skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I'm counting, Syriza was the third government of Greece elected on the promise of no further borrowing. One other party changed his worldview as soon as elected, the other changed only after several closed-door negotiations with Troyka (that let people talking of everything, from bribery to death threats, so, no idea about what really happened).

Holding the people of Greece accountable for the action of those governments based on the fact that the country is a "democracy" is a complete delusion.

By the way, we should use the same rationale for other countries, and should hold the guilty accountable of their actions more often, instead of the innocent.
Academia.edu, Citations, and Open Science in Action
Two months in inner Mongolia
I can't find the link just now so I'll have to ask my colleague.

Some guy ask a question like "I can use 'x + 2' to add two to the value of x. How do I store the result?" I'm pretty sure he really did not know.

Someone replied "Use jQuery. jQuery can do everything."

This initiated the troll of the century, finally someone supplied the correct answer "y = x + 2" with the end of the thread being "you suck".
"...only a new “heresy” (represented at this moment by Syriza) can save what is worth saving in European legacy: democracy, trust in people, egalitarian solidarity."

I'm glad the Greeks voted No. The zeal with which austerity politics has been unflinchly pursued has caused enormous hardship for people in Greece and across Europe. But do people in Europe really feel a sense of solidarity with each other?

I'm from the UK, a country often lambasted for it's aloof and isolationist attitude to Europe. I used to be embarrased by the scepticism shown by British MPs towards closer EU integration. Now, however, I'm just a bit indifferent. The reason? I've seen clearly that self-interest among European countries (almost) always trumps a greater collective good. Yet the press and politicians continue to pretend otherwise. I don't blame individual countries for doing this, but I wish they would drop the pretence that they are pursuing a greater collective goal for Europe when in fact they are often pursuing a best-for-my-country approach. And who can blame them when it will always be to their own electorates that they must first appeal?

The migrant crisis in the Mediterranean really amplified this for me. I was ashamed of the UK response, but no other country was willing to share fairly the number of migrants rescued either. And even the rhetoric around Greece is rarely about solidarity and common European humanism, but instead about keeping the integrity of the financial system in place.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/business-33132595
The Life of the Buddha in Thai Manuscript Art
True. I hadn't thought of that angle. I concede my Holy Fvck if you grant me the vanishingly small transaction costs.
Well we can do inception and go one level deeper:

Most of the banks that loaned the money were akin to Credit Unions or similar. EG: La Caixa in Spain, the Landesbanks in Germany [1], etc.

So they had to give in to the banks, because one way or another the Governments were on the hook for that (due to deposit insurance for instance).

Now the question is "why did the banks lend to Greece?" and the answer is because Greece and other countries pushed in the Basel agreements to have a risk weight of 0% [2] in order for them to accept the agreements (or else the Greek banks themselves would have been reluctant to hold Greek bonds).

At the end of the day, even if default is allowed, the borrowing parties should bear responsibility, in the same way people do when they borrow too much and then default. This is not moralistic but practical, because otherwise you end up with huge moral hazards and everyone and their brothers defaulting all the time...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Landesbank
[2] http://www.voxeu.org/debates/commentaries/basel-ii-concept-l...
absolutely stunning design. nothing of new mathematical interest. beautiful though - simply gorgeous.
How to build an OS X .pkg installer for your node-webkit app on Linux
Musk: No Clear Explanation yet for Falcon 9 Failure
Director of Customer Operations  SolarCity
It's curious that there's only intervention in the markets when they're tanking. If the underlying reason for the intervention is to prevent irrational behaviour then where was the regulator when the price was going up like wildfire? Surely it should work both ways?
As argued in the article I linked (and elsewhere), the U.S. in particular appears to be a statistical outlier, which suggests that we might be able to identify what is different in our policies, and make some improvements.
Japan’s largest TV network starts 4K broadcasting thanks to P2P startup
Can someone give the cynical spin on this? I know a lot of these companies purport to care about stopping smoking, but is there also a profit motive?

I've heard scattered accounts that when a convenience store stops carrying cigarettes they also draw fewer problem customers, but haven't validated it.
More importantly, are there services that will 'give' DEC2 to people who want it? ;-)
Better pen input would be great, especially for drawing.

How about some form of chorded keyboard or glove? A chorded keyboard was demonstrated in 1968 by Engelbart:

http://web.stanford.edu/dept/SUL/library/extra4/sloan/mouses...

Google's Soli project might lead to better input:

http://youtu.be/0QNiZfSsPc0
"To ignore Golang right now would be akin to ignoring Java back in the early 2000s in my opinion."

Except Go provides limited value for somebody who already knows .net or a jvm language. And that's a huge chunk of the market.

And the key advantage that Go offers to business is that they can easily hire from a pool of experienced programmers and have them learn Go with little downtime.
I was really hoping this was going to be a python package for manipulating the symbols in the Linear A and Linear B scripts. :-/
How to get a read on mainland stock prices:

Over the years I have used FXI to watch general stock prices in China. But FXI only indexes the large cap stocks listed on the Hong Kong Stock Exchange.

Since the mainland stocks began reversing after the extreme price rise, I found the Shanghai stock exchange composite to be far more useful than FXI. To get the current price, use "Deutsche X-Trackers Harvest CSI 300 China A-Shares ETF":

https://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSEARCA%3AASHR&ei=Uj6cVcG4...

Any ideas about how to easily get the price on an index covering the Shenzen stock exchange?
Genuine question, as I was wondering about what an alternative architecture would look like from a systems perspective.

Would something like NodeJs+clusters (or any evented IO framework) be a better fit (considering the clusters are stateless, and don't have to talk to eachother)?

If we're talking concurrency/parallelism, would you prefer JVM+Threads/Erlang+Actors over Go? Thanks.
I know CVS is not 100% altruistic, with Caremark (sp?) being huge and there being talk from CVS about making prescribers pay more at pharmacies that sell cigarettes and whatnot (and how that may help make up for lost cigarette sales) [0] - but way to take a stance and really see it through. In terms of corporate good, this is great.

And what a horrible shame on the U.S. Chamber of Commerce. I'm so sick of the idea of the dollar above all else. Cigarettes kill people. That's it. Deciding it's ok to not only sell these death sticks, but actively fight against the championing of healthier living and longer lives is absolutely, totally, and completely shameful.

[0] http://www.wsj.com/articles/BL-270B-850
the article claimed that the short sleepers (the ones with the genetic mod) didn't have any health disadvantages, though it didn't give many statistics
> Wikipedia gives $16,138 vs $18,863 and $29,209 vs $26,773 PPP estimated for 2015, so Slovakia is actually a bit better off.

...on average, and Slovakia also has (as far as the most recent numbers I can find) a lower Gini coefficient, so should have smaller numbers far above and far below that average.
CVS is rolling out walk-in clinics in their stores. So for them it makes a lot of sense and helps them make the case they're a health focused company.
You wish poverty on millions?

How much does Greece have to pay per year? I think it's something like $5bn? AFAIK they have a GDP of $300bn and $100bn of that are converted into taxes. Why would paying $5bn result in poverty of millions then? Isn't their spending on military alone in the billions?
Well, CVS obviously doesn't want to compete against companies that can profit from selling cigarettes as they will be at a disadvantage. CVS is also looking to burnish their brand by showing they truly look out for public health. That's as cynical as I can get. On the whole, they are doing a pretty good job at burnishing their brand in my eyes...
Similarly, in the early AOL days, there were several "warez" distribution lists going around which had the pirated software directly attached to the emails (not links to external websites). As long as the emails stayed in AOL, you could forward them instantly (there must have been some deduplication on the back end making the attachments basically a link to the same files).
Ultimately? No. Ultimately, because the €zone is not a homogeneous enough area, there will have to be a framework for fiscal transfers.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Optimum_currency_area#European...
I used the GitHub API to find which cities had the most GitHub users per
The most likely cynical spin I can think of isn't that cynical; just trying to anticipate cultural trends they can use to their advantage in marketing and public opinion. Investing in sometimes-slightly painful positions earlier than their competitors.
I am able to sleep at 4 AM and wake up at 5:30 AM fully rested, each day. No naps, with exercise.
Planned in next release
Founder @ RethinkDB here.

Our next release (2.1) is due in about three weeks and includes automatic failover/high availability. Feeds on table joins (and other greatly expanded feed functionality) will be in 2.2, which should happen ~6-8 weeks after 2.1.

(Sorry to jump in with a shameless plug; what PipelineDB is doing is super-cool; I also met the founders a few times, and they're awesome, smart, and very driven people -- I'm really excited about what PipelineDB has to offer!)
I don't think anybody here is capable of answering that. We simply haven't tried anything like that on humans. We have the technology called CRISPR/Cas, which was used (successfully) to cure adult mice of genetic liver disease.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CRISPR
How similar is this to something like http://riemann.io for processing events from a stream?
They still have whole aisle's dedicated to beer and junk food, so it's about more than just eliminating unhealthful offerings from their stores.

Tobacco is on the way out in the US, in 10 or 20 years you'll have to buy tobacco in specialty stores. I think CVS just saw the writing on the wall and seized a convenient opportunity to jettison the business.
That's so simplified and dismissive that I fear it's missing the point about "reality" here. Or I'm missing what you think is the point, which I admit is possible. I'm out of my depth on economic issues.
Ask HN: Who are some of the most productive programmers actively developing?
I'm wondering who are some of the most productive programmers who are actively developing in 2015?

And by what measure are they very productive?
It's not just shame, this is literally evil. Cigarettes don't merely kill people, they addict them as well. And what's worse, is the US Chamber of Commerce has decades of extremely conclusive research on this matter. It's one thing to kill someone accidentally, but to take a gun and point it for power and profit...
I have been in a theater when someone yelled fire. Most people ignored the person yelling fire, and looked around for fire and smoke. They took the absence of those things, and the fact that the person was a teenager, as indications that the person was being a jackass and ignored him. I doubt a theater of people will respond to someone yelling "fire" unless the person was an authority figure of some kind, like a uniformed theater employee or police officer. Perhaps a person who yells fire very persistently and credibly will prompt a reaction: a few people will get up and look around, or inquire, but most people will wait for more information, especially if they see no evidence of a fire, and see other people investigating the alleged threat.

(If anything, most people wait too long to flee from fires. They only begin to flee once the danger is imminent and nearby. This is often too late, given the ability of smoke to rapidly expand.)

The visceral experience of being in a threatening environment can rob people of agency to a degree, I agree. Panic can do that specifically. I'm not sure that sitting in front of a desk and watching numbers tick on the screen is the same kind of visceral panic on which we should give people a pass for making good decisions though. That's an intellectual panic, not a physical danger-based panic.

In any case, one question I'd ask is: how can we improve at this, as the human race? One way to improve is to allow there to be slight competitive pressures favoring people who are more rational. Over time, those folks will be more successful economically and will have a greater influence on the rest of the population. Over time we'll get better, an effect that will be lessened if we provide too many safety barriers.
> He seems to have drawn very far fetched conclusions from vague anthropological and archeological signals.

That's what Darwin had to do too.
this makes sense in a fair market where trading is fair but in china the market is far from fair and the government hates to admit that but insider trading is rampant. Many of the short sellers are the majority stockholders in the companies they are shorting. These are people who have greater than 50% ownership in some of these companies and they are shorting their stock to make quick money off people with little risk.
▶+SEE+ANOMYMOUS+CODE+RED+NOW+?+-+YouTube
Black Man Blows White Womens Brains Out While Walking in Hollywood…
Not accessible for me.

Error 404 Not Found

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Guru Meditation:

XID: 630373509

Does it work for you?
Memcomputing NP-complete problems in polynomial time using polynomial resources
Your point is valid, your condescension on the other hand is lamentable.
Reread the second sentence in my post above. An electorate's responsibility does not end with the selection of the rosiest-sounding promises.
> I've noticed that a lot of IT workers tend to be non-confrontational and unwilling to stand up for themselves even if the situation calls for it.

"Standing up" to the mafia is not going to end well for most people.
That can take forever in the arctic, as mentioned in the article...
BaaS, hah! The rest of the world calls 'em CROs :)

In theory, one could develop a CRO for DIY biologists, but I just wonder how many of them there actually are. We've made comments downpage about releasing biology to the masses like Jobs and Gates did with their PCs and operating systems...but it really feels like something is missing. The passion of the Homebrew Computing Club? The public's aversion to science, or maybe its short attention span for failed experiments?
For what it's worth, we use this metaphor a lot, along with the same wording in pretty much every pitch we do, both public and private.

What I find interesting about Docker is that different people get excited about different aspects of it.

One of the major reasons I love working at the company - I get to watch them have the same feeling I did over 2 years ago: the feeling that Docker can help with something they find painful in their daily work.
There are far simpler things you can do to affect the global climate. See the "Risks and criticisms" for some reasons on why we may not want to.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Climate_engineering
SICOM:IND and SZCOMP:IND?

http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SICOM:IND

http://www.bloomberg.com/quote/SZCOMP:IND
When you're dealing with a state that has the economic clout that China has, and the kinds of hyper-reactive sensitivities that China has about Tibet [1], you tend to defer for sake of a smoothly functioning global economy, whether you agree with their position or not.

[1] For example, barring people from getting a Chinese visa for life for publicly making pro-Tibet statements.

Another: you need an "internal" visa, issued from within China, to get into Tibet [2]. If you mention on your visa application to get into China in the first place, however, that you want to visit Tibet, your Chinese visa is automatically denied. Essentially, you have to lie to the state about the purpose of your trip, if you want to visit Tibet. No, they don't have any issues there at all...

[2] Unless you're flying into Lhasa from Kathmandu, where you can get a direct-entry visa.

EDIT: footnotes.
There are many, many regulations that limit the rise of the markets, the most obvious being the limits put in place on credit and margin. All Western governments intervene in the various stock markets, everyday. That's been true since at least the 1930s. The interventions are sometimes direct, but are more typically indirect.

These last 40 years there has been a movement afoot, especially in the English speaking nations, to weaken the controls that limit the spikes, up and down, in the market. There may be some advantages to this policy, but there are also many disadvantages.
Hey! I'm that marketing bod you're referring to.

I wasn't trying to oversimplify the challenge of coding email templates. I was only trying to say that learning markdown is a great stepping stone for our team to get more technical skills under our belt. We have to crawl before we can walk. If everyone understands how to do things like create hyperlinks or knows how bold and italicize words without the help of a WYSIWYG panel, that's a good thing in my book. Maybe we can't code the most beautiful, responsive, complex emails in the world, but hey, everyone starts somewhere.

I'm really lucky that I work at a company where we're encouraged to learn and where marketing is actually included in decisions like moving a blog from Wordpress to Jekyll. We had engineers who asked us to consider the extra work of learning Git and markdown. We welcomed the challenge and saw this as a unique opportunity to collaborate. I don't look at this decision as some hasty bait and switch move made by the engineering team. We were consulted as partners in the decision and I'm happy with where we landed.

One of the writers on our team helped scrub the blog before we published it. At one point she even had more commits on the repo than any of the devs! I loved seeing that.

I'm excited about the possibilities and would encourage you to be a bit more optimistic about our capacity to learn new skills.
7 Rules for Creating Gorgeous UI (Part 1)
Famed Simpsons voice actor Harry Shearer isn’t leaving after all
Show HN: Build Your Own Code Climate Analysis Engine
The final version was crappy? How would it be better?
I'm not too into the "beer and junk food" line. I see a fairly large difference between offering choices that can be unhealthy if a person overdoes them, and helping to lobby governments to keep markets open for an addictive, harmful drug.
Remember that meme started when theatres were very popular venues with huge crowds, which often used fire(!) to illuminate the live action on stage, and had no safe exits.
Also note what Steve Jobs thought of Gassée

“Jean-Louis Gassée is evil,” [Steve Jobs] snapped. “I don’t say that about many people, but he is evil.”

Brent Schlender. “Becoming Steve Jobs: The Evolution of a Reckless Upstart Into a Visionary Leader.”
I had a colleague and have a friend of a friend, both of whom were in car accidents as adults. In both cases, their need for sleep dropped to about 4 hours a night and their intellectual abilities skyrocketed.
They said they would take a $2bn hit to annual revenue [1] when they originally announced this. But I imagine long-term the issue is that having acquired a pharmacy benefits management company, they maybe determined that a plan member who doesn't smoke is a plan member who is more profitable?

CVS's PBM subsidiary last year was also proposing charging an additional fee to members who filled their prescriptions at pharmacies that also sold tobacco.[2] Not sure if this ever happened or not; that seems anti-competitive. I don't see why filling my prescription at Walgreens instead of CVS should cost me more, only because you can buy a pack of smokes at Walgreens.

[1] http://www.cvshealth.com/newsroom/press-releases/pharmacy-se...

[2] http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2014/10/20/a...
> Can someone give the cynical spin on this?

Customers dying younger because they are buying an addicting, health-damaging product may produce some money if you are selling them the product, but if you are selling other products -- especially other expensive, long-term regular-purchase products that they will reliably come back to you for -- it can be a net loss. Perhaps CVS has decided that there's more return on customer acquisition dollars if it gets out of the cigarette business (both selling and promoting indirectly via USCC) and stops actively killing off its own reliable customer basis (and, incidentally, other people).

I don't know that that's really all that "cynical" of a spin, but its a self-interest profit motive rather than an altruistic one.

> I've heard scattered accounts that when a convenience store stops carrying cigarettes they also draw fewer problem customers, but haven't validated it.

That's quite possibly a factor, but CVS isn't just a "convenience store"; they are drugstores (that is, a key feature of their stores is the pharmacy) and they also have and are expanding in-store clinics (so they are also health-care providers.)
Popular appeal is one of those things that remains quite resistant to dissection and scrutiny. Up to a certain point, measurable talent drives success, but at the highest levels, the drivers of success become a lot harder to characterize. Why is pop star X so famous? Or pop star Y get so famous so quickly, but then fade from view? Or Z remaining a niche act, despite obviously superior talent? I've read a lot of retrospectively written narratives (that are suspiciously overfitted) but the drivers of fame are still poorly understood (partly because when one thing works, everyone tries that, and fame is zero-sum).
Will Silicon Alley Be the Next Silicon Valley?
A great time-saver, especially for noobs who want to take NativeScript for a spin without spending too much time on setting up their NativeScript dev environment.
There are so many extremes here that I just want to mention that I actually sleep 7-8 hours.

Something that is apparently only normal if you aren't talking on HN. :)

(Less causes problems, more is not needed... so pretty average)