skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I do think that Brian overstates Rails' importance. Rails and Ruby aren't exactly earth shattering; the web would be the same as it was yesterday if these technologies disappeared today. For example, RubyMotion; were apps not built before that? The only thing that did was let Ruby devs write for iOS. Have apps increased in quality since RubyMotion? No. It just made it easier for Ruby devs to not learn Objective C. But it hasn't innovated much in terms of the user. Most of what they've done has been in PHP frameworks; how innovative is that really? I actually like Rails, but it isn't like they've invented HTTP. It's just another framework. I can do some cool stuff, but nothing that could not be done before. It all feels like a self congratulatory circle jerk with actual user-level improvements that would not be particularly noticeable by the average user; the Basecamp UX I am presented on the web is still the same cluttered mess it has always been. So what magic is this innovation actually creating? Just because we like a particular framework doesn't elevate it to the level of earth shattering. It certainly hasn't had the effect on the web that PHP has.
You'll pay extra for Jet Blue, to avoid paying $10 for WiFi??
It actually reads to me that he is saying something quite similar to what I have been thinking recently: countries go bankrupt, we need a bankruptcy court/procedure for governments.

The US needs it for its bankrupt local governments. The EU needs it for member states.

The rationale behind bankruptcy is this: if a borrower cannot repay their debts in full, the lender cannot receive them in full. This isn't negotiable. It's an artefact of reality. Given that the lender will not receive their payment in full, it makes sense we may as well have a process that acknowledges this fact and moves things forward. There is no point to debtors prisons. Debt means risk and if bankruptcy happens, that risk plays out.

The current Greek situation is exactly that. The troika cannot receive its repayments in full. Greece simply cannot repay them. It's not marginal. It's not possible if only Greece would... It's not going to happen. They owe too much and their economy is in collapse. It is game over for these loans.
Qua? A 'special tax on private wealth' would presumably be a progressive tax, rather than a tax on the poor. And the tax would presumably be distributed amongst the richer countries of the EU to forgive the debt of the poorer country (Greece, in this case).

Meanwhile, inflation has been kept in check for many many years by the manipulation from central banks. Who does inflation hurt? Well, turns out it hurts people sitting on top of big piles of money, as their pile of money is worth relatively less. So generally, capitalists don't like inflation because it hurts their capital.

Inflation can also hurt the poor if their wages aren't on track with inflation, as has been the case in the US for quite a long time. Annual raises are supposed to offset the effect of inflation, though: The morale of the story is that if you have a politically weak labor sector, the 'cost' of inflation can be transferred from owners to workers. But on the whole, the main impact of inflation should be on the big piles of money, rather than the people with none.
Varoufakis did not speak English when he said that. He said:

"αυτό που κάνουν (οι πιστωτές) στην Ελλάδα έχει ένα όνομα: τρομοκρατία"

In greek, τρομοκρατία is a much less loaded term than "terrorism", even though it translates the same way. It's more "terror campaign".
According to http://mic.com/articles/86089/if-the-u-s-legalized-weed-what... (which is one of many articles that address this topic):

> the Colorado Court of Appeals ruled that the state's Amendment 64, which legalized the possession of small amounts of marijuana, meant that some offenders could appeal their convictions. A unanimous decision by a three-judge panel agreed that the ruling should be interpreted retroactively, which immediately overturned the 2011 conviction of a woman for possession, and potentially setting the stage for the release of many Coloradans incarcerated for marijuana possession. Hundreds of prisoners and persons on probation could see their sentences modified, and some could even be released.

Quoting further from http://articles.latimes.com/2014/mar/14/news/la-ol-marijuana... :

> To start, the Colorado ruling gives marijuana prisoners the right to appeal their sentences. It doesn’t guarantee they will actually see any relief. That will have to be decided on a case-by-case basis. The ruling also does not appear to apply to older convictions, where those who already served prison time could petition the court to expunge their records.

> Of course, the ruling doesn’t apply to other states. Washington, which also legalized marijuana in 2012, like Colorado, will have to make its own provisions for retroactive ameliorative relief.

In any case, federal convictions have no guarantee of retroactive ameliorative relief.
I highly recommend the planetary.org blogs for space news, especially Emily Lakdawalla's - they are always excellent.
Just added upvote by non-registered users.
Cool to see Swift being used outside of XCode
I disagree again. You don't have to be a douchebag that posts vile things to believe that the free speech slippery slope argument may be merited.

It's relatively easy to either only remove illegal content or to have very strict moderation (ala Facebook). It's much harder to only remove certain kinds of "offensive material" without removing too much.
I love that uber feels entitled to get the same deal as taxis. Wow. Like zero self awareness. Pay for medallions, get regulated, and all the other business that come with being a taxi and maybe you too can use the taxi lanes. Such BS.
It might not be the 0.1% but it is certainly the 10% or 20% that should worry. Savings and pensions will be wiped out. One can find comfort in physical assets (property, gold) but the history of Europe and of the US tells us that it is easy to get expropriated (all property in the communist bloc, gold in the US, property in Germany after the war, etc...).
I though strategic position for business. Of course, you have strategic position for war but it will not bring you any money if NATO moves forces to your country to protect Europe against Middle East and North Africa.

It also funny you mention you are what stand between immigrants and Europe but I guess you forgot to mention you don't protect your borders anymore because you cannot afford it anymore so thousands of immigrants through your country is flooding Europe.
You seem to place an awful lot of value on the cause of debt being war. The interview gives no indication that Piketty would be unable to grasp the difference of the Greek and post-war German situation. That this "boggles the mind" seems to be a bit disingenuous.

Also, the 2008 crisis isn't the direct cause of the crisis in Greece right now. That crisis has been building ever since Greece joined the monetary union in 2002. As Piketty notes: "The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books". Papandreou finally revealed this (indeed, around 2008), and the current Greek crisis and European monetary instability followed suit.
If you are willing to accept payment in land, it's quite easy.
You are absolutely right. Big difference. I did not mean to imply that it was 5 days, regardless of holidays/weekends.

In fact, because we are online more often during holidays, it is during holidays that we most often find vulnerabilities that we need to disclose.

Especially during December, we are much more lenient.
> In 2012, on the 35th anniversary of the Wow! signal, Arecibo Observatory beamed a response from humanity, containing 10,000 Twitter messages, in the direction from which the signal originated.

What.

Receive possible signal from intelligence in other star system. Send back tweets.

What.
If reason fails, wing out the Nazi-Bat.

I think the history is full of misinterpreted debts, especially Germany's (Versailles > WWII...)

But I think one basic understanding of debt should not be discredited:

There's a difference between ...

- A debt that was agreed upon by both parties in a free market (Greece defaulted on that in 2012)

- A debt that was agreed upon by both parties's representatives as an act of embezzlement - i.e. favoring Europe's banks/Greek oligarchy (Greece is about to default on that right now)

- A debt that was agreed upon by the winners of a war over a defeated country

You can say what you want about a "level playing field" not being in place when battered Greece gets to negotiate with its Creditors, but even trying to compare that with a war-looser situation is disingenuous.
Prior discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9834721
Private GitHub, Travis-CI, AppVeyor, Freshdesk, and of course AWS for everything else.
When Greece borrowed money, it was sustainable. Their GDP was growing, in large part because the European economy was growing before the crisis.

When the European and world economy went down, it dragged Greece with them. The debt became unsustainable. Instead of the creditors losing out (much as an investor or normal creditor would when they invest in something that loses), the Europeans decided to bail out the initial creditors, and convinced the then-current Greek government to take a bad deal, all the while basically 'socializing' the risk. Their shitty economics led to a 25% contraction in the Greek economy.

If you follow the chain of events, this crisis is as much Germany's fault as Greece's.

Another thing to keep in mind, is that it doesn't matter whose fault it is. If Greece stops paying its creditors and stops taking loans, Germans will lose out. It's actually in Germany's best interest to forgive some of the debt, and have Greece pay the rest. Greece's economist/finance minister knows this, that's why they can play this game.
Math in real life
I really like many of the books he has posted.

I'd definitely rate CTM in the top 2 programming books I've ever read. I think it's the modern sequel to SICP and it doesn't get nearly as much love as it deserves (due to the choice of Mozart/Oz I guess).
Inflation is tax on the poor.
"We hate women! How dare you fire one!" Not exactly a cohesive portrayal of bigots.
>There's a very clear difference between a country that comes out of two world wars, with everything all but destroyed, including millions dead.

Which allows us to provide a further distinction: the country who had everything destroyed was directly responsible for that destruction. Yet, the debt that they racked up because they tried to take over eurasia while killing and torturing millions in the process, was forgiven not many years after the killings and torturings took place.

I think there should be a distinction between a country that kills and tortures millions and one that does not. So, why again should we forgive the debts of those responsible for killing and torturing millions, but not those of a country who has done nothing comparable?
My approach has always been to do checkpointing on long computations, so that if something fails in step n, it can pick back up again from step n-1.

Of course, if your script has REAL problems, your data is going to be suspect at step n-1 as well....
I'm currently working in a team that is 50% women, and I'm amazed at how many stories they have of previous work experiences and the culture of acceptance in medium sized companies.

I hope Jessie doesn't give up. Not only for the sake of our industry, but also for the sake of girls who want to make it in this industry and not have to put up with what jessie has had to put up with.

Her (or any person) having to leave our industry because of any sort of harassment hurts the rest of us the most.

Rather than going the law enforcement harassment route, is there any way we as an industry can stand up for Jessie and the rest of the woman who are being abused by a few assholes?

Just yesterday I met a friends niece who wants to become a game developer. She's only 14 now, but what a shame it would be for her to give up on her dream because some idiotic moron, mentally incapable of forming real normal relationships, has ruined our industry for her.

This doesn't need police action (though nothing wrong with that), it needs us to be outspoken and supportive. Maybe also a bit creative in how we handle this. I'm all for finding ways of kicking these offensive guys out and bringing more women in.
I wish more cities would do this and in more areas. Boston and Cambridge for example are terrible to drive in and the public transit system provides a very viable alternative. Maybe even convert some of the larger avenues to powered walkways and simply ban all private car traffic.
Years ago, I quit Netflix when they separated the digital and DVD offerings. "Harumph!"

These days they're fine, I'm back, and it's almost the only thing I watch on my TV.
Outrageous behavior, and I'm glad Jessie is not giving into it. I can't imagine why someone would get death threats over being a female engineer.
You also have to be willing to kill all the people currently living on it.
I am still new here but as far as I understand upvoting is not the same as agreeing.
As someone who has dabbled in both biology/chemistry and now computer science academically, my thoughts on flash cards and spaced repetition software has changed over the years.

On one side you have the biology/chemistry guys who tend to use a lot of flashcards, and have a reputation for "just memorizing" facts. Then on the other end you have the physics/computer science guys who often refer to themselves as "lazy" for lack of memorizing and have a reputation for only focusing on conceptual ideas.

It seems to me that the people who succeed utilize a mixture of both approaches ("memorization" and "conceptual understanding"). I'm not sure when these two approaches suddenly became mutually exclusive.

As an example, although there were some classes in Biology that required a heavy amount of memorization, without the flash cards it would have been very hard for me to make the conceptual connections during lectures, while reading, etc.

Knowledge and understanding is kind of like a spider web, the more you have, the more you are able to grasp.

Purely focusing on conceptualizing the topics at hand has never worked out as well as I had hoped.
Inflation always hits the non-rich the hardest. The rich have countless options for avoiding inflation. Those that are primarily wage dependent, do not.

This is why the wealth gap has expanded so much in the US the last 15 years: the abuse levied on the dollar. Take a look at how nearly every single thing priced in dollars zoomed after 2001, including the GDP of every nation on earth and commodities - all went up simultaneously, often dramatically, and all stopped going up simultaneously. That was the dollar losing value, aka the non-rich in America having their standard of living hammered, while the rich were able to shield themselves from the damage, leading to a vastly expanded wealth gap.
Sovereigns don't need bankruptcy protection, they just stop paying.

Somebody will always lend money to states, even poorly managed states. At the end of the day, three people with the most to lose are the richer countries of the world, because they are also in debt, and a sovereign default will screw up all of the debt models.

In the U.S., there is municipal bankruptcy. U.S. States cannot go bankrupt, which will be interesting when states run as poorly as Greece (ie Illinois) get hit by a tidal wave of retirement obligations.
A relativistic velocity kinetic weapon is already on its way.
For a court to mean anything, you need an authority to enforce its decision. You would need some form of international army. Who would control it? Who will enforce a decision against Russia or China (or the US!).
> The group of people that can least deal with inflation

Inflation in the cost of goods and services = wages go up. If you're involved in any economic activity beyond hoarding cash, inflation isn't a bad thing.
Given my own code was only 1MB total, neither. 97% of the size was from external dependencies. FWIW, it was a "shaded" jar that had all its dependencies linked in statically.
I do not know the author of the blog but that's horrible. No one should have to face that. Unfortunately, behind the anonimity of the internet, trolls and disgusting people will harass pretty much anyone and there's not much anyone can do.

Best of luck Jessie.
What Is Lean BPM and Why Do You Need It?
who started World War II ?

> There's a very big difference between war caused debt and economic caused debt

not if you started the very war that put you in debt.
>This makes me lose respect for Piketty. There's a very clear difference between a country that comes out of two world wars, with everything all but destroyed, including millions dead.

Yes. The main difference being that Greece didn't invade anyone, didn't cause millions of deaths and didn't exterminate 6 million Jews.

Just over-borrowed. And it has paid for it with 5 years destruction of its economy (40-50% effective less buying power per person among other things and unemployment rates similar to the Weimar republic). Hey, Greece didn't even ask for its loans NOT to be repaid -- they just asked for a better deal, without heavy taxation and anti-business austerity measures that prevent development and make it even more impossible to reboot.

The idea that the first case is somehow more justified to relieve is ludicrous -- not to mention insulting to the victims of the Holocaust and WW.

[EDIT] Besides, the main historical reason Germany was "forgiven" wasn't that it had suffered losses too (war agressors have no right to complain about that), but because it suddenly was in the right place to serve as a nice Cold War ally, half to the West/NATO and half to the USSR, so both sides wanted it to be in good standing.
For me the main sign is the different behaviour. Left hemisphere is vile, ignorant and selfish. Threatening a doctor with death because he hurt you falls in the being sociopathic bastard category. This is my highly uneducated guess
Yes, I think you will concede that 2015 is not a year to use for forward projections. The country has been paying loans without external help, the uncertainty means no investment incoming, tourism is hit, and people in the country are withdrawing cash from the banks and hiding it in their houses, not spending it.

As for the punitive Troika, they had 5 years to run the country and they failed in every single projection they made. Every memorandum was meant to be the last, and they had the governments of their choice. How many more years of full cooperation do they expect before they accept that yes, perhaps the system isn't working. But I refuse to believe they're idiots at this point. The programmes are meant to appease the average German voter and serve as a warning to the Spaniards and Italians. Basically, punitive.
Agreed, it just feels inadequate to me, too. Information theory is a hammer ... and now everything we can think of (~ information...) looks like a nail.

Another hint that maybe the big Turing machine isn't quite cutting it might be the experiments showing that gravity isn't quite like 'just' an entropic force but seems to behave genuinely different.
wow, only 22gb in 13 years? Do you lower your media's resolutions before archiving them? I thought about doing that with most of mine... but I would still need to go through the collection one by one to avoid doing it on my favorite ones even if I used exif metadata to rate most of them.
There is no particular reason for the 'std::string&& str() &&' method to return a std::string&&. You could return a std::string instead, and still avoid copying. Sometimes you'll get an extra move construction, where it isn't elided on the return side of things, but your code will be more resistant to bad refactorings. The member variable will always be moved from, instead of having that depend on how the caller behaves. Also, it's less likely that you'll code your way into returning an invalid reference.
Great book. Interleaving contexts, spaced repetition, etc. - all great concepts.

The most important takeaway for me was accepting that the tougher something is to remember, the greater the benefit will be when we actually remember it.
It's not a Ponzi scheme. As long as investors have confidence in the faith and credit of the debtor to meet the contract, we're good.

Otherwise, the debtor will just ship pallets of printed currency to the creditors.
That would be an amazingly impressive turnaround time given that our tweets likely haven't physically made it even a promille towards where that signal came from! :D
Cover of “Ghost”(Ella Henderson)- by Luisa Hackett and Gianfranco Casanova
> The whole thing is a ponzi scheme.

It absolutely is. If you think of money as units of labour instead of 'wealth', it makes more sense. Every year, more people are born, the workforce grows, more things are produced, more food is eaten, etc...

The money supply has to reflect that there's always more of everything. This means inflation. And it's not a bad thing.
...so we've gone from debating which word we should use to describe conservative reactionaries to the denial that they even exist.

I'm honestly kind of impressed.
> I think there should be a distinction between a country that kills and tortures millions and one that does not.

There isn't a major economy in the world that this does not describe. Perhaps not India. The "Race for Africa" was a low point for the UK and France, for example.
Everyone here seems to be criticizing Piketty for weird reasons. He is not saying post-war Germany's debt is the exact same thing as the current Greek crisis. Pointing out parallels isn't same thing as saying two situations are equivalent.

His point is that this isn't a "moral" decision between two peoples. It's an economic decision between nations.
I just want to understand why people do this. If some men were afraid of losing their jobs because of a big influx of women I'd at least comprehend (but definitely not agree with) that behavior, but it's a job free-for-all now and seems like it always will be, so I just can't see what the motivation could possibly be. If they're just pure sociopaths, why don't they harass men this way as well?
Where did the idea of (db action) => db come from? A reduction?
In U.S. you have a thing called fiscal policy. We don't have that in EU so that's why the thing you propose cannot work for us.
I expect a Linux port to be made available, but did they actually promise that? From what I can tell, they promised the open source part, and announced their intention to have ports to OS X, iOS and Linux (https://developer.apple.com/swift/blog/?id=29)
"> We cannot demand that new generations must pay for decades for the mistakes of their parents. The Greeks have, without a doubt, made big mistakes. Until 2009, the government in Athens forged its books. But despite this, the younger generation of Greeks carries no more responsibility for the mistakes of its elders than the younger generation of Germans did in the 1950s and 1960s."

Agree with your point. While the quote does have some merit, Germany had bottom up drastic structural change forced upon it before the "youth" were excused.
EDIT: (I should have read to the end): I disagree with Pickety on his "maximum allowable budget" committee. It's an unnecessary violation of sovereignty, and I think that sovereignty is important.

If bankruptcy norms existed, they could create a market discipline. As government approached the intervention threshold, their bonds would decrease a little in value. Also in my governments-can-declare-bankrupcy world, this can happen a lot sooner and the defaults can be much smaller.
No, Troy Hunt is right to call them out.

> How can the security industry build deep relationships with clients when we publicly ridicule them when the inevitable happens?

Simple: Call out the competitors of the clients you seek. There, now it's positive PR for your clients and security researchers aren't practicing self-censorship. Win-win.