skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, I'll freely concede that I'm ignorant on the issue, but Bonsanto made an extraordinary claim below (that government forbids buying non-Venezuelan currency) that despite my initial idea, turns out to appear truthful.

So, According to this somewhat recent article by Bloomberg[1], "A school teacher with 25 years of experience made 9,786 bolivars a month in 2014. That's about $35 a month at the current black market exchange rate, which won't even buy a used television."

It's hard to tell what the actual exchange rate of the bolivar is to the dollar, because apparently Venezuela fixes the exchange rate, so while it's been steady on paper, it appears that in practice, its actual exchange rate is approximately 100 times less than the official exchange rate. The official rate indicates that 1 bolivar == .16 US dollar, but other sources indicate that the effective, actual rate in Venezuela is more like 1 boliver == .0036 US dollars (or, because my simple math skills are horrible, 100 bolivar == 36 US cents.)

If that's the case, and I'm not missing something crazy, it doesn't seem far-fetched to me at all that an electrical engineer would be earning the American equivalent of $10.3 US dollars per month, depending on how you define the exchange rate.

[1] - http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-03-06/monthly-sa...
>how is the printing of money by Venezuela different from the printing that goes on in the West

In the west you produce things, so you need to print money to buy those things, or money would depreciate.

In third-world countries like Venezuela the gov needs money, so he prints a lot of it. There are no new things. Nothing get produced or imported, so you have a lot more money for the same things. Thats inflation.
VA is for veterans.

Most of us use our own health insurance from our jobs because the VA is absolute garbage.
"I don't think the complexity of the tax system is really that much of a problem."

The fact that TurboTax exists means the complexity of the system is a problem. For the average citizen to need a program to attempt to follow the law and still not get all the deductions owed points to a problem. The fact that the programmers at TurboTax have screwed up in recent years and cost people money and made them not comply with the law says the system is too complex.
> Wish you had made a better argument here, for perhaps I'm missing it.

I did have a better argument here. It was point 2.

Unauthenticated encryption is dangerous:

https://paragonie.com/blog/2015/05/using-encryption-and-auth...
A Ghost Ship Drifting Through International Waters
Yes. The money doesn't go to banks or stocks or real estate.
Well, they don't really care about software attacks as much since those don't make them as much money. It's also fairly difficult for a remote hack because everything leaving the console has to go through an IPSEC tunnel to pass cert (at least on the 360).

And you'd be surprised how secure you can get a game console these days from a hardware perspective. For instance, on the 360, all stacks and everything in the hypervisor is encrypted with a per boot random key and hashed as it leaves L2 for main memory. If the hash doesn't match on the way back, the system resets. You're very protected from DMA attacks. Particularly of the kind that that's easily reproducible and able to be sold in mass.
I don't think you have to sacrifice a meaningful key comment to make this work; "MYMH_user_DONOTMODIFYTHISCOMMENT_onetime0" is already on the key's line as part of the sed command that deletes the line with "MYMH_user_DONOTMODIFYTHISCOMMENT_onetime0"
Considering any of that "worse" is definitely your perspective. It's simple back-in-my-day-ism to apply a value judgment to language use.
Indexes. Corrected.
The techniques for addressing this are essentially the same for any display technology: Avoid rendering stuff that is not on the screen. This works just fine in React.
Of course war's been part of the human condition since inception, but it hasn't been evenly distributed, has it?
Here's an article from late may that disingenuously claims that the inflation rate is at 500% year over year.

http://www.xe.com/currency/vef-venezuelan-bolivar

So I guess the situation improved in June/July?
I am with you here. It sounds like the security benefit is the key rotation, which IMHO shouldn't have to be done every single time... If this is what the author meant, then he would have written "key rotation" somewhere in the description?!

Another way to secure the authentication is to use a One Time Password to authenticate.
Fire and multiple explosions at a U.S. Military base in Sagamihara, Japan
> Can you explain on how it (new key for every use) could work? If you already have a system (e.g. similar to the current CA system) to tell the remote server to allow a newly generated key in, what purpose does the key serve here at all?

It protects against old key compromise. Sometimes the attacker will compromise a key from a week-old backup or because someone forgot to wipe the disk when they replaced a PC. If the key is changed on every use or on a short interval then it will be unusable by the time the attacker learns it.

Of course, that also means a backup of the key will be unusable to the actual user.

> Also - the encrypted private key is already two-factor authentication - you have the key and you know the encryption password for the key. Is this fact usually ignored by everyone because paswordless keys are that common?

Key files encrypted with passwords are weak because an attacker who compromises the key file can then crack the password offline. By contrast, when the password is verified by the remote server, the attacker has to guess passwords online, which is much slower and allows the server to block or rate limit the attacker after too many bad passwords.
Sweden in particular? Like the rest of Europe, absolutely dismal birth rates and an aging population. Sweden is also particularly gung-ho about granting citizenship to any and everyone who shows up. That places additional strain on the system as the people showing up are a net drain on finances.
This is how i imagine his meeting went with the HR
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6bahX2rrT1I
Full disclosure, this is my project.

https://monthlyreadersclub.cratejoy.com/subscribe/72545612_b...

We send out a book each month that matches the course you sign up for. The goal is to help people read more, but I also believe reading is one of the best ways to develop the soft skills needed in business. One book a month, every month, is compounding interest for your brain.
Well that's depressing. I feel for my fellow engineer in Venezuela.
Why would some one who is free-market be in favor of patents? Patents involve government intervention at a very low level (e.g., evaluating technical details to determine patentability) and are prone to regulatory capture, which is not remotely free-market. I do see how a "hard-core capitalist" would love patents though.
The fulfillment locations also have to be supplied somehow.
Yes, eventually the central bank will be repaid the dollars it spent, the money spent and injected into the economy will be withdrawn as QE winds down.

Assuming QE ever ends of course.
I suspect this is heavily skewed by the age distribution of Spotify users
Demo is crashing :(
The only thing I can see that bears on this is that Venezuela's chief, and basically only real export is oil. With oil prices depressed across the globe to what they are, this is perhaps bearing on their economy in ways that defy explanation.
> I don't think that's so clear.

Yes, it is clear. When you have a system in place that is predicated on having enough productive citizens to support the non-productive ones and your birth rates have fallen off a cliff you're in for trouble.

> Free market capitalism has its own problems and its flagship country, the US, is increasingly considered to be in decline.

Never said the US doesn't have problems. Just pointing out that socialism also has its own problems. No economic system is perfect.
Proportional to usage, yes, but not proportional to the damage caused by weight, which goes up proportional to the 4th power of the weight.
>We don't need you.

Yes you need him, dude. You need every engineer you have, if you don't want to go back to medieval times.
This is most likely a correction, not a recession. There will be recession in markets that depend on China -- the commodity exporters like Brazil, Russia, Venezuela, etc.

The US economy is actually doing quite well. Stocks are not overvalued, commodities are cheap, jobless rate is going down, and housing is at 2004 levels. Fundamentals suggest the bull market could last at least a few more years, yet cash levels are at their highest since 2009. This correct is a great buying opportunity for anyone who has stood out of the market for the past few years.
I think a further issue with rating systems is the difference between individuals.

Some people's 3 star reviews are higher than other people's 4 star reviews so reviewing the ratings can often be misleading.

I think the issue arises from some people viewing 3 as the default, the "everything worked, nothing went wrong" rating, reserving 4 and 5 for people who go above and beyond.

Whereas others see 5 as the default and the "nothing went wrong" rating.

I think 3 should be the default personally, as the article says, if you rate everything a 5, what do you do when something exceeds all of your expectations. I think it would help when looking at the quality of a product.

If anything that "does the job" has a majority of 5 star reviews, how can you tell when something really goes above and beyond?

At the moment it seems review systems have one level of good, and four varying degrees of poor.
Needs uploading to pypi, lots of devs brought into python via django etc 'pip install' basically everything.
The US is literally producing more oil domestically than it can refine, it's got more cheap domestic oil than it knows what to do with...

I don't discount American involvement but I'm not sure that oil is the great driving factor it may have been historically, the Americans are producing enough of their own.
Have you thought about self-confidence training? It doesn’t invalidate who you are to seek a bit of professional help with dealing with interviews and social situations (especially if you’ve got experience and good sample code).
It's because there's demand for US dollars. More importantly, people see value in US goods and services (which are bought in US dollars), whereas there's no demand for Venezuelan goods and services (and this currency). This drives down their currency relative to imports and foreign currencies.
Alchemist v1.5.0 Is OUT – Elixir Tooling Emacs Integration
I think HDR photography has some influence too. "Normal" photo-realism isn't necessarily the benchmark for renders anymore. Not when HDR looks so good when done right (subtle).

Take this photo of a room. The HDR is subtle, and reveals shadows in the corners that wouldn't be there without HDR.

http://www.vangviet.com/wp-content/uploads/lovely-separation...

Game graphics aren't known for subtlety. So the cheesy overdone HDR photography that burns our eyes, has found its way into gaming graphics. GTA5 generally looks great, but I noticed the overcooked corner shadows.
Neat! I played one game, and solved it in seven guesses. Is that a good or bad score? It would be nice to have it tell you if you're doing better or worse than the average player.
> the physical qualities of VHS offer much more than the 0s and 1s carried on an electron stream directly to televisions

that's the money quote. maybe watching videos with tracking issues gives the whole experience an ambient warmness missing from evil computers.
> Finally we are far away from full body gene therapy this way, which would involve delivering a CRISPR kit to every cell.

My layman's understanding of the situation is that the most likely first use of this in humans will be for personal eugenics of one's offspring. Meaning, removing deleterious genes from, or adding beneficial ones to, your sperm or egg cells in a lab and then implanting an embryo.
This is why I'm always wary on commenting on any potential companies I would work at on social media unless it's positive.
I think about this every time I'm at a zoo or monkey temple watching primates interact - fighting, sure, but not torturing or persecuting or enslaving or committing genocide - and wonder at what point in evolution did we start being so brutal and cruel to one another as to cause the kind of trauma that now seems so common.

I don't claim to be any kind of expert on history, so I don't know how far back we've had the scale and brutality of the wars of the last 100-or-so years. But I have an easy time believing that the more recent wars have done more to traumatise people who were in them, as well as those who weren't due to the widespread media coverage that's also happened relatively recently.

At the same time, I agree with your point; trauma is not new and we certainly see it in other animals (maltreated dogs for example).

And I certainly believe the phenomenon I'm talking about could go back well beyond the past 100-ish years; that would make sense in my case, as none of my parents or grandparents were directly involved in the wars.

But I just wonder if the scale and brutality of the more recent wars, along with the media exposure, have made the problem more intense and widespread.
Actually there are many stories like this. German newspaper Der Spiegel once had a whole series of articles.

My favorite is about two guys escaping from East Germany an surf boards[1]. They built their own equipment, they never surfed before but still successfully crossed 70 km Baltic Sea in about 4 hours.

The article link is just Google translated, the photo gallery is also interesting[2]. It has images from the trip of the surfer guys as well as other escapes including the balloon of Strelzyk und Wetzel.

[1] https://translate.google.com/translate?sl=auto&tl=en&js=y&pr...

[2]http://www.spiegel.de/fotostrecke/spektakulaere-mauerfluchte...
I admit that I'm pretty topic dumb -- the closest I can personalize this to is an Ameri-Cuban reality show that I watch, titled "Cuban Chrome"[1].

In it, the story apparently focuses on a couple of folks - a taxi driver, and members of a car club. Because of the trade embargoes (now lifted in theory) between Cuba and America, most of the "newer" cars in Cuba are 60s-era classics, for which finding parts is nearly impossible.

Apparently Cuba's embargo has left them trading with Russia, so, if you want/need a new carburetor for your American Chevrolet, you end up having to retrofit a diesel carburetor from a Russian schoolbus, at exorbitant prices, and only by trading labor with someone capable of making the retrofit work.

I know it's reality TV, which already makes it very unlike reality, but it's difficult to watch in spots, as I see people struggling with what would be, in America, a completely solved problem.

[1] - http://www.discovery.com/tv-shows/cuban-chrome/
> What does 'fair' mean, though?

Just remove 'fair' from the sentence.

> a) The marginal utility of money is greatly increased when you don't have much of it. A 15% tax on $20k a year will lead to eviction, hunger and health problems, creating social ills that we'll need government programs to deal with. Or they'll just not pay the tax, so again with the prisons. And again, the overall tax needs to be increased to deal with a stupid choice in the tax code. This is inefficient and arguably unfair.

I disagree. If you know exactly how much money you have to pay each month, you can budget for it. A well planned budget can make $20K a livable income. I grew up in a family of 4 at that level. We tithed 10% of our income on top of the taxes we paid. We never were on Government welfare. And I never went hungry or didn't have a home. It wasn't easy, lots of people helped us, but I never realy realized we were "poor" until I went to college.

Sure it's just my family, but I'm pretty sure a lot of other families I knew as a kid were in similar situations.

> b) Furthermore, if we don't want to punish the poor for being poor, we have to reduce the ratio, meaning we greatly reduce investment in infrastructure, education, etc, mainly as a result of undertaxing the wealthy to avoid punishing the poor. This also seems hella backwards.

The goal is to help make it so that the poor are no longer poor. Government overspending, discriminatory taxation, loophole filled regulation, etc, helps mess things up so that it's really hard for the poor to stop being poor.

Fixing the tax code would be one step in solving the overall problem.
Encryption won't stop a single thing.

It now assists.
I sympathize with anybody who attempts to write an editor that runs in a browser.

If you're going to even entertain the thought of writing an editor I recommend reading Piotrek Koszuliński's article on Medium [1]. There are many pitfalls when writing an editor and the sooner you know of them the better.

On the plus side a new spec for a more low-level version of contentEditable is currently being worked on.[2] It's a complicated undertaking but the task force is making progress. There is participation from all major browser vendors so we have reasons to be optimistic: we may make it out of the Dark Ages of web-based rich editing one day.

[1] https://medium.com/content-uneditable/contenteditable-the-go...

[2] https://medium.com/content-uneditable/fixing-contenteditable...
According to the libertarian Cato Institute's Human Freedom Index, Sweden, Denmark and Finland are in the top 10 freest countries on earth. The US is at place 20 and Venezuela at 144 out of 152.

http://www.cato.org/human-freedom-index
http://www.cato.org/economic-freedom-world

Scandinavia has very free market open economies coupled with extensive welfare states financed by high taxes. You can call that socialism if you want, but it is a very different system than the criminal tragedy that is Venezuela.
> I wonder why there's inflation in Venezuela, and not e.g. in the EU or the US. In particular, how is the printing of money by Venezuela different from the printing that goes on in the West (Quantitative Easing).

Because we do it better than Venezuela. And honestly, that's all that there is to it. Injecting money into an economy is not necessarily a bad thing... depending on your goals.

For example, China is lowering the price of its Yuan (not necessarily through QE, but through similar means). This has the effect of encouraging factories to be built in China and arguably creates a net-gain.

Venezuela however is not playing anywhere close to the same game as the other world powers. They are printing money because they are out of money, and that is simply a bad situation to be in.
Even if he actually did put in a 100-hour work week (highly suspect as I and probably others question if actual quality work was getting done during all 100 hours or if he counts other activities as part of "working"), he likely was and even admits that he was a walking zombie which definitely calls into question the quality of the work[0].

[0] http://lifehacker.com/working-over-40-hours-a-week-makes-you...
Are articles on BI not proof-read before publishing?
The 10.3 u$s per month is possible. You have to remember that using the government exchange rate, food also is very cheap. Gas is almost free, IIRC about 5 or 6 bolivars to fill a tank (about 0.006 u$s I think).

The thing is, you cannot buy anything imported because then the real exchange rate goes, and you actually can buy only u$s 10 worth of imported stuff. You are forced yo spend your salary in locally-produced stuff, that actually kinda work for countries like Argentina that produces a lot of stuff (except computers and high-tech products), but do not for Venezuela, that only produces oil.

Interestingly, what happens if you go with your US-savings, say, u$s 50000 to Venezuela? well then you are basically a king there. You could buy half a city with that money, thats why they had to put laws to prevent foreigners to do that kind of thing.

TLDR: You can be rich with u$s 10/month, as long as you dont leave the country and don't buy anything imported.
Everyone Needs a Personal Website
>I wonder why there's inflation in Venezuela, and not e.g. in the EU or the US. In particular, how is the printing of money by Venezuela different from the printing that goes on in the West (Quantitative Easing).

Printing money doesn't cause inflation. Spending does.

QE doesn't directly cause spending. It just lowers interest rates and hence shifts investors' investment preferences from treasuries to equities/land/housing/riskier debt as they try to get back the yield they used to have. This pushes up the price of housing and equities to absurd levels, among other things. That is, until they both crash.

That actually, perversely, causes CPI deflation. People are spending less on consumer goods as they need to spend extra service their mortgage/rent/retirement fund/student loan repayments.
I think you'll find that the behaviour of the East German Authorities has more in common with the beliefs of Mr Trump than those of Mr Sanders, but either way that's a cheap shot not worthy of democratic debate and stretches the point in either case.
Actually The Biology of Belief proposes a very sound hypothesis for the placebo effect.
What's easy is to make pronouncements about other people and the way they handle emotions, when you have literally no way of actually making those statements without imposing staggering amounts of your own bias.
I always enjoyed the rejoinder: "Real-fast is not real-time."

50 years ago, real-time in it's true sense was not a product or service attribute that humanity was much concerned with. Information was disseminated largely via 'latent' methods and the delay between and event and it's report was typically measured in hours at best, and months for people subscribing to magazines.

Today, it does matter to an increasing number of people when an event occurred, and their desire to know 'soon' is increasing, because the reach of events has expanded to global extents and and the time we have to react is shrinking. Case in point: I've set a reminder to keep an eye on the Hang Seng in Hong Kong this evening to get an early read on where the NASDAQ will head tomorrow morning.

These trends are pushing the term real-time/realtime/real time out of computer jargon and into mainstream where they must be oversimplified and therefore conflated, like so many others. It's the natural evolution of language.
The long term strategy of the US is to provide energy security to Europe between tar sands, crude, gas and oil. It has multilateral plans with Canada and Mexico to build North-South pipelines to achieve this.

Recently the conflict over oil off the shore of Guyana and the documents I linked to above (where it is STATED that the coup is motivated by oil) show recent actions by the US that contradict you.

And further it is not merely about TAKING the oil (though it is). Venezuela uses its energy economy to unilaterally fix political outcomes. Think their shipping of oil to Cuba despite US sanctions. The US wants control of that oil.