skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Hitler

The rise and fall of the Third Reich is a perfect example of the counterbalance effect within our species, which longevity has little bearing on-- for every psychopathic, misguided or downright evil person bent on causing suffering & death, there are people willing to stop them. These people's longevity & capabilities will increase with those of the bad actors.

> I am slowly starting to believe the biggest threat to mankind are idealists living in their own tiny little mental bubble

Without them, we wouldn't have anything resembling the technology and social progress we've seen erupting like mad for the past couple hundred years. Is it a temporary phenomenon? Will we see another massive decline into an even more terrible 'dark ages'? No one knows. But dwelling on all the things that could go wrong is not how progress happens.

> Next time you'll have an idea how to singlehandedly solve all mankind's problems, sit back, think about it...

I don't know anyone who really believes they can do this, and I certainly wouldn't trust myself for the job. I give a fairly high probability that we kill ourselves off. However, predicting the future is a fool's game, and focusing on only the negatives is the practically the definition of self-defeating behavior.

> For some reason, world still works as it does.

It absolutely does not, our predecessors from 200 years ago would find the world we live in now fundamentally different to a very jarring degree on multiple levels. You can say that our basic social and governing structures are 'the same' if you use some crude metrics, and if you proposed that we've all been bossed around by the same secret society for thousands of years I might even entertain the notion, but 'the way the world works' changes in dramatic ways constantly. If it didn't, no school would ever need to update its curriculum.
I don't understand it either.

One-off events in the world don't really interest me. I believe that on any given day in the US, some public school administrator does something stupid where a student is involved. And also the majority of public school administrators are very competent and handle similar situations without blowing things out of proportion.

There's no evidence of a trend. This isn't a sign of a shift in culture or of the impending [DOOMSDAY SCENARIO].

I just ignore the headline and move on.
And getting only a few toes amputated due to gangrene would be lovely to someone who lost a leg for the same reason. That doesn't mean losing a few toes isn't terrible.

I don't think it would be hard to find people who would have rather have faced what you suffered than what they went through. (Kalief Browder might have been one.) That doesn't mean they would be right to say that what happened to you was "lovely."
I don't understand why US schools have police in them, and they put little kids in handcuffs. It insanity.
Excellent article and great infographic
I'd say one talk at an erlang conference three years ago falls into the umbrella of not talking much. The article doesn't say "they never talk about engineering."
Fishing for a Glimpse of Salmon’s Future – Hakai Magazine
Good economy is not always the case. It's due to the fact that emerging economies are not performing that well and also the Fed is looking to increase the interest rates for the first time in 7 years.
Many of us were the nerdy kid in school at his age, and we got bullied by people because of it. That fact that he's being bullied by his school administration and the police is just disgusting.
Show HN: Hacker News desktop app made with Electron and Node
"X is a creative influencer..."

"Y ... appreciates open, casual conversations."

These read like dopey profile statements people write about themselves on Twitter.
And how is GDP growth more relevant than GDP itself?
And what about humongous, growing income inequality?
Chile doesn't really rank that well, does it?
140th out of 159 ranked countries
http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=gini+index+chile
Because every hacker on hacker news has done stupid shit with science and technology. And the majority of us got away with it.

When a kid is brutally harassed over double nothing, we can both link with him AND cry for the experimental culture that is dying the death of a thousand cuts.
Many, probably most, of us can imagine ourselves in this kid's shoes.

Personally, I was punished repeatedly in high school for things I didn't do, simply because the administration was extremely paranoid about my computer knowledge. The principal once threatened me with "blacklisting" (seriously) because they got infected with a virus and didn't know what was going on.

A lot of people in the tech community have similar stories. We tend to stick out in the wrong way while in high school.

What's really worrying is that when I was his age, it was just the school I had to worry about. I was sometimes harassed and threatened (and to be fair, encouraged in a lot of things) by the administration while at school, but that's where it ended. Now they're getting the whole system involved.
On the surface that would be a security risk that is hard to quantify (how would they figure out that an app is occasionally capturing audio from someone's living room and using and/or storing or sending it in a way that it's not supposed to?). For instance it could probably be used for some evil scheme to make targeted advertising.

They might be able to open it later if they can find a way to do so, e.g. perhaps only allowing post-processed text to be returned and not raw audio, and even then only whitelisted words.
The shop doesn't work on a monitor (or browser window) with height > width. It appears when I resize the browser window. Otherwise the game works quite well on a rotated screen. Independent from screen rotation, some textures are badly compressed. Such as the pattern on the vase.
If College Commercials Were Honest
Polymer Hypergrid: display a peta-size data-set in a grid with smooth scrolling
2nd law of thermodynamics only applies on macroscopic scale. So not really inevitable.

Plus, the laws of physics are based on a set of axioms, which don't necessarily have to be true.
Thank you for expressing exactly what's going on in my mind.

I hate being interrupted, we all do, even working as a cashier in McDonalds. But the idea that a special branch of people SHAN'T be interrupted is snowflake treatment.

I already feel privileged over other employees in my company for having flexible workhours (felt sick yesterday evening, sent a text at 1am and got at work around 2pm today despite a production deployment being scheduled for 5pm), now if suddenly MY time is more important than anyone else's, I'm not an engineer, I'm a snowflake in an ivory tower.
I was thinking of this quote from the article:

the teacher recommended he hide it from the rest of the staff.

However it's not a direct quote so I don't know the wording the teacher used. Regardless, this teacher seems to have known enough to step in at any time before this child was escorted from the school in handcuffs.

Perhaps he did and was shot down. I don't know but the details as shared stuck out to me.
"They" are the administrators involved.

Don't hold your breath.
Yup, similar experience here. I'm now a die hard believer that social structures, governments, and religions are there to make our life's as miserable as possible. To me that experience was comparable to that kid in Whiplash.
API as a service. I could use this.
Unfortunately, entertainment is making people think everything can explode:

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/MadeOfExplodium
Well that is a great reply to the two party system we have in America that sadly I won't see changed in my life time.

That is why it is important to be an influence with the vote.

I never pull the party lever but I also know local politics really is the foundation for our political system and if you like Cherry Coke let your local politician know what you want. Heck follow them on FaceBook and talk with them.
Of course, the best part about that Aqua Teen "bomb scare" was how the guys that were charged for putting up blinking LEDs (and their lawyer) handled the press: "That's not a hair question".

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X2fGzmphx4U#t=44
I'm much more of a tinkerer than any semblance of serious musician but I remember how awesome it was to get a cheap 4-track at a pawn shop in my teens. Until then, my "workaround" had been two boom boxes, some blank tapes, and some splitter cables.

I'd pop a tape into a boom box, record the rhythm guitar part with my little "headphone amp" routed to the aux-in, then rewind. Plug a headphone cable in and split it so the right channel went to headphones and the left channel went into the left aux-in on the second boom box. That way I could record the leads or other parts while listening to the rhythm over headphones.

You could bounce back and forth a couple of times as long as you had some stereo-to-mono adapters but quality degraded quickly. Still, I was a teenager with a $100 guitar, some old boom boxes, and a lot of time.

Still, I can't imagine cassette is easier or cheaper to record and distribute compared to digital or even CD-R today. I'm guessing it has as much to do with "novelty" (which is funny to say about deliberate anachronism) as ease/cost of distribution.

That said, if people dig it, then more power to them. I like picking up vinyl records at Goodwill because they're 4 for a dollar and sometimes I find something that ends up being pretty interesting. I also buy vinyl new releases sometimes because there's something more psychologically pleasing about getting a "thing" for your money instead of a file that could just as easily be duplicated infinitely. I really like how vinyl often comes with a digital download code so I still get a 256-320k/sec mp3 copy for portability and convenience but I also get the big cover art and something tangible. Album art really is something I miss about physical media and vinyl 33's are large enough to offer great, big cover art.
What if the kid had gotten his hands on a detonator button transmitter thing? It could have been a disaster. I'm being sarcastic, but I fear that one of these tools might use a similar excuse if you questioned them.
stupidity + malice

Calling it a hoax bomb is ass covering by shifting the blame to the person who happens to be the only adult in that bumfuck town's government.
In the little video, it looks like a lot of it was just cannibalized parts. I'd be interested in the actual thought process that built the monstrosity (and I say that as a person who just loves that sort of gizmo work). When I was his age, I didn't know anything about proper electronics, and so I only took stuff apart and tried to figure out how to get it combined. I remember one of the big problems I had was figuring out enclosures, and frankly a $5 box from Target really would be the perfect thing; the other stuff likewise followed similarly.

Think of it as the Git-R-Done philosophy, like installing Postgres for a single two column table. It ain't elegant, but I wouldn't make a kid feel bad for trying.
I guess one would be that for life to exist it needs to use energy.
What is wrong with American schools? The more I read the more disturbing it is. Where is the proportionality and common sense?
Great article, recommend watching Bettany Hughes's documentary on the Spartans[1]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oGHlp8g7I0M&list=PLb5MA_edV9...
There's a couple of reasons:

1. A lot artists don't incorporate cassette into the workflow much. Usually people do what they do with a DAW or go to a studio to record. Cassette is mostly used as medium (like CD, vinyl etc). But yes, I do have friends who record directly on cassette. This will sound very rough though (depending on setup), too much even for some lo-fi aficionados.

2. Hipster points. Tapes are very "in" right now. Don't disregard this point. Just like networking is sometimes seen as a sacrifice of your "humanity", so is hipsterism. This is not so. Like it or not, sometimes it's important to go with the flow and play the field.

3. Easy/cheap to make. You do have to record in real-time which sucks when duplicating tapes, but other than that it's way easier to do a few tapes than to go vinyl.

4. People like supporting artists. This can be hard. Many shows are free, everyone downloads, so tapes, even if they can't be played at home, are a way to show your appreciation.

5. Sound. The sound is to me the most important part. Cassette can sound just as good as vinyl with the proper transfer, and introduces some great artifacts like a smoother high-end and a bit of saturation.

6. Professionalism. If you've spent 20-50 hours to create artwork, order tapes, duplicate them (or get someone else to do it) etc etc you show that you're serious about shit. It's a way to create your brand (of course this goes for vinyl etc as well).

7. I'd just like to copy Coldpie's point in regards to vinyl further down in this thread. Go upvote him:
"...for some there's more to listening to music than just listening to music. Going to the shelf and looking over the albums, remembering when you bought each album, who you've played them for, things that were happening while you listened to them. Looking at the cover art or the silly liner art or notes[1]. Noticing markings (or smells...) from previous owners and wondering about them, what they were doing when they bought or listened to the album. Physically placing the album on the turntable and aligning the needle. Listening to the lead-in scratches as you adjust the volume before the music kicks in. Sometimes you get silly lead-out loops[2].
It's just a fun, physical way to listen to music."
Don't Teach Coding
If you're laid off, that probably doesn't apply anymore. It would have to be negotiated as part of the severance package.
I'm all in favor of seti@home but it's not like running that on the school computers is free. If he didn't have permission to do it, then setting it up on those computers without getting that authorization was inappropriate. Obviously firing him is an overreaction, but I tend to believe their excuse that if he was fired for that, it wasn't just for that. He was already on thin ice before that incident and it was just the final straw.

My point being, comparing what this kid is going through -- pure racist overreaction -- to a teacher installing seti@home on school computers without permission, isn't a great comparison.
Of course it's possible that I'm wrong. All I'm saying is that it could go either way. Converting high-quality work for few in exchange for low quality work for many is not an inherently valuable proposition. (Because it often creates extremely-high-quality work for a very few.) You need more information to determine if it is the right thing to do.
Hey, great point ! I wanted to buy property in Thailand but found I'm not legally allowed to because I'm not a Thai citizen.

That's got me thinking, what about the social responsibility of southeast Asians towards Americans who have been denied for decades the opportunity to own property and live in southeast Asian countries?

Every country has it's own laws about who can settle and work and under what conditions. America does it and so do 'Southeast Asian' countries and everywhere in-between.

Thailand decides who can own property (or work) there. It's neither racist (as you seem to imply - but perhaps you mean only when it's America?) nor is it evil.

Guess, I'll just need to suck it up and go without that great beach house in Thailand.
This is very tough to learn, but critical.

The catch-phrase is "fierce opinions, lightly held"

I'll argue the shit out of whether or not brackets stand alone in C++ code, but at the end of the day we all agree on something and move on. We're still friends. You have to both be passionate about what you do -- and willing to see the big picture -- to be a true professional.
France has one of the highest per-worker productivity in the world, well ahead of the US. You may want to read more
Maybe they use clocks for something else in Irving, TX. Like a wristwatch used for a tourniquet, an alarm clock as nut breaker, a monocle watch to burn trash etc. I mean, you dont know! stop judging! Now maybe they can repurpose the kid's invention to bash the heads of these morons to knock some sense into them. amirite?
AptDeco (YC W14) Is Hiring Business Dev and Customer Experience Managers in NYC
No, but I don't claim companies owe any responsibility to people in their hometown either. Certainly if companies do owe something beyond wages for work performed, I can't see why it wouldn't be owed to the poor rather than the rich.
I could not personally because I don't care to. But a blockchain address is like any other piece of metadata: once associated with you, it's no longer anonymous. You can create another one easily.

And I actually think that last part (lightweight account creation) may be what the banks are after here. It allows them to obfuscate transactions on the wire by using one-time accounts so that other banks not involved in the transaction know who is transmitting what from looking at the blockchain -- while at the same time providing enough transparency and security that banks can independently validate transactions they were involved in.
I guess we can add science-ing while brown to the list of de facto racist laws in america
Are you suggesting Gorbachev was the USSR's enemy? He brought Russia out of the dark ages of government run socialism i.e. communism. He and Reagan gave Russia the new found joys of capitalism it enjoys today and brings the world all those cool I Love Russia YouTube videos.
Site seems down, I found a cached version at archive.org:
https://web.archive.org/web/20150905234615/http://www.sigidw...
Just what the economy needs: additional legal risk and associated expense for employing people.
Why Ad blocking is devastating to the sites you love
This really reminded me of the Star Simpson case. The police actually held her at gunpoint so it was perhaps even worse: http://tech.mit.edu/V127/N40/simpson.html
The Facets of Burnout and How to Handle It Without Crashing
You should read the introduction of this article about this "mere curiosity".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/French_language
Permutation Racer
This is awesome news! I'm not surprised that the library's Trustees voted to keep the relay online. As others have said, New Hampshire's residents care quite a bit about individual liberties (Live Free or Die), so any time the government attempts to impose its will on what we can and cannot do, there's always a lot of feather ruffling. Makes for interesting small town politics, but in this case, I say that smarter minds prevailed.
I realize it may seem like fun to try to bring "discrimination" into this, but plenty of white kids have gotten in plenty of trouble for stupid reasons too. Yes, including handcuffs and arrests, and at times, even court convinctions and orders for things like staying off computers entirely for some period of time. I see no reason to believe it would have gone any differently for any ethnicity, gender, age, sexual orientation, or anything else. This stupid is well-distributed.
Holy shit... Is there any follow up on this?
It is as stupid as it sounds. 4 year old will listen to instructions and if they disobey you take away toys or have silent time, etc.

But signing something? That's just really stupid. It's not enforceable and not even understandable.
Whales also live longer because it's evolutionarily advantageous for them to live longer (they have a long, fragile reproductive cycle). There's little need for a fruit fly to live 100 years and historically it doesn't seem that there has been a great need for humans to do the same, either.
I find it hard to believe a matured company, rife with middle management, wouldn't have held those people "mailing it in," so to speak, accountable years ago. Whether they work onsite or remotely, some work is turned in. A handful may fall through the cracks, but it's just that, a handful. Not 30,000, even in a company much bigger.
Introducing MailChimp Pro – MailChimp
Over a million social security numbers found on public server
Systema Software recently put over a million social security numbers on a public Amazon cloud server: http://www.databreaches.net/oops-error-by-systema-software-exposes-millions-of-records-with-insurance-claims-data-and-internal-notes/
Do not underestimate hilarity of corporate legal.
Show HN: Handle Your Business: a succinct guide for the self-employed
Even 20 years ago that is still unusual.

And even pre-9/11 I'm still not sure what the legal status of that is. Since it was designed to be a "bomb," even if it is inert, several laws do cover that.

Essentially as soon as you describe a pile of distinct legal parts as a "bomb" you've now got a class of controlled weapon even if it has no explosive components.
More evidence that school serves to simply stultify the youth. Unschooling is looking more attractive all the time.
I'm sad that I wasn't able to make it to the board meeting. While I don't live in Lebanon, I was still very interested in hearing the discussion. It's nice that out-of-townies were invited to speak and weigh in on this.
Yeah, I was suggesting the latter. The purpose of a non-compete is to keep him from taking information to the competition, so if he merely uses his phone contacts list to get a job, I don't think HP's going to sue.
Whether you like it or not, the US economy is going to get first-world worker protections, even if it needs to be dragged kicking and screaming (GDP be damned).
This is an actual bomb threat. Fun, but probably a felony.
If my junior intern is being delayed in her work because I can't answer her questions, I'm not her manager, I am the idiot who is delaying our team's output.

She is one meter to my right, unless I tell her "Sorry I'm trying to think of something give me five minutes", I want her and ANYONE who joins my team to ask me any and all questions, otherwise A) I've done a bad job showing my team they can communicate properly with me B) I've done a bad job managing them because I am slowing them down.
"You are under arrest for making a circuit board with a clock display, while bearing a name such as 'Ahmed Mohamed' and exhibiting a brown appearance."
FocusBitch Chrome Extension
Flavor Flav is going to be in HUGE trouble.
This is the crux of the issue:

> “We have no information that he claimed it was a bomb,” Mr. McLellan said. “He kept maintaining it was a clock, but there was no broader explanation."

Creative people don't need to have a good reason to make something. They create things because there is joy and satisfaction in creating things. It's a shame Mr. McLellan had such a boring childhood.
It's a genre thing. There is a whole class of these grid-based dungeon crawling games out there and even in the recent ones they stay true to the restriction.
I built this little chrome extension as a bit of fun to help me stay focused. Hopefully will be useful for others :)
The person who had a good life in the early 1800's in central Europe would have been really pissed to have stayed around long enough to live during the depression and WWII in the next century.

People often go through negative experiences; they generally don't kill themselves in response. I'd like to be around in 2200 even if there's another war and depression between now and then.

Build a better, self-sustaining world for all first

We have been: http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/global-monitoring-re... . And curing aging would tremendously reduce health care expenses, which benefits everyone.

then we can talk about living longer for individuals

Sorry Mom, no cancer treatments for you until everyone in Africa has an iPhone.
I find it striking that you almost never hear about such behavior occurring in Europe (correct me if I'm wrong). Any ideas why things seem to be very different there?
They still have to sue you to enforce it- better to have a 6 figure income and a non-compete lawsuit winding its way through court than to be handing out carts at Walmart.