skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"if rates were 0%, it would in the long run make sense to bulldoze the rocky mountains to save money on gas, because there is no marginal cost to consider"

Wait, run that by me again more slowly.

In general, it does make sense to make large infrastructure investments in order to increase long term productivity, especially when interest rates are low, but in general, it's always the case. Hell, bits of the Rockies WERE bulldozed (And dynamited) to save money on railroad or freeway construction that would pay off on a fifty to a hundred year timescale. What does zero percent interest have to do with that? Presumably there are even some positive interest rate values for which the eventual gas savings outweigh the cost of hiring the guys with the bulldozers, if those are the only costs you care about.

If there's a quadrillion dollars worth of hydrocarbons on Titan, and it'll cost me a trillion dollars and fifty years to bring them to earth, it makes economic sense for me to do it, even if interest rates are 5%. I don't think it's the interest rate that makes these projects make sense or not make sense.

What's the magic that happens at zero that causes otherwise nonsensical projects to make economic sense?
When Science Publishers Aren’t Getting It Done
"This site works best in Google Chrome".
It is very interesting to see almost every company becoming a software company. Businesses that earlier thought of software as a tool at most, now see the endless possibilities for efficiency and decision support.

An example is UPS, who plans it's routes with a heavily modified traveling salesman optimizer. http://www.wsj.com/articles/at-ups-the-algorithm-is-the-driv...

Personally, I work on a system that tracks food items and makes sure it stays fresh on the store shelves.
From what I can see, this article is on point, but is missing an important factor: the risk these "front runners" take. As soon as the announcement is made that a company is joining the index, it's public knowledge. In theory, the expected increase, minus a risk premium, should be priced in immediately. There will likely still be money to be made over the following days until the addition is complete, but it's far from guaranteed, and comes at the expense of reduced diversification. (Which I suppose is another way to say that you're getting paid for providing liquidity, as the article says.) Just because AA went up X% over the 4 days, or whatever, before it joined the index, doesn't mean the next stock will. Perhaps its jump will be overestimated by the HFTs, and retail investors trying to get in in the days following the announcement will end up losing money. Probably not, but it's certainly a significant possibility. So if a person wanted to pursue this active strategy, they would need to manage their risk appropriately. It's not necessarily a bad idea if you enjoy spending your time on that kind of thing, although personally I'd rather index (with a moderate small/value tilt).
Ask HN: Self-destructing email?
Does anyone have recommendations for services that allow you to send long form content that is self-destructing / ephemeral? Or can at least be deleted by the sender from all recipients? The value would be to have an email like correspondence without the fear of it showing up in the New York Times or in discovery as part of a legal action.
Systemd:The Biggest Myths
EFF 25th Anniversary Membership Campaign
All of the academic stream systems from the early 2000s are long over. The students have all graduated.

Truviso got bought by Cisco and disappeared into their internal projects.

StreamBase got bought by TIBCO and is still available today.
Firstly congrats - as a recent HN submissions showed, half the battle is simply finishing the damn thing.

A couple of questions, if you don't mind.

How did you support yourself while writing the book? And if you were working another job, how did you find time?

Did you try any other marketing like giving away the first chapter or blogging/newsletters?

I've been toying with the idea of writing a book on programming AVR microcontrollers for a while, since most of the information online is horrifically fragmented. I'm tempted to go down the website route and then publish it separately as a cohesive ebook, but it looks like leanpub may be a good option if you can publish individual chapters as you write them.
IMHO this solution is nice but wrong.
The point is not just creating a "cool" program with Go that will handle HTTP requests.

Without really knowing the company's needs, I am relying on this paragraph from the post:

While working on a piece of our anonymous telemetry and analytics system, our goal was to be able to handle a large amount of POST requests from millions of endpoints. The web handler would receive a JSON document that may contain a collection of many payloads that needed to be written to Amazon S3, in order for our map-reduce systems to later operate on this data.

Knowing this, I would build it differently.

1. Clients post to S3 Directly
2. Lambda -> Overload business logic, private data, cleanup, spam control etc...
3. Prepare files (64M) for Hadoop
4. Hadoop

There's no reason to have that proxy in the middle, Amazon S3 will handle those millions of requests with no real trouble, I wouldn't throw machines on this process.
It looks like Apple Watch sales are tanking
Top 20 Google Cardboard Apps You Can Download Now
However, for a lazy or casual investor discovering the difference between the good managers and the lucky managers is very hard.
Eric Holder: The Justice Department Could Strike Deal with Edward Snowden
The twitter query string should be removed from this link
Great thanks! Looking forward to checking it out.
That's a very good point. Adding to backlog :)
Yes, certainly, computers should be safe. But they aren't. So another less idealistic defense is to teach fear to users. Just as I have to induce fear of cars to my kids (annoyingly necessary), I will tell them to not trust anything coming from computers.

I'm old now and I'm in computers since I was maybe 14, and, believe me or not, I've never told my name to my computer.
The world of finance makes these aspects of your life function:

* Allows you to get a mortgage

* Allows you to protect yourself with
health/car/life/home/title/etc insurance

* Pays for your highways/stadiums/schools and other public works

* Protects your deposits

* Pays for your retirement

* Funds the college fund that paid for your school

* ... Or the student loans that allowed you to attend school

* Supports the global supply chain that brings you your
iPhone, stocks the grocery store/your favorite restaurants with food, and puts the clothes on your back.

* Funds the growth of corporations large and small, giving you the job that allows you to buy an iPhone

* Funds the massive philanthropy expenditures that help those
in need everyday

* Pays the pensions of the elderly

Financial innovation make our lives more predictable and less sensitive to chance. One could argue a huge amount of human progress is owed to modern-day financial institutions.

Like a software system, it's extremely naive to think that complexity is a sign that a system is rotten. Finance is an art, not a science. Sometimes we make products that we don't always completely understand until later. But the vast majority of financial innovations are deeply ingrained in the good life that you get to enjoy every day.
And the corresponding Go library: https://github.com/dchest/spipe
Greece Crisis and the Federal Reserve
Just one instance. https://twitter.com/mxcl/status/608682016205344768 , I've seen hundreds like this.
Exactly. I think he's assuming he'll never have to pay back the principle.
I need a developer on retainer for some personal projects, starting at something like 10 hours per month, for 6 months. Full Stack is preferred, but the main priority will be front end development for some small websites. Other work will involve some application development in JS (node), Go, etc. This is a retainer! I will try to keep you busy but some months you may just collect a check.

Summary: Full stack developer with a lot of projects and goals seeks to employ another full stack or front-end-ish developer on retainer to move things along. Initial contract will be 6 months, 10 hours per month or whatever we work out. Remote ok!

email me for more information, blouis at unquietcode.com
Show HN: Mockups/Wireframes Kit for PowerPoint
Allows you to get a mortgage which is a function of available credit which is near limitless and so becomes a function of your expected lifetime earnings. Times two now they lend at "household" income.

Education prices are also a function of available credit that tops out at expected total salary less food/rent expenses.

It's enslaving you. Unless you ride it and enslave others.

Your list reads like a wide-eyed econ grad. This is not the real world.

Also note the "we" in the statement. Vested interest.
If someone stands in front of one of these cars then I imagine it will stay still. Someone could probably commandeer it at that point. A person in the same situation might sense they are in danger and try to get away. I would be ok with having the self driving car give itself over since that is safer for the public, but what if there is a human passenger in the self driving car?
There are very sound technical reasons why this doesn't work. If you send a set of bits to someone on a device they control, they have a copy of that set of bits. Even if you do a bunch of work and make it so that they have to use a device you control to access the message they can still get to it ( the "analog hole"), even if at slightly less than perfect resolution.

And honestly Snapchat for the Enterprise does not sound like a worthwhile endeavor.
Quite amazing. This talk is not just about Om Next - its also about ClojureScript.next. Featuring:

1. AMD, CommonJS, ES6 module support
2. CLJS in CLJS (yup, that works - including the standalone nodejs based REPL)

Thise in combination are especially huge.

With core.typed being an option as well (once your system starts growing and the design solidifies) looks like the clojure ecosystem is really positioned to be one of the technically strongest available for web development.

And of course, replacing that awkward REST mess seems painfully obvious now (except for duplicated data which seems like something that might yet need solving). Hindsight is 20/20
The cult of Vice
I'd like to echo drjesusphd and ask if you could point us to any good information you've found on increasing per-student expenditures. My university likes to justify increasing tuition by pointing to a decrease in the proportion of a student's education that is funded by the state. The implication, is that per-student state funding has gone down and that's why tuition is going up, but state funding per student has remained relatively steady in inflation-adjusted terms for decades. It leads one to wonder what exactly they're spending all the extra money on.

I have yet to look into the numbers in greater detail but if you could point me toward some good sources it would be much appreciated.
Yeah, that was a great talk.

I really want to try out Om Next. I've been building a bunch of stuff in Om lately and the Falcor/Relay/GraphQL/Om Next stuff is really going to be great to have at my disposal.

The clojurescript compiling clojurescript stuff looks great too.
When Did Women Start to Outlive Men?
Or because they enjoy nicotine/tobacco. Not everyone is drowning in self-hatred because they like a little head-buzz. Witness the outrageous growth of tobacco-based vaping products in the last few years.
The business case for issue prevention
All of these were done 25, 50, or 100 years ago. The basis for the mortgage industry as we know it was developed during the new deal.

I need some serious convincing that the effects securitization of everything has been a net win.

The markets for most of this stuff are made or directly supported by the Federal government.
Another one on my list is anti-discrimination laws. A better idea if it absolutely have to be done is to impose anti-discrimination restrictions on specific companies.
Alternate theory: March 27th is 38 weeks after July 4th.
Which raises the question of why so many of these people are vehemently opposed to e-cigarettes, which are essentially just a mechanism for delivering nicotine with some inert vapor.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iFDe5kUUyT0 series is a good watch and will give you an idea why they "made" it complex.
You already have a mobile phone with a 4K (or ok, a HD) display
No, not at all the point Levine was making.

But like tptacek said, you probably need to read Levine regularly to unpack his argument there; it was extremely self-referential.
The company managing the Vanguard fund is owned by the fund holders themselves. It's a closed system and the incentives are aligned.
Not so. The whole "second hand smoke" thing is BS.

http://www.forbes.com/sites/danielfisher/2013/12/12/study-fi...
Two points:

1) From your link, "The study doesn’t cover the many other ill effects of breathing somebody else’s cigarette smoke, of course, which include asthma and possibly cardio-pulmonary disease." So not debunked exactly.

2) Penn & Teller are entertainers (and illusionists). They present controversial opinions for the sake of a TV show. It is not journalism and shouldn't be accepted at face value.

ETA: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Penn_%26_Teller:_Bullshit!

Penn says, "right now, as I sit here, there probably is danger in secondhand smoke".
It's clear that secondhand smoke does harm others, but the extent to which it does is a matter of debate. There's non-tobacco funded research that indicates it's not a significant risk unless you live with an in-home smoker for 30 years[1] (lung cancer only, not sure about heart disease). There are studies that paint a far more extreme situation, I'm sure, but I think this puts occasional outdoor exposure into perspective.

[1] http://annonc.oxfordjournals.org/content/26/1/221.short
Humans can sense the polarization of light with the naked eye
You can actually add videos to your Kindle book and sell it for a higher price. Note however that the video version is supported only for Fire devices. Checkout - Kindle Textbook Creator - https://www.amazon.com/gp/feature.html?docId=1002998671
Isn't it? The US Chamber of Commerce apparently supports those actions.
You have to sue them yourself, in small claims court.

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/22/m...

http://www.legislation.gov.uk/uksi/2003/2426/regulation/30/m...

Judges range in how they feel about these complaints, generally you won't be able to claim just for the time they've wasted, you'll have to justify why you have suffered damages. Extreme cases are different, if they're truly wasting huge amounts of your time, but the occasional email is unlikely to be enough for wasted time.

Alternatively, you can get the ICO to tell them off even if you haven't suffered any damages, but that's not always easy…
Wireless Power and Battery Life Anxiety
It is nice to see people from the tools we use daily watch Hacker News and actually listen to what we talk about. Thank you and I will be using you guys for my first book on Functional Programming soon!
Smoking cigarettes does not create second hand smoke, smoking in enclosed spaces with other people does.
‘Redneck’ Dixon White Calls Out White America on Racism – Video Goes Viral
Motionographer User interface design: Why motion matters
> Like a software system, it's extremely naive to think that complexity is a sign that a system is rotten.

The reality is, the derivatives market is larger than the actual market. More capital is invested in calls guessing if Google is going up than is actually invested in Google. This is a sign something is rotten.

This article from 2008 has a lot of interesting data from after the subprime crash ( http://monthlyreview.org/2008/12/01/financial-implosion-and-... ). It then has an analysis of that data. Whether or not you agree with the analysis, the data it points to is interesting.
Show HN: My first JavaScript game/app
PersistIQ (YC S14) is Hiring a Customer Experience Lead
Mirror (it was sporadically down for me): https://archive.is/lM0Ds
OP here.

FAIR WARNING:
Aside from the Javascript course on Codecademy I have no prior experience working with Javascript.

About the game: It's a simple memory game (match rapper faces), it looks awful since its a work in progress. There is some jQuery code to handle animations and other random things.

To do (Growing list):
Add sounds for each pair of tiles.
Fix the overall presentation.
Add a button to reset the board and add credits when the player runs out or wins. I also need to figure out how to shuffle the board so that the tiles are in different positions after refresh. I'm using an object to hold the key,value pairs.

Request: Be brutal with your feedback, tough skin here. I'm not concerned about what it looks like. I'm more interested in what others think of the code structure.

Thanks in advance. Feel free to break it. :)
Decisions made when javascript was being written. Certain functions were decided to be more non-numeric than what the floating point spec called for.
I think it's fine:

http://www.tradingeconomics.com/embed/?s=unitedstamonsupm0&d...

Look at that innovation! How is your life doing recently? I feel like mine is four times better. Oh no wait land is way more expensive and I'm working to pay my landlord every month. Should I go to my bank and make a huge bet on record low rates or wait for them to print some more whilst wages are static?
From your link, "The study doesn’t cover the many other ill effects of breathing somebody else’s cigarette smoke, of course, which include asthma and possibly cardio-pulmonary disease."
'Hacking Team' Exploits and ‪Hacking‬ Tool Source Codes
I am not familiar enough with the models to recommend one over the other.
No it hasn't. There was a study that came out after that episode which confirmed secondhand smoke, and caused them to issue a retraction.

www.youtube.com/watch?v=3s8yqj3EL7A
Also working on a LeanPub book that doubles as framework documentation for our company until complete. Love it so much! Thank you!!!
Yap, thank you for finding. I was just being lazy.
>>Meanwhile people sleep on the streets in Greece, from children to pensioners.

People sleep on the streets in a lot of countries, I come from one such country(India). And I can tell you getting a home to stay is really your responsibility, its not the governments job to pay for it. Let alone expecting another country to pay for it. Nobody is entitled to a home, education, or in some cases even food. Every where else in the world, people slog their whole lives for these very basic necessities.

Europe needs to see its face in the mirror and contemplate that same things that apply to every other country in the world apply to them as well.

And Greece is no poor african nation. Its not like war lords are tearing apart a civil war ridden country, with a history of European powers colonizing it. These are pretty much self created problems. Early retirement, free education, free healthcare, insane standards of living which are unaffordable to even begin with.

This all feels like a kid born into a rich family making a virtue out of its own sins of spending away all their money. And now wants their neighbor to continue fund their party, and calling them evil if they don't.
The Most Dangerous Movie Ever Made
Is there a screencast available of this “chainable” interface? I haven't seen anything quite like it since The Mother of All Demos in 1968.
Useless middle-manager administration. Look up how many deans there are at your local university, and how many directors of mumble-mumble social justice mumble mumble. Or look at how many wildly expensive infrastructure projects are getting built, with very marginal usefulness.
I second this. Also you seem to have more erotic/unusual titles...
Well, there could be some counterarguments.

> Allows you to get a mortgage

Wonder if that was always so? Didn't people manage somehow to have a house without something which name suggests it will be paid for the whole life?

> Allows you to protect yourself with health/car/life/home/title/etc insurance

A casino, right? On average you lose, but for a price you buy a hedge against unforeseen? At least unforeseen for you?

> Pays for your highways/stadiums/schools and other public works

I thought my taxes pay for that :) . Do you mean "finances" as "machinery which helps moving money"? I think there are several definitions there.

> Protects your deposits

That's great and helpful

> Pays for your retirement

Nah, that's those same deposits. I largely pay myself for retirement, by saving the whole life. There is also an element of "societal insurance", when I pay a little extra to help myself in case I suddenly become disabled. Or dead. Or, well, not so little; that depends.

> Funds the college fund that paid for your school

Again, it's either another example of "moving money", or an oddity - as people managed to get educated even without banks.

> ... Or the student loans that allowed you to attend school

Same thing.

> Supports the global supply chain that brings you your iPhone, stocks the grocery store/your favorite restaurants with food, and puts the clothes on your back.

Yes, that's another important role - bringing together lenders and borrowers, for a fee. One ought to assume the fee in the computerized XXI century should be small?

> Funds the growth of corporations large and small, giving you the job that allows you to buy an iPhone

Same thing. Banks don't "fund" - they "serve". Money aren't theirs, but theirs', banks', depositors.

> Funds the massive philanthropy expenditures that help those in need everyday

Talked about that already.

> Pays the pensions of the elderly

We already talked about that.

So, to boil down - banks provide money-related services, like "guarding" deposits (you pay for the privilege) or "investing" deposit money (you ought to share risks and benefits). Other than that...
*If you life in a first world country and come from at least a lower-middle class background

You are talking about money. Not modern wall-street finance.

> huge amount of human progress is owed to modern-day financial institutions.

Like synthetic credit default swaps?

> Like a software system, it's extremely naive to think that complexity is a sign that a system is rotten.

Complexity that can't be coped with is rotten! The Linux kernel is quite complex but each part of it is well understood and there are a lot mechanisms in software to reduce complexity.

> But the vast majority of financial innovations are deeply ingrained in the good life that you get to enjoy every day.

Tell that to Greece people that got into the Euro because of clever CDS from Goldman Sachs or the masses of people that are stuck in debt from their education or credit cards.

> Sometimes we make products that we don't always completely understand until later.

That does not stop you from selling them and acting like you do. However recent financial crises have shown that banks offering these products for the most part understand them... the persons buying them don't.

> Funds the massive philanthropy expenditures that help those in need everyday

That shouldn't be needed in the first place if there wouldn't be such a huge inequality. Philanthropy is not a good idea for a good-working society. There are laws and a justice system that is more fair than a few far too rich persons with a selectively good cause.

> Finance is an art, not a science.

And it should be a tool not an art. A means to an end.
It's got graphs so it's definitely scientific.
June 21 is the summer solstice, and pregnancy lasts for 280 days. March 27 is exactly 280 days after June 21.