skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Not talking specifics here, but there's a point that people must be shielded from their own ignorance (or even plain stupidity). There are lots of things to know about, and many people simply won't ever know about them by pure chance. I believe the law should actually be maximally protective of individuals up to the point it starts severely compromising the flexibility of businesses or individuals. Doing any less is masochism in my opinion.

For example, roads have guard rails in high traffic areas that mostly protect people from their stupidity -- you shouldn't speed near ledges otherwise; doing so would be stupid, and from then you could be small distraction away from death. It frees mental bandwidth and cuts transit times of travelers with little added cost. Nobody should have to suffer needlessly for poor decisions (not even taking into account most times it's just bad luck -- let's assume worst case it's just stupidity) if we can prevent it, and sometimes education won't work (not as fast as it should).

I've been stupid quite a few times with regards to physical/career risks myself and have a few otherwise very bright friends make stupid decisions. If those were preventable they should be prevented. They are much more efficient ways of teaching than allowing very significant mistakes to be made.

In particular, any safety mechanism for which if the majority of affected users post facto would agree upon can likely be put in place beneficially (which I would argue is the case for limiting overdraft fees).

You can think about it as if instead of needing people to learn about the innumerable (and mounting) hazards of the systems around us, we can free mental bandwidth and create other systems that learn about the hazards and protects us so we don't have to worry about it.
Trading in Stocks, ETFs Was Halted More Than 1,200 Times Early Monday
We used to use free plastic shopping bags as trash can liners. Now we buy boxes of plastic bags as liners. Net savings of bags = 0.
Nonsense. Nothing obligates you to use your checking account for the vast majority of ordinary purchases. And for those that you generally cannot avoid (usually only the rent), nothing requires that you fail to record the amount you spent and track the amount remaining. If you aren't sure of your records or don't care to keep them, use cash for everything else.

People with far less education than today's Americans have been successfully balancing checkbooks for over a century. My great-grandfather was a dirt-poor coal miner with a fourth-grade education and he never had any trouble avoiding overdrafts. And yes, he had -- and used -- a checking account for most of his life. Ignorance and carelessness are just excuses; they do not absolve you of your responsibilities.
Larger and authoritarian government tends to be far more corrupt and more importantly tend to interfere lot more in economy. While American politicians are surely corrupt they have relatively far lesser control on economy as their Chinese of Indian counterparts.

That is why net worth of American politicians is so less but if you look at Chinese or Indian politicians it is a different picture.
I mostly agree with you (99%) except the part about 'Rich bankers robbing poor people'. The bankers devising this are not rich - they are very much middle class MBAs who are struggling to meet ends meet, what with high cost of property in good school districts, etc.

It the same guys who develop devilishly complicated cell phone plans, cable tv plans, drug packets that are 8oz big but contain 4 pills that would fit in a 1oz packet, etc. There must be an MBA school course 'How to screw over people with IQ lower than 90'.

What i'm saying is that it's not a rich vs poor but rather intelligent vs less so (or just people who fail to pay sufficient attention).
Hey Dan, no questions in particular, but this was a fascinating and hilarious look into the infancy of the internet. Kudos, my parents, and 13 year old me didn't get the internet til 1999, but this site certainly seemed to be ahead of its time. To this day it's my go to cooking site, although Kenji and the team at serious eats bring a perspective I enjoy.
A huge chunk of legal theory is about negating conflicts of interest.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conflict_of_interest

From Judicial Disqualification, to the very core of our adversarial judicial system (Fruit of the Poisonous tree, etc. etc.), it is definitely a well studied subject in the US.

The solution is pretty simple. If someone in power has a conflict of interest, then the law should be rewritten to resolve it. Typically, the US seems to do it by introducing an adversary of some kind. (ie: The NYPD are considered 'corrupt' behind the 'Blue Wall of Silence'. So an adversary has been introduced: the Civilian Complaint Review Board. The Civilian Complaint Review Board not only reviews complaints, but has been granted judicial power to subpoena individual officers and force them to testify before court)

In fact, our very constitution was designed around this principle.

* The President enforces laws, but is not allowed to write the laws.

* The Congress writes the laws, but cannot enforce the law. Congress is further divided into two different houses (Senate and House) with differing responsibilities, as writing the law is considered the most powerful position of this country. Only when both chambers agree do laws move forward.

* When questions of enforcement come into play, the Judicial branch resolves it by interpreting the laws.

-------

Unfortunately, large swaths of red tape and political theory dance is expensive. So even the Federal Government cuts corners sometimes... but even more so with local governments.

When some country town can only afford one Sheriff for their entire police department (which is a huge chunk of the country btw), I'm gonna bet you that the town won't be able to afford a "Civilian Complaint Review Board" like New York City can.

A good example is St. Louis County / Ferguson right now. Their Police Department has been shown to be incompetent at best. But they can't even afford Police Cameras! They tried to buy cameras this past year, and the only way they were able to afford cameras was through funds seized from the populace (either traffic fines or other sources...). Such a source of money isn't enough to handle the ongoing storage costs of police cameras. (To say nothing about the conflicts of interest involved in a Police Force with guns who rely on parking tickets, fines, and court fees to fund key parts of their department...)

So Ferguson / St. Louis County will remain in the dark, without police cameras... at least until that city / county can afford them.

Still... Ferguson and St. Louis County are learning. They are probably going to implement civilian review boards soon. http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/govt-and-politics/ferguso...

But for a county that can't even afford police cameras properly, I bet you that the rollout of this new agency will be slow at best.
Functional Programming should be your #1 priority for 2015
Learn X in Y minutes – Tcl
'Major step' toward universal flu vaccine
Grass is always greener on the other side but when you look at the larger picture it is certainly clear that while 600M Indians still ear dirt, Chinese people have almost tripled their per capita income in 20 years. Which is pretty significant and India will take another 15 years to reach where China is today. That matters a lot on the ground.

It is true that China is bearing US. Look at how China has appropriated South China sea. See how any geo-political decisions taken by American government needs to factor in Chinese interests. It is only matter of time before US become China's bitch on international stage.
Powerlifting for 10 here. Just hit 40, and I'm stronger than I've ever been. What scared me into seriously exercising when I hit 30 was that it started being painful for me to walk up a single flight of stairs, and when I went to my doctor she looked at me with utter disdain and handed me a sheet of basic bodyweight exercises and sent me packing...

Now my 1RM squat is 192.5kg / 424lbs and my knees never give me trouble any more.

I think quite a few of us get into lifting partly because we need something to counteract the damage office jobs and sedentary lifestyles out of work do, and partly because it's something that fits the hacker mindset - weight lifting, whether oly or powerlifting or body building, lets you endlessly tweak programs and diets and measure results fairly precisely.
Bad ghost blog! Very bad! Thanks for heads up mgraczyk, now a smoother 40kb of viewing pleasure.
> Kind of weird just taking the middle row of pixels.

That's kind of the definition of what a slit-scan is ;) Maybe they wanted that specific effect, maybe they didn't have the resources to do something "better" – part of the beauty of slitscans is how simple they are.
I know right? Even a crappy CPU based on the Mill concept would be good. You could at least perform computational efficiency (ops/watt) style benchmarks. I'm sort of curious what the endgame is, myself.
Like I said, not quite the South. Geographically, it's below the Mason-Dixon Line, but's a pretty informal means of designating what's The South. Other than location, the state probably has more in common culturally with the northeastern states. And climate-wise, which is really the only thing that matters when it comes to kudzu, it's definitely not the South, even though summer here can be pretty oppressive.
I guess this suggests that your question about whether people deny countries have the right to censor things probably was rhetorical. Well, I guess you've noticed that a lot of people here don't agree, and think there's a kind of inherent illegitimacy around most information restrictions, maybe regardless of where they come from.

This kind of disagreement seems pretty intractable. :-(
It is dangerous, but also rather safe if done properly, just like say driving (which still kills as many people as 9/11 every month in the US alone, you'd think national security budgets would fund driverless cars... well they do, but more than now).

But yeah there've been some really tragic accidents. If you put your hand on the bottom of your neck and you feel your spine, some people have dropped the bar on there and couldn't walk for the rest of their lives. Which is why there's quite a bit of hate for Crossfit from the oly/powerlifting community because a substantial portion of their activity isn't safe. (where at times, either the exercises, or the guidance are inadequate for safety).

Generally though it's pretty easy to move the bar/body when you fail in the movement, and a proper trainer would let you go through those movements first so you get a feel of how to 'escape' a failed lift. The only danger is if you're inexperienced with this, or if you weren't watching your breathing properly and faint during the exercise. (that kind of training/experience is usually extremely solid if you do olympic lifting or powerlifting under guidance. You'll be hard pressed to find an olympic weightlifting trainer who doesn't know what he's talking about. Crossfit hasn't matured as much and there's just too many trainers out there who are novice lifters and teach lifting, and focus on ridiculous amount of volume, and it's dangerous)
Have you ever been a poor person?

This is a fallacy. If you were to claim AGW occurs or that outer space is a vacuum, it would be a fallacy for me to say "have you ever been planet-sized body warming due to excess CO2?" Of course not, but one can still reason about such things.

If you are claiming that the poor are incapable of taking responsibility for their choices, recognize that there is a term for this: incompetent. Are you claiming the poor are incompetent and unable to make choices like the rest of us?
China's working age population peaked four years ago, currently they are losing over a million workers a year.
Property values are down around 6% year over year, shadow banking is collapsing, I'm going to humbly disagree with the title of this thread
I've shipped one hardware product on Kickstarter [1] and I'm in the process of fulfilling the second [2]. Lessons I've learned are:

1. Design with your factory. Finding a good supplier is important but the real work starts once you've shaken hands. Your factory is your greatest resource as a presumably inexperienced hardware designer. It's like having an expert-level consultant work on your project for free, so take advantage of it.

2. Keep it extremely simple. MVP applies here. Your project will probably fail if it does not have the absolute minimum viable number of hardware features. The majority of your effort should be spent thinking about how to simplify your designs. Avoid moving parts if possible, and design parts that can be produced with simple tooling.

3. Your margins should be higher than you think. Think long and hard about your pricing before you launch your Kickstarter. Chances are, your MSRP is optimistically low. Bringing a hardware product to market involves lots of expensive rabbit holes. High margins will save you from death.

[1] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/rideye/rideye-the-black...

[2] https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/voltus/voltus-mobile-po...
Walking the Great Firewall of China
I'd buy like 4 of these or any other IR bluetooth/Wifi adapters if they had an API so I could hook them up to my Echo. "Alexa, turn on South Park" (turns on TV, switches input, changes channel, etc etc).
I never know this before! Thanks for sharing.
Engineering Colleges in India
The same capitalism also moved a billion people out of absolute poverty. It's not all black and white by any means. China's communist history royally screwed over the country from 1949-1978, and autocratic capitalism was the drastic measure necessary to change the people's lives for the better.

Obviously the country is no longer remotely the same today, and the central communist government is trying hard to adapt (i,e keep developing the country while making sure they hold absolute political power).
delay it a bit then
Squirrel – An installation and update framework for Windows desktop apps
Spotify/Apple Music still haven’t figured out how to direct fans to new artists
Yea they do talk about how corrupt it is, but they believe that Western governments of more developed countries are equally corrupt.
This sounds like someone who's just read Ben Graham telling DE Shaw that they're doing it all wrong, and index funds are the way to go. A massive lack of understanding and experience in what professionals with cutting edge research and resources are actually doing.
At
Hoy entro la compañía al país, líneas de iusacell reportan LTE, velocidad que antes no tenían, sin embargo nextel no ha reportado nada, habrá que esperar
I remember reading a postmortem about a failed hardware Kickstarter campaign (some photographic accessory: a flash remote?) and they said they contacted a professional manager from the industry who told them he wouldn't even try developing new hardware without a few million in funding, tens of millions being more common. So there, turns out making new hardware is really expensive.
Hah and with Wells Fargo, a check from one account to another will take a day or two. Online transfers take up to three.
China's economy is definitely not OK.

The distortion in the system are massive, the main things that work well (and extremely well) is the export sector. BUT China's export sector has always been more dependent on foreign investment, foreign management and external inputs. Even the height of it's manufacturing boom, China could run a trade deficit because its export sector was so oriented to labor-intensive final assembly activity.
The real estate sector is well know for its ungoldly distortedness, it's science establishment is riddled with fraud, it's economic statistics are generally falsified. The pollution produced by it's industry (and corrupt state) is now making a true deadly impact on its society but the pollution is also a product of its energy sector's costs being falsified and so-forth.
I actually think that "longevity" is a better term. But I only realized that after I wrote the article. Here's another version of the article that never really was released, which focused on longevity over timeless: http://poly-graph.co/timeless/nodiggity.html

We only have two data points in this work: today and release date. So longer trends like the one you pointed out might be lost in time.
Russia Says It’s Banning Wikipedia
I have a similar version of this - being the only ops guy in a small sea of devs. I'd love to be able to bounce ops-related ideas off people in-house, but no-one is interested, because it's not what they do or what they're interested in. I sometimes wonder how many weird ops habits I have picked up, since they don't get to be aired out much...
It's all of Spotify. So while it's international data, it certainly skews toward western music.
My money is in my checking account. That's where it is. I can't use money from somewhere else. I could put it on a card, but then I still have to pay the card at the end of the month, don't I?

In fact, I just recently over-drafted my rent. Do you know why? Because my phone company auto-charges to my account. All I had to do was forget what day this happened, and not coordinate the exact day that my landlord cashed the check. (PS: it was my landlord who charged the overdraft fee. I have a decent bank.)

You're taking too narrow of a view here -- this isn't about responsibilities. Of course I'm responsible for my over-drafts. But I should not be at risk for them in the first place. And that's what this is about: RISK. The severity of a problem multiplied by the probability it will occur. Overdraft fees do not minimize risk, and thus they are not rationally justifiable. They disproportionately transfer risk from the bank to the customers. (That is, for every unit of risk the bank saves for themselves using over-draft fees, they deliver more than one unit of risk to their customers.)
Aside from the more obscure use cases in sibling comments, multitouch implies potentially having a large number of "pointers" at once. Usually combined to make a single gesture, but the OS is supposed to do the right thing if the user tries to scroll multiple views at the same time or whatnot.
From experience in the sports I'm knowledgeable about, I feel this holds true beyond lifting.
Like this ? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Bkk0Wqc_keg
>The problem is the closely-held belief that There Must Be Suffering or we're not being responsible adults.

While this is quite true, there are underlying demographic factors to take into account. Namely, insofar as voting means anything at all, Generations X and Y together now outnumber the Baby Boomers among voting, working adults. This means that there is now an active, demographically-driven political conflict between the interest of incumbent creditors and the interest of an increasingly large majority of the voting, working adult public.
CloudABI, an ABI built around capability-based security
> they're not a properly formed company

They aren't? Really?
I don't think size makes much difference. See any banana republic or African countries run by "strongmen".

It probably has more to do with education and progress. The more education and progress there is the less corruption. But little or minimal corruption does not mean open society either. You can have an autocratic system with low corruption.
Ah, yes. Good point :)
How would someone begin the process of finding electronic manufacturers?
Overdraft fees are maddening. I can't even imagine how bad they would be if I were strapped for cash.

I admittedly am not great at managing my accounts, but, it blew my mind that the following situation could (and did happen):

I got paid monthly, let's say it was $5k USD. At the end of the month, I may or may not have enough money in my account, for, say, a day or two.

So, I go to buy a coke at the university shop. No problem, costs me $1.25, but I used my debit card.

Now I get a $35 fee because my account was at $.75

That makes sense right? Given that the bank has significant historical information that I will get paid in less than 48 hours, how am I a risk?

OK, so I bought another soda, later in the day, another $35.

Whoa! $70 for two sodas.

Kill me now.

What's worse... I couldn't set my account to reject these transactions. Either I had to always monitor my account, AND make sure that none of the services I subscribe to ever charge me in this specific time period.

It wasn't until specific laws were passed that I could make my account follow these rules, and this was about 2009, or 2010.

I paid at least $1000 to the bank in overdraft fees over the course of a few years.

In fairness, these are the only fees I paid to the bank, and probably, if this were the cost of banking (less than Spotify!) I probably would have paid them happily.

The problem with these charges is that they were volatile, a surprise, and scraped the bottom of the barrel when I was least capable of handling the charges.

It's maddening, and I feel strongly for those who weren't as well off as me who got fucked over by banks under the scheme, and likely continue to get fucked over because the banks still don't make it easy to set your account up in such a way that you reject overdraft charges.
Article is behind paywall. :-/
I still think a lot more research needs to go into it. Specifically in the field of computer ethics, and general AI. (I don't want judges interpreting the law, I want safe machines doing it.)
Could you name some of the packages you think are better than any of their equivalents?
Even if it's (asset forfeiture) a statistically rare event, we have to worry about it because it is a deeply corruptive practice. Asset forfeiture goes against much of the philosophical underpinnings of this nation.
And yet peopl eat "bitter gourd" in China and "Goya" in Okinawa, both super bitter. Are those bad too and they just don't know any better?
> the market is good at certain things and bad at others, and gov't action is a sensible alternative in the areas it's better at (of which there are quite a few, not least dealing with externalities) or a damaging hindrance in the areas where it's worse than the market mechanism (explicitly setting prices, in most cases).

I don't think that's actually true[1]:

>Two German microeconomists tested the “widely accepted” hypothesis that “prices in a planned economy are arbitrarily set exchange ratios without any relation to relative scarcities or economic valuations [whereas] capitalist market prices are close to equilibrium levels.” They employed a technique that analyzes the distribution of an economy’s inputs among industries to measure how far the pattern diverges from that which would be expected to prevail under perfectly optimal neoclassical prices. Examining East German and West German data from 1987, they arrived at an “astonishing result”: the divergence was 16.1% in the West and 16.5% in the East, a trivial difference. The gap in the West’s favor, they wrote, was greatest in the manufacturing sectors, where something like competitive conditions may have existed. But in the bulk of the West German economy — which was then being hailed globally as Modell Deutschland — monopolies, taxes, subsidies, and so on actually left its price structure further from the “efficient” optimum than in the moribund Communist system behind the Berlin Wall.

Or in other words, mixed economies can easily operate just as far from the Efficient Market Hypothesis as centrally-planned economies. The Efficient Market Hypothesis should probably be considered more like a Carnot engine than like a real internal combustion engine: some substantial degree of inefficiency is probably an inevitable result of operating in the real world.

[1] -- https://www.jacobinmag.com/2012/12/the-red-and-the-black/