skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"A revolution is coming. There’s a new addition to JavaScript that’s going to change everything you think you know about data-binding. It’s also going to change how many of your MVC libraries approach observing models for edits and updates. Are you ready for some sweet performance boosts to apps that care about property observation?"

On one hand: this looks cool.

On the other hands: wheeee time to rewrite everything again!

Should we just plan on rewriting all web code every 1-2 years?
So, in principle I like everything with David's new approach... the main question I have is "How well do 'recursive queries' work when the data relationships between my components is really complex?" I think I will only be able to answer that question by trying this approach myself and seeing how it performs for my needs.

(Another question is: "How am I going to use this when my server's database is a blockchain and not a conventional database [1] like datomic?" but I know that's a niche question I'll have to figure out for myself.)

[1] Just kidding (mostly)
I assume you're referring to the situation that the Greeks have got themselves into in the first place?

Take a step back, the idiocy of the past is history. There is the idiocy of the now to deal with.
So who is getting all that money?
But why does being born give you the natural right to speak, to defend yourself, and to live privately as you choose? Looking back at the last few thousand years of human history, I see no basis for saying that those are inherent human rights that are yours simply because you were born.

A deist would say that humans inherently have those rights (from God), but that human governments and societies have illegitimately suppressed them. You (I suspect) would also say that human governments and societies have illegitimately suppressed them. But given that humans often have not enjoyed those rights, what basis (other than simply asserting that it is so) do you have for claiming that humans have those rights?
> I feel as though the addiction springs from the person and not the drug

The only people who claim that are ones who haven't been addicted to cigarettes :-)

If you're only smoking once a month, the nicotine isn't building up enough to make withdrawal a problem. I'm not even sure there's enough nicotine in one cigarette that you would notice any withdrawal symptoms. And in a month, the nicotine from the previous cigarette is long gone.

Besides that, the hardest part of quitting is getting rid of the habits around it, and if you're only smoking once a month, you're not forming any habits. Try smoking a cigarette with your coffee first thing every morning for 6 months, and see if you still believe it's not addictive :-/

That said, I'm sure the strength of the effect can vary from person to person.
The description does not convey the idea that the idea is evil.
e-cig to the rescue!
Grab the name before someone else takes it!
> I don't think there are any smokers out there anymore who don't know it's bad for you

I suspect this is not necessarily the case in countries with less public health education, especially developing or poor countries which is where Tobacco has shifted its efforts to grow or maintain revenue.
OMG that's funny. Search "child support" and the archives vomits a suspiciously high number of articles. O.o
> A free market can't handle limited liability. It's only government intervention that can provide things like orderly bankruptcy proceedings.

Obviously. And it's the government that actually establishes the free market, regulates it, and provides all the surrounding infrastructure (roads, police, courts, ...).

A "free market" doesn't mean that you can do whatever you want - the name for that is "anarchy". Free market only means that everybody is free to compete under equal terms. Additionally, governments would step in if a single player got too powerful and would exert its power in ways that would undermine competition.
How to “try again” when exceptions happen in Ruby
I don't read him regularly, but I read it as him downplaying index funds as some sort of arbitrary, socially derived benchmark, which just isn't the case. He glosses over - he surely knows this given his background - all the efficient market theory that created the index funds in the first place.

There is a good reason that index funds are very difficult to beat consistently, and it's not because they are copying all the hard work everyone else does for fees. It's because you don't get paid for specific risk.
For example in the course of people saying that marriage limits their freedom, that the years of fun are over after it etc. Especially in progressive circles it seems to be frowned upon and it's regarded as boring and unprogressive if people marry early. It's probably also losing value as people become more secular and the concept isn't tied to their world views as tightly anymore.

On a more general note, I have the feeling that we are losing other useful cultural mechanisms over the course of secularization as well, and we are right at the transition where both spiritual and scientific explanations are regarded as unacceptable. I'm however still hopeful that the work by philosophers like Sam Harris and Daniel Dennett can help us building a value system based on naturalism.
I believe alcohol is a far more important battle to be fighting against than tobacco.

It's amazing people's beliefs in regards to alcohol. I had a friend, who was already drunk, rant at me about my use of cannabis because they didn't like the thought of something that takes away your control. Alcohol is so often thought of as a "nothing" drug even though it is probably one of the worst recreational drugs.
I should think it'd be safe enough just to use a 40-pin breadboard breakout and a ribbon cable with a few of the pins (i.e. all the 5V out ones) not populated. That seems like it should provide all the necessary safety (because the 5V pins aren't broken out onto the breadboard, and the J8 pins are covered by the IDC connector), and be a lot cheaper and more transparent than an Arduino besides.
For sure. But this article isn't about that.
New video released today please view
Thanks for following https://youtu.be/Y-Pmsx2VHqU
GodlyDreams #15 new video just released today please view,and subscribe under Noreen Aguirre thanks!!!
Just to share here in case you don't want to read the article... the tl;dr version is accurately summed up as: 33% "I'm the greatest at this", and 67% "Star Citizen isn't gonna work because I can't see how (and remember, I'm the greatest)".
> The concept of inalienable rights does not require supernatural powers for validation.

Sure, it can stand as a moral axiom on its own (and, heck, even when it is used in the context of a supernatural power, that's not really a logical validation/justification, simply another element of the story, and they still are independent moral axioms.)

OTOH, it makes the fact that they are moral axioms and not grounded in anything else a bit more obvious than the "God says so" version. Its pretty easy for people to reject bare moral axioms that other people offer.
Because I'm not selfish. Because life on earth is more than just me. Because, thus far, death has been an important part of life, and I have the intellectual humility to admit I'm not sure extending life would be for the best.
Homebrew would be nice too.
Ask HN: If Hacker News was a startup, what would be its valuation?
Actually, there is some cross referencing.

wikidata[1][2] is used in some places, for example the population of london could be stored in wikidata, and referenced from all the translations of the london article.

Amusingly, Birthdays is the first example given in the wikipedia article about wikidata.

[1]https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Introduction
[2]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikidata
Show HN: Ptop – writing a task manager from scratch
Go away for two weeks. Make sure you go somewhere that there are lots of women. Make sure you meet lots of women.

How? Just sign up with dating sites and meet anyone the site recommends.

In the meantime, pack your figurative bags and prepare to bail out of the startup.
It's just that I'm old. I didn't read Kafka four time in a row mind you. I'm not nihilist at all, what made you think that? I have a high opinion on art, music, movies, literature, and prefer Kafka over Harry potter if you don't mind. When I see a twenty so claim himself an artist and a bunch of appraisers, I insert my view which is that artistic genius is a curse, happens very rarely, and certainly cannot be taught by a twenty so blogger who draws.
Congratulations! The inside pages of the book seem to have a custom design, not what leanpub gives you by default. Its great and adds to the appeal of the book. Have you applied that to your leanpub edition as well?
thankfully the Chinese monopoly on rare earth metals has been slipping in the last few years.

http://dailysignal.com/2015/01/16/free-markets-smash-chinese...
I think that "biology is hard" isn't a trope, because I don't believe in the existence of readily commercializable biotech projects that would exist but for the existence of the kind of stuff that the OP is talking about here. We don't have a lack of biotech startups because robots are too expensive (they are not) or because people can't get access to lab equipment (they can), but because the problems that are potentially commercial are many hard problems away from commercial success.

In case you're wondering, my definition of "hard" is the CS definition: there are "trivial" problems ("send this structured text over a network connection"), there are "straightforward" problems ("scale this website to X requests per second with a median latency of Y"), there are the "hard" problems ("translate english text to another language"), and there are the problems we suspect are intractable ("solve the halting problem"). Pretty much all of the wealth generation in software over the last 30 years has come from the "trivial" and "straightforward" problem sectors. Even Google, when you back out a bit, was the result of the careful solution of straightforward problems. It's not like they "solved" information retrieval or machine translation -- they just took existing research, and scaled it.

In contrast to CS, biology is loaded with stuff that shows potential, but that we just don't understand very well. The money isn't in making bacteria glow, it's in making bacteria glow in a way that provides a reliable biosensor, or making those bacteria produce things that are safe to put inside people. The limiting step here isn't access to robots -- it's our horrible understanding of the underlying biological systems. There's very little (if any) biotech stuff out there that is a "straightforward" problem away from commercial success.
prestige is a combination of fame and selectivity I recall a debate on the value of college( Peter Thiel vs some college admins) and Thiel asking his opponent (a university administrator) if Harvard is providing such a great value to the world why are they making it so hard to obtain for people? Good question.
I was working with someone who thought I was stupid for insisting on integer or fixed-point maths for what I insisted would be a particularly troublesome piece of functionality.

They were more experienced, convinced me I was being pedantic, and I myself wasn't coding on that project anyway. Months later, we had to do a panic refactor as real-world usage immediately made the app fall over.

These are the kinds of bugs I discovered as a kid writing crappy computer games for my friends and I: "floats for everyone! This is way easier!", followed later with: "floats are slow, and I don't understand half my bugs!".

Actually, on this project I found myself explaining several things I'd learnt from recreational games programming. Things that you apparently don't learn in CS (I did EE, so I wouldn't know), or a decade of doing the J2EE business middleware dance.
Getting Started with Elasticsearch
Show HN: The Kontact Magic API – Find Almost Anyones Email
Yes, the main reason it was created is OpenStack deployments where Anchor is used for securing internal communications, so the PKI is an internal one (most likely).

We cannot change how the CAs work in public networks unfortunately, but if they do, we're going to be ready :)
Sign up for the free plan and click API Access to try it out from your browser.
One of the restrictions on short-selling is the "uptick rule" - you can only sell a stock short if the last tick (transaction) was higher than the one before - i.e. if the stock was going up (at least momentarily). It's used in Western markets as well, AFAIK. Personally, I think it makes a lot of sense, because it prevents you from short-selling during a crash, exacerbating the panic. The reality is, markets rarely panic upwards, but quite often panic downwards.
When someone says they are changing the algorithm of a news feed or search engine page it's never to benefit the reader, it's always to benefit the advertiser. It's a lazy way of fitting the advertiser to the feed rather than letting the user decide what they want, and then fitting the advertiser to the users' preferences.

I spend a lot of time curating news (see bio). It's not enough to go out and just aggregate information on a topic. I see so many products that scan the web for news and then present them in a list. Even Google does this, presenting a list of blue links with no context. There's a news article, then a tweet, then a YouTube video. but what does it mean? The reader is required to make some mental sense of it all. The reader is required to build the story. The challenge IMHO is to build an intermediate stage of human curators who can compile data that can then be built up into a story that is meaningful to humans.
Tetris blocks traumatic flashbacks even after the memory is fixed
One downside to doing these calculations in the application, vs the DB: You have to transfer more data from the DB over a finite sized connection than you do if it's in SQL (stored procs or no). For better or worse, the DB is well tuned for these forms of workflows, most general application programming languages are not.

This doesn't apply to data which is being manipulated before stored, of course.
Update

Looking at the source, it seems like the initial key exchange keys are sent as a k_(pub,x) || sig tuple where x is 1 for the sender and 2 for the receiver. Similarly, it looks like the shared keys are derived from subslices of k_(pub,x) and k_(priv,3-x).

Is there a particular reason there isn't a single read/write symmetric key that's derived from the entirety of the public and private keys?
Thankfully brownies don't make everyone stink.
Exokernel was designed to run multiple applications that needn't know of each other's existence, on real hardware.

The idea behind an unikernel is to run a single application on virtual hardware.

Both minimize the OS to only provide what the application(s) on the system need. Exokernel also tried to move as much code as possible from the OS into the applications. Unikernels do not do that, but do minimize what the 'real' OS that runs on the hardware need to do.

And something can easily be 'just another novelty' and 'take off'. Whether unikernels will is anybody's guess, IMO.
Many years ago I did a comprehensive analysis of Canadian mutual fund returns over about 20 years, and found that the average return per year was dead on the market. The distribuiton of returns was Guassian and had a width of about 1%. I concluded from this that in fact fund managers can beat the market... by precisely amount they pay themselves.

This is evidence for the "second order version of market efficiency" your mention: it was uncanny, and put me into index funds for life (that, and the fact that there was no way of predicting from year-to-year which funds would beat the market the following year.)
Are websockets required or can it fall back to polling? I would like to to use it behind an authentication proxy that does not support websockets.
I'm from Ireland but live in the US. Of course there are things I am not happy with the government about at any given time, and technically I'm not responsible for what government does in the US since I can't vote in US elections, but insofar as I support the US by living here, paying taxes, and so on, I do feel a little bit responsible even for things I disagree with. Of course individual voters have very little power and it's very difficult to actively lobby government without getting into the 'political-industrial complex'.

But in the aggregate, having political agency means you have to live with the ramifications of the electoral decisions you make in the normal course of things.
I don't think human curation is "back" per se. There's just a difference in expectations.

When I listen to a radio show or a new playlist from a friend, I have a general understanding of their tastes and the taste of the audience that has elected to receive these recommendations. Arguably, the biggest thing here is that decision - you've subscribed to this person's taste and you are predisposed towards justifying that decision.

With a recommendation algorithm, it is reaching much higher, trying to give you personal recommendations. The relationship is more confrontational. I'm much more inclined to think "why this" when given an algorithmic recommendation, trying to reverse engineer it, instead of trusting a person's taste in curating a selection based on much broader criteria.
The majority, sure, but not all. Look at since-inception charts of POGRX, VHT, and BRK.B for example.
I find that a lot of budget arguments in general, not just of Universities but all kinds of government and private institutions, suffer badly from the lack of having two budgets to compare side by side. Say a budget from 1990 and a budget from today, side by side line by line. But clean data is almost impossible to come by. So people just argue in ideological generalities. Which is absurd when it's a numbers question. Can we see the numbers please? No.
But it's actually true. I've personally had the experience (as a freelancer) of watching people that I had just recently met be laid off because of what I was being generously paid to do. I did not like it.

I could at least comfort myself by the fact that what I was doing was actually useful (and creating efficiencies that destroyed jobs), whereas concealing risk is actively deceitful and destructive.
> "Most scientific computing is not "serious""

Stopped reading after this.
Introducing pig-herder – Production ready pig/mapreduce workflow
I just checked and it seems 26% of South Korea's export (and 16% of import) is to/from China. That is pretty big, but not terribly bigger than many other countries. (For comparison, 8% of US's export and 20% of its import is to/from China.)
Why do they even differ?
I think the big thing with alcohol is it's a lot harder to become addicted to. I don't disagree that alcohol addiction is a problem (and a more damaging social problem in some aspects - a smoker father is probably far less of an issue than an alcoholic father). But I don't agree that going back to prohibition would benefit the situation.
Article appears to answer the question why does finance exist, not why is it so complex.

I think the answer for why is it so complex is that it is a human domain that rewards complexity.

First, humans that turn their full brain power on something inevitably make complicated structures. If you think about it, this becomes clear that it's true, even if there's absolutely nothing there. For instance, it's almost worth picking up a practitioner's book on numerology or astrology, a really "good" book that goes deep into the details and history, not just a superficial "intro" jobber, to witness the incredible complexity humans bring into a field that 90%+ of the readers of this comment will agree there is virtually no reason for it to possess, because there's no "there" there.

How much more complexity and richness we can bring to an already complex field!

And as others are pointing out already, finance also rewards complexity, both because people can hide things in the complexity and because people can fool themselves into thinking they understand the complex things, and because the interaction of all these complex things is even more complex.

You want another domain that works much like that? Consider any ol' pile of code that a software company runs on. It's bad enough that all software companies of any size are trying to solve a non-trivial problem, but throw a few hundred random developers at it and before you know it the "simple billing system" has 100-line buggy sorting functions sitting next to the double-booking accounting algorithms and all the other endless monstrosities we sometimes swap stories about on HN or various reddits. And then one day a trivial quirk in that sorting algorithm accidentally erases all the data in your customer database when it accidentally decided everybody had failed to pay their balances for over a thousand years or something. Computing is complicated even before humans start humaning the place up, but then it gets even worse.
> I think this is just a sign that there's healthy decision making going on. If what the CoC claims is true, that Jamaica's law was passed without following the proper process, then that is a problem and it should be challenged whether you want the law or not. You can't have a law-making process, trademark protections, etc and then just walk over them when you decide it's an important law. The whole point of the process is to decide if it's the correct law in the first place!
The CoC's purpose is to support the interests of it's members. So they absolutely should be doing this. What good is a chamber of commerce that arbitrarily decides to throw some of its members under the bus when new laws threaten their businesses? The real complaint people should be making is that it allows tobacco businesses as members, or even that the government allows tobacco businesses to exist at all.

Jamaica is one example, did you look at the others? In some cases it appears the CoC's stance goes beyond simple good faith defense of their members.

> What shocks me the most is that the CVS pharmacy was selling cigarettes 1 year ago! What?! Pharmacies sell cigarettes in America?!

To my knowledge, they all still do so with the exception of CVS.
Ask HN: What are your favorite interview questions?
I've interviewed at a bunch of startups recently, and overall I've been unimpressed by the interview questions.

Many of you have hired for both technical and nontechnical roles - how do you approach the interview? Do you have a set of questions that you ask every candidate? Or do you just wing it?

What are your favorite questions?

I haven't found many resources online for interviewers. I'm thinking about putting together a handbook that includes great sets of questions and advice about hiring based on potential, from this awesome HBR article https://hbr.org/2014/06/21st-century-talent-spotting.
Sincerely, the thread originator asked how to responsibly disclose sensitive information. This has been done ~recently, and the person in question has been lauded for their efforts in responsible information disclosure. I am curious why the same model shouldn't be followed.

Yes, the first comment was glib. I was hoping to spark a debate. The edit on my second comment was probably superfluous.
> do cool things with CS (GUI stuff, web stuff), the better CS education will be

The issue is these skills don't solve serious or interesting problems. GUI and web programming have become easier than ever and requires less programmers on staff to perform. My company can't find enough qualified engineers with a good depth of knowledge in CS.

I've found functional concepts have been incredibly important in shipping maintainable code on the JVM using both Java 8 and Scala.