgui.com/usenet/?group=8&id=1113
The reforms were not "punishing", they just were never implemented in full due to resistance from the people. Even today, the majority prefers a clash and chaos to reforms.
your home country doesn't have free software? what a magical place. I assume your country's DNS servers are running on Windows Server, and the main webservers are running Microsoft IIS?

Sad thing is, with Windows Licensing v.7, you barely get what you paid for, and only if you use Free Software as leverage to get a low enough price.
Sure, some of the austerity measures make sense. Tax evasion and the bloated public sector are a huge issue and need to be fixed.

But it has to happen in a way that doesn't completely destroy the economy in the process.
It's working for everyone but the Greek. Blame them all you want, but we need a solution that works for everyone.
Far better one that turned up in my G+ feed a few days back:

http://faculty.chicagobooth.edu/anil.kashyap/research/papers...

"A Primer on the Greek Crisis: the things you need to know from the start until now", Anil Kashyap, University of Chicago, Booth School of Business, June 29th, 2015

1) How did Greece get into such trouble?...

To accompany that:

"Greek Debt Crisis: How Goldman Sachs Helped Greece to Mask its True Debt"

http://www.spiegel.de/international/europe/greek-debt-crisis...

Goldman Sachs helped the Greek government to mask the true extent of its deficit with the help of a derivatives deal that legally circumvented the EU Maastricht deficit rules. At some point the so-called cross currency swaps will mature, and swell the country's already bloated deficit.
Thanks for the feedback, we are including that in the next version.
The TROIKA GDP Forecast graph is great! I think from now on I am going to send it to any investor who thinks asking pre-revenue companies for projections is a reasonable thing.
Yep, I just posted that myself.
The download's a zip file, with an iso file, with a lot of html files within a few folders. It's a bit tedious. I remembered that the Internet Archive has tools to simplify it, so I sent it over there... and it's not working! Dunno what's up.
Windows 8.1 has a tiling window interface. 8.0 tiled to a lesser degree.
That works out OK, because I don't disagree with anything you just said :) If it's a vacation you're leaving for, have a good one!
They were a profit seeking enterprise from the beginning - they just kept punting until that round. At some point the rubber has to hit the road.

I don't have the answers but I don't think monetizing the 31st most traffiked is impossible. They have to think harder and dig deeper.
ChromeOS is also based on Gentoo. :)
I picked up a Chinese propaganda poster calendar a few years back. All the smiling chubby babies...
Pressure is relative, and it is this pressure difference that causes the lifting force. So what is "high pressure" relative to the top of the screwdriver is "low pressure" relative to the bottom of it (and the atmosphere.)
> "At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it's time to get Reddit functioning again," Alexis Ohanian wrote.

I like Alexis, I've read his book and seen his TED talk and think he is overall a good guy. That said both this comment and the way he reacted on reddit was extremely poor. This "apology" for Pao is shit and completely empty. After years of ignoring the mods and the hard work they put in to make reddit possible they tell everyone "You've had your fun, now start making up money again". I'm not just ready to leave reddit for something like voat like I left digg for reddit but this is not the first thing reddit has done recently that rubs me wrong. Maybe this is just their Google-"Don't be evil" transformation where they do things that the community thinks are not in keeping with their stated mission but continues to use the platform because it's better than most everything else out there...
Can they really do this if you're just upgrading the phone and signing a new contract since you're not required to choose a new plan? If you were absolutely required to choose a new plan when you upgradethen how can people with unlimited data still be grandfathered in?
It seems like a common intuition in software is the "code smell", where you can just look at some code and tell if it will be "maintainable" or "good", for some value of that.

I've come to think of it more as a "familiarity" though - where if you're familiar with writing stable and maintainable systems, you'll get the right smells - but some people have opposite feelings about systems, and it seems like they are people that have the opposite type of experience as well.

Other types of intuition I think are based mostly on pattern recognition. If you have a system that makes a set of choices that follows a well known pattern to you, your brain can start predicting what has been done where, and with enough confirmation, can start feeling confident about the behavior of other parts not yet scrutinized. Once again, if things are done in an unfamiliar way, all that evaporates and one needs to fall back to looking at the low level strategies and techniques.
I wonder how much Windows 10 will add to that, as there you can drag windows into one of the corners to have it adopt a defined screen space.
Hey:) reading one page at a time is better!

Anyway, the approach to Islam taken by Americans is different by the one taken by Germans some 100yrs ago. Is there anything to learn or epochs are just too different?
I believe Von Neumann showed that any consistent ordinal utility can be mapped to a cardinal utility. As long as you can rank your preferences, for cats, children, or whatever, you can come up with an equivalent cardinal utility.

So I think Waldman's statement is technically correct, the two are equivalent, and one isn't more scientific than the other.

There is this notion that it's bad form to say, a rich person gets less marginal utility out of a dollar than a poor person, or sum up utilities across people. And it's bad form to quantify the value of a human life for instance.

You can, however, say the rich person values leisure at more dollars than the poor person.

If you could sum up utilities across people I'm sure it would lead one to very bad conclusions, unlike some of the other simplifications economists make, which only lead to useful conclusions. <cough> Actually, I'm not really certain what it would change, if anything.

In any event it would appear that humans aren't very consistent with their preferences, c.f. behavioral economics, hence the notion of utility may lead one astray whether one views it as an ordinal ranking or cardinal quantity.
> Probably gestures are an innovation, but it isn't used widely except in operating system windows manager and Safari

I give a lot more credit to the multitouch trackpad.

Gestures are a great (and they work basically anywhere there are clear 'back'/'forward' navigation actions), scrolling is actually more efficient and painless than with one or more wheels; we also got rid of physical fixed buttons.

I initially switched to a magic trackpad to see if it would alleviate RSI like problems, but for how I use it I found it way more efficient than the mouse in the end.

I think the advances in trackpad usability on OS X are the main reason there is less pressure to have a touch screen.
Relative to 1 atm.
I guess a lot of the analysis being offered recently is showing that the Greeks, if not being encouraged to lie, we're certainly being given a wink
and a nod. At least, the current crisis should be seen as two separate issues - poor Greek governance, and poor bank governance.
Implementing a land registry and getting people to pay taxes is not punishment...

What part of the reform is actually punitive?

The history of the Greek land registry is kinda hilarious btw...http://openeurope.org.uk/blog/reforming-greece-easier-said-d...
All of those things provide real world skills but their informal nature makes them unfit for a resume. However those skills are increasingly relevant in the industries built around those games so its mainly a matter of selling yourself to the people who can recognize the value in that skillset.

Just as virtual skills don't always translate perfectly to the real world the reverse is also true. There's a large market out there for digital goods that most people are blissfully unaware of.
Still on the cards.
I know windows 7 had the "snap" feature that let you tile two windows side-by-side by dragging one window to the left and the other to the right. Does Windows 8.1 do tiling any better/automatically?
Depends what user space debugger you mean...

Some specific advantages of uprobes:

- Kernel tracing with user-level context. uprobes works with the other kernel tracing frameworks, so front-ends like ftrace, perf_events, and SystemTap, can trace both user and kernel, and combine the results (especially programmatic tracers like SystemTap). Eg, let's say we wanted disk I/O latency by database query, or scheduler run-queue latency by application request.

- Full user-level visibility. You may have a language runtime tracer that shows what the language is doing (and do so better than uprobes can), but not system libraries. Eg, Java burning time in a compression library, or even its own libjvm for GC, which may not be seen (in the same manner) as method tracing.

- It's there by default. At my company people can run anything. So if there's a performance issue on an application I've never seen before, I have one way to dig in, even if there are no other options.

- Some debuggers are not made for real-time production use, as they halt the target. With uprobes, we can pose a question of the running software (latency of X, arguments of Y), and answer it quickly, with relatively less overhead.

- It can trace system wide. (I'm not sure many other debuggers can.) Eg, you could trace libnsl calls, across all processes.

Some advantages of other user space debuggers:

- User to user tracing is more efficient than calling the kernel. LTTng has a user space implementation which beats the performance of user->kernel tracers by some factor. Some runtimes, like Java, have plenty of user-level tracing add-ons that are also much more efficient. (It's possible, like with LTTng, that uprobes could be implemented to do user->user tracing, and combine results afterwards. I don't know the status of this.)

- Custom user-level tracers (eg, with Java) can be better developed to handle the target language and context. Tracing Java methods with uprobes is extremely difficult (I have an idea of how to do it), but trivial with Java tracers designed to do that. (I should add: tracing Java native calls, like the workings of GC in libjvm, is well suited for uprobes.)
That's what this is about: http://worrydream.com/SeeingSpaces/
And for that matter of a lot that is published in print, in The New Yorker among other places.
Ah, another HN trope! Classic, throwing out the dumb and inaccurate topes left and right.

HN users getting their hate on and their cynicism and all of that, it’s all so awful and pointless to discuss, really.
It also hasn't been the case (yet, maybe?) to me mostly because we haven't been teaching computer science fundamentals in most schools, sadly...

And I mean learning fundamentals, not training for proprietary solutions like Office that isn't what high school is about.
How much are stem cells improving quality of life?

How much did clean water, flush toilets, and municipal waste removal improve quality of life and life expectancy?

https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/MsQfdPAn_0XUdZUoReBfbg

https://d324imu86q1bqn.cloudfront.net/uploads/asset/attachme...
> Greece has no real alternative but to adopt severe reforms and that means severe "austerity", whereby "austerity" of course what people mean is shrinking the Greek state to a size more appropriate to the size of its economy.

Greece has a perfectly workable alternative in a Grexit. It would help them enormously and not require austerity but there are political reasons that won't allow it.

If Greece was using the drachma, this would not be a problem.

The other problem with austerity measures is that they have a tendency to inhibit growth or even shrink the economy; shrinking the government further certainly doesn't help that situation.

EDIT: I forgot to add that Greece has a primary budget surplus - meaning that if it wasn't for the debt they owe, they'd be doing fantastically budgetarily.
On a zero-based forecast the two are equivalent. It is different though to keep your stocks high while taking your flows down as if you keep a euro balance sheet and a de-valued euro p&l. They are two roads in the same direction but with totally different outcomes.
One thing I'm familiar with, thanks to my kids, is the Suzuki method of violin instruction. Kids start out just playing by rote memorization, and by ear, with no charts. There were books for the Suzuki repertoire, more for the use of adults, as the kids didn't read from them.

When I was growing up, Suzuki was controversial in the US because teachers were afraid that kids would lose the chance to learn how to read, and be musically crippled for life. I have to admit that I was among the skeptical, since I learned according to the European method.

The first note that I ever played, an open string, I read from a book that had that one big note sitting there in front of me. The entire emphasis was on "getting the cats out of the instrument" as it were, but yet it was all done with reading from the git-go.

What's happened since then in the US (don't know about elsewhere) is that reading is introduced gradually through a separate curriculum. It's been going on for long enough that Suzuki kids are now playing professionally in orchestras, and we've met one or two "superstar" concert violinists through master classes for the kids, who have mentioned their Suzuki background.

So apparently you can start out without reading, and live to tell about it.
Clickbait labeling bullshit. Another dumb classic of HN comments. So dumb, so simplistic, so fucking pointless.
Hm. Having to drag windows at all seems to be a serious deficiency in a "tiled" implementation.
The reforms may be a long term solution, but pushing austerity to far makes the end solution push out in time and actually make it less likely that the loans are able to be paid back in a reasonable time frame.
Praise for Simple and its security team: I interacted with Simple on a security issue, and Simple's responsiveness and engagement are both top tier. Kudos!
ProcessWire: http://processwire.com/
If Greece's creditors lent money to the country while knowing of its government's misrepresentations, then whose fault is that again?
What the Finance Minister of Greece Says
How to Create Sublime Text Snippets
I think this is referring to the Windows 8 apps?
Microsoft Bob anyone?

http://toastytech.com/guis/bob.html