skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Many here seem to misunderstand the article as an expression of what is best, of some normative preference. Stratfor is describing what they think is the long-term (i.e., over generations) fate, in a way, of nations, based on a framework they embrace, geopolitics. I'm no expert, but here is my amateur understanding, undoubtedly flawed, from many years of reading this kind of material:

Humans long have tried to develop theories that predict the behavior of nations and its outcomes. It's perhaps the most important question to ask, with the survival, prosperity, and freedom of billions at stake. But it's a very difficult model to build, based on billions of human decisions and many other factors, including geography.

One well-established theory (though I don't know how popular among experts currently) is that geography, including climate, ultimately is a powerful factor determining the fate of nations. For example, a nation without arable land inevitably will have a small population and everything that follows from that: A small economy, a weak military, etc. Some real-world examples: Probably the biggest factor in Britain's survival in WWII was that they had a body of water between them and the German army; if they had switched geographies with the French, the results would have been much different. The U.S.'s WWII success and eventual post-war primacy was mostly because oceans separated the country from its enemies, providing an unmolested homeland, economy and manufacturing of war goods. The geography of Ukraine is easily traversed by large armies, leading to Russia being invaded through Ukraine many times over history (Napoleon and the Nazis come to mind); that is a big reason they want to control Ukraine. Russia's lack of access to the Mediterranean and Atlantic has greatly limited their naval power and thus their influence in Europe; that's why they care so much about Crimea and Syria, where they have naval bases with access to the Mediterranean. China's land borders are the Himalayas, other mountains and deserts, and poor areas such as Central Asia and Siberia; thus their trade is highly dependent on sea routes, resulting in their current actions to control the South China Sea. Overall, the regions of influence China tries to claim now is the same as when the Qing dynasty was ascendant in the 17th and 18th centuries - everything else changes, but geography stays the same.

Wrote one historian: If time is the locomotion of history, place could be the gradient against which it is pitted. Dynamic, the one hurtles forward; inert, the other holds it back.[1]

How these issues play out is another matter. China could resolve it's South China Sea concerns via multilateral agreements, or through military aggression. Also, there are other theories, including realism and constructivism.

----

[1] John Keay, in India: A History. Keay is not a credentialed academic historian but has written respected surveys of history; I don't know how well his theory ultimately holds water, but it's the best expression of the issue I've seen.
That is a fucking sane and logical idea, no wonder no one has mentioned it.
Not a bad idea, except that it's illegal. If they invest on your phony numbers then they can sue you later for lying to them.
25 is a reasonable age. I would recommend raising the age for vasectomy if that makes things more equal.
Seriously: why?
You haven't quite laid out your argument so I have to guess what it is.

When you say "That is not how HTTP works" it suggests that your claim is that anything that HTTP allows is ethically OK to do. However that is clearly a ridiculous stance, since a DDoS attack is a stream of valid HTTP requests and that's clearly not OK.

So I'm left wondering what your argument actually is for why unwelcome scraping is ethically OK.

I find this an interesting question, because while I would love for protcols to also define ethics, I feel that would be scope creep for the poor protocol designers. There's a wide variety of conduct and ethics questions that a protocol cannot address.

Where I myself draw the line is at protocol behavior intentionally designed to obscure my intentions. For example, sending my requests from a wide variety of IP addresses is behavior that is specifically designed to obscure where I'm coming from; my only intent in doing so would be to circumvent the intent of the serving machine from providing lots of content to a single requestor. At that point I'm engaging in deceptive behavior; I've crossed an ethical line.
Google's public-policy attention is largely elsewhere, eg. lobbying for net neutrality at the federal level or self-driving cars at the state.

Also, Mountain View's bargaining position is a lot stronger than Hershey's. If Hershey left the town of Hershey, there would literally be nothing there. If Google left Mountain View, there would still be Intuit, Mozilla, Symantec, LinkedIn, Microsoft, YCombinator, and a whole host of other companies. Google's negotiating position vs. local governments is actually a lot stronger in many of the places where they build data centers, eg. The Dalles, OR; Lenoir, NC; or Jackson County, AL, because those towns have no other major industrial employers.
> I'm going to assume you didn't live through the same era that I did

You're incorrect.

And... Jobs DID come along, iTunes DOES exit, it ate album sales without providing similar revenue, now Spotify et al are eating iTunes' market share while providing even less revenue, and it's a race to the bottom.

Everyone loves to talk about what would've happened if all the various content industries had been more forward looking, and it's all ridiculous. One of my favorite, quantifiable examples is the newspaper industry and the classifieds. Yes, I guess the newspaper companies could've been Craigslist instead of Craigslist being Craigslist. To what end, though? Look at Craigslist's revenues. Look at what the newspaper classifieds' revenue was before Craigslist came along. We're talking orders of magnitude difference. And that's Craigslist's business model, right? Low overhead, passes the savings onto the customer, skims a little cream off the top and it's more to pay their bills because they're not using their cut to subsidize journalism, they're just doing the whole Bezosian "your margin is my opportunity" thing and making money where they can. If you split all of Craigslist's revenue up among every newspaper in the country that lost classified revenue when Craigslist hit the market and they could afford to pay everyone a few dollars more in their severance packages as they keep laying off journalists.

The world changed. We think we've figured out where the world is landing, but we're pretty much just all sitting here in the post-apocalyptic wasteland scavenging -- all the big names we think of when it comes to new media -- iTunes, Spotify, Netflix, Hulu -- are just selling us media produced under the old business model at marginal cost. When Spotify and iTunes and all them finally do get around to killing the music industry we're going to be in a very, very different world. Maybe it's better! Maybe it's worse! I only really trust people who say they don't know.
I agree and disagree. SMTP is bad, but it isn't the primary problem. The problem is social conditioning.

Since the 19th century, postal services have been monopolized by government institutions with a fee levied for storage, processing and transportation costs.

Physical mail delivery in bulk is costly, which makes it more profitable to send directly rather than en-masse.

But SMTP requires no fee. Originally, your ISP would provide you with e-mail in exchange for the fee you paid for your connection. Since the advent of "free" email services, people got used to not paying for mail anymore.

With electronic mail, it's cheap and easy to send in large quantities. Before we never needed to verify who was sending us mail, but now it's the only way we can filter out the noise.

To make electronic mail better we have to make it more expensive. Requiring a payment to send mail would reduce the cost-effectiveness of spam, and I would argue it would make the systems more verifiable. You could even preserve anonymity by having anonymous mail services, as long as you paid to send those mails, say with bitcoin.

Want to run your own mail server? Fine, but relaying will cost you. FedEx doesn't deliver mail from the USPS for free, and so relays shouldn't be expected to pass on mail without transportation costs.
It looks like a really nice tool to get teenagers or kids started in programming.
Even a cheap $100-$200 SSD can do over 2Gbytes/sec these days:
256060514304 bytes (256 GB) copied, 95.4762 s, 2.7 GB/s

The M.2 interface has finally shrugged off the SATA bottleneck for commodity hardware. It's common on new motherboards, new laptops, and I recently read there's similar circuitry in the new iphone 6s.
I would disagree on the relative merits of in-kind vs. cash assistance, for reasons that have mostly been explored by other replies. There is a specific problem, I see though, and it's what all of these quotes have in common:

"When poor people are explicitly given a room, 3 square meals/day, and government issue poor-people sweats"

"You've now demanded that specific goods be added to the list and we can explicitly have a debate on the merits of those goods."

"then they can consume only some of the available in-kind benefits"

"But you can also just eliminate the bad choices and directly manage their lives until they develop the ability to manage their own life."

All of these things have massive overhead at the administrative, procurement, and distribution tiers. Each of these things costs a lot of money:

1. Deciding on what to distribute

2. Subsequently arguing with recipients over the addition of items to the available benefits, and subsequently approving new items

3. Selecting and procuring the available options for each benefit item or type.

4. Distributing each item.

5. Tracking inventory of each in-kind benefit.

6. Negotiating returns of each in-kind benefit.

7. Balancing stock levels of available benefits to match the partial consumption of some recipients.

While I haven't seen a specific evaluation, I would be completely flabbergasted if this overhead was somehow a lesser cost than the potential loss of cash benefits to pleasure spending.

EDIT: To summarize, why manage this all centrally instead of relying on market dynamics that are well understood and efficient retail and distribution infrastructures that already exist?
Maybe in practice, but in principle?
> but there is a compelling reason -- this ability to send junk to anyone has allowed some people to make money consistently for decades

How is that a compelling reason? Why would I want to open myself up to spam so that others can make money?

There is a compelling reason that we use the current email system. We do it because we have to. Nonetheless, communication over the internet without spam is a solved problem, whether or not we choose to take advantage of the solutions.
Many of these studies appear to be variations on the form "We selected some people, gave them some money and told them we'd be back to check up on how they were doing." I wonder if there's a significant effect from the expectation that being part of the study will improve one's life. Perhaps receiving attention from authority figures (PhD or MD), and potentially their judgement, might alter behaviour in similar ways to the "honesty box" experiment [1].

It seems like there might also be some bias in selection - presumably one has to consent (in writing) to be part of a long-term study. Perhaps this encourages participants to think of the future and might influences decision-making away from short-term goals and towards "investment" uses of the money rather than ephemeral ones.

I'm looking forward to seeing the results of their differential experiment, and whether there's as much difference between the $333 and $20 groups as there is between the $20 group and the "$0 group" of the general population.

[1] http://rsbl.royalsocietypublishing.org/content/2/3/412
What? I assure you that the the meddling, micromanaging social services bureaucracies are not run by "conservatives". Far from it.

A conservative or libertarian model would tend more toward a negative income tax or guaranteed basic income than what we have now. In fact, Milton Friedman was a big advocate of the NIT.
Will the average Cherokee child consume $80k of police/court/prison services during their lifetime? That's breakeven. Assuming "massive win" means another $80k of cost savings, that means that absent this intervention, the average Cherokee will cost society $160k over their lifetime.

Is this really true? Is the average Cherokee a criminal who spends 3 years in prison (google suggests prison costs a bit under $50k/year)?
An MVC Primer
Unfortunately the media inadvertently establishes terminology in a permanent and unavoidable way. The word drone is easy to say, widely recognized, and best of all has 20% more drama than the other terms. Drama is the lifeblood of the news business.

More likely they're saying "The term 'drone' is becoming too ordinary, how can we spice it up a bit? The drone menace? drone threat?"

I'm really not kidding.
There is literally nothing objectively "meaningful" to do that we know of. At all. Anywhere. Ever.

The concepts of "meaning" and "meaningful" come from the human mind, it's subjective. Anything can be 'meaningful' to someone and not to someone else.

The point is not to make other people sad when you're gone, the point is to make other people (and yourself) happier while you're alive.
"In contrast, an American man can decide to get a vasectomy at age 18 and, yeah, sure, we will do that."

Nonsense.

https://www.google.com/webhp?q=doctors%20refuse%20vasectomy
Headcount isn't really relevant. My dad was a director (mid level manager) of a government org with something like 1,500 direct reports. He probably made the equivalent of $120k today. I think the salary differential between that gig and a line manager was 30-40%. I manage a big IT organization, manage a huge budget, 50 engineers. I make less than 5x the lowest paid employee. My boss's boss maybe 40% more than me.

The corruption of governance and a sense of entitlement fuels CEO salaries. End of the day, the CEO of WalMart doesn't deliver $35M of value. His decisions have big impact, but there are dozens of people who can make those decisions, and many could do so for far less.
No offense, but this is exactly the sort of nonsense I associate with urbit.

>ideally, all values in its range are fixpoints, f(x) == f(f(x)).

This doesn't make any sense whatsoever. The only function for which this is true is identity, and I assure you it takes more than just the identity function to make a useful program. This isn't even possible unless the function has the type "a -> a".

The only other thing I can see you trying to express here is some butchery of set notation, where by f(x) you actually mean {f(x) | forall x of the correct type}. Even then, what you're saying is still completely nonsensical.

I honestly cannot tell if urbit is some sort of coordinated trolling effort.
That would hold if we assume all things which fly (aside from animals, obviously) are under the jurisdiction of the FAA by default. And then then only certain itemized exceptions (like model aircraft as they define them) are not.

However, I'm not certain that's the case.
How Geekie's adaptive education shattered 'centuries' of pain in Brazil
Spam is anything that clogs my inbox and makes the emails I want to receive harder to find.

But I agree, SMTP is not where email organization should happen. Blocking illegitimate senders at the protocol level is the most that should be done, and the blocking of unwanted content should be pushed into a more user oriented layer. Current structure isn't optimal.
"In-kind assistance has the added benefit that parents can't divert public assistance intended for children's welfare into other goods"

This can always be done, sometimes at tremendous inefficiency.

http://www.fns.usda.gov/tags/water-dumping

'"Water dumping" involves buying beverages that require a container deposit and immediately dumping out the contents in order to return the container and receive the deposit credit in cash.'
You mean extortion. Give us money or we will drop your mail.
Exactly! Unfortunately people are quick to react to short term costs ($4,000 a year to improve society) rather than seeing that the long term benefits far outweigh them.
I have the A7ii and like it. It's made out of metal and feels good in the hand. It could have better battery life, and it would be nice if it didn't use lossy compression on the RAWs. That said, I've never run out of battery or noticed the compression artifacts. It takes super-sharp pictures of any scene I can throw at it, landscapes, people, the night sky, etc.

The AF is not great, I always notice myself wanting a bit more sharpness from shots where I wasn't thinking and let the AF do whatever. If I care I manually focus, and then things are sharp even when looking at 3:1 magnification. I've tried a friend's Nikon D750 and was blown away at how fast the AF was compared to Sony's, but I don't know how accurate it was.

The Zeiss-branded Sony lenses are amazing, though there is a limited selection compared to Nikon and Canon, who also make great lenses. Thanks to the missing mirror, you can easily adapt any lens you want onto the Sony body. I use a (manual-focus, of course) Nikon 28mm lens. As I understand it you can adapt Canon lenses to the body and still get EXIF, camera-control of the aperture, and AF, but I haven't tried it.

Software for DSLRs is never good, and Sony is no exception. I don't have a flash attached to my camera, but if I try to turn the flash off (it's currently in "W" mode), the camera says "setting not available in aperture priority mode". The functions you can map to buttons is stupid (no one-button focus magnification, the only option is a two-step operation). Their auto-ISO algorithm also makes stupid decisions when you give it other variables control. Set the lens to f5.6. Point at something bright. It decides ISO 1600 at 1/8000 shutter speed. WHY.

That said, you can basically point the camera at something vaguely interesting and the photographs are great, so I won't complain. I took up medium format photography recently and my list of mistakes is impressive. I have an entire roll of film showing detailed views of my lens cap, for example. I have some other pictures with perfect composition and exposure ... that I forgot to focus. This modern technology is quite useful, even if annoying when you're looking through the EXIF information and thinking "I wish the camera chose ISO 100 here...".

So in the end I like the Sony. And it's sure small and easy to carry around compared to a "real" DSLR, though still more imposing on your subject than a Leica.
Yeah, and the page itself further mentions additional benefits that LuaJIT has that Ravi doesn't, putting LuaJIT even further ahead. As an outsider to Lua, I assumed I was missing additional context (eg. limitations in applicability of LuaJIT maybe?) that necessitates the existence of Ravi.
Agreed that it seems unlikely an average child would grow up to use $80k less in police/court/prison services, but much more persuasive to me would be a case that they produce $80k more value to the rest of society, from less use of such services to paying more taxes, to being better neighbors, employees, employers, and citizens.
That analysis is too linear. As a basic rebuttal, supposing some small percentage of Cherokee children is averted from a path of violent crime, the reduction in violent crime brings an outsized benefit (especially to would-be victims) which is worth the cost. You're looking at the middle of curve, and ignoring the narrowing of the extreme bottom. And presumably the entire curve is shifting to the right, so there's gradual gains at the extreme top as well.
Sounds like a plan!

With a memory-bound proof-of-work system like my Cuckoo Cycle, computing the hash could require the use of more than 4GB of memory for over 5 minutes on a 20-thread server, thus preventing the use of botnets for avoiding the expense.
Once the minimum benefit is determined, you can of course rely on market dynamics to provide it. The government can put out an RFP for caring for poor people and the lowest bidder can service the contract.

As for determining the actual minimum benefit, that's really just the job for a few bureaucrats. Once the basics are specified, the rest reverts to (free) political pundits - e.g., kragen arguing that books should be included.

And note that the losses due to pleasure spending can be HUGE in some cases, mainly relating to location. For example, consider the various housing projects in the east village, upper west side, etc. The cost of pleasure spending is $manhattan 2 bedroom - $cheaper location dormitory (living in Manhattan without roommates is a consumption choice).
Houdini is indeed the software vfx companies go to when the problem becomes to abstract or difficult to solve in everything else.
A good title to promote your product, sure, but there's little substance or truth in the claim really.
Einstein's “Why Socialism?”
This needs to happen.

But it won't. After generations of people like you persecuting those who make more money than you, they've learned to dodge the ever higher taxes you would levy against them for the crime of being good at business.

Even if the laws were passed to raise taxes on the 1%, they'd find a loophole.
>it ate album sales without providing similar revenue

Similar revenue for WHO? If you've studied the music industry then you know that artist compensation - whether a physical sale or digital sale - are equivalent from a practical standpoint. Of a $.99 sale on iTunes, Apple takes the first $.30 for their role, and the rest is at the mercy of label and artist agreements. Whether it was a CD or a digital sale, an artist was only entitled to a certain defined compensation.

It's kind of funny you mention Craigslist, because you're citing it as a reason that the predominant distributors - PRINT DISTRIBUTORS - should not have to compete with a technological innovation with less overhead. It's a middle man of the highest order. And you assert they should be propped up because why?

Craigslist exploited a loophole of eliminating the friction between seller and buyer without skimming a bunch of revenue in the process. Why are you trying to argue that systems which benefit sellers and buyers should compensate legacy entities which refused to adapt and change? In a digital realm where rights management matters, the only people who argue for additional payout layers are people I don't trust. I don't like the old business model, so that's why I refuse to buy in and push for a new one.
Neither of which are examples of centralised bureaucracy?

That aside, conservative politicians aren't famous for demanding that the poor be given free money.

The current British conservative government seems intent - quite literally - on starving the poor to death. That seems to be more usual for conservatives than aggressive agitation for a guaranteed basic income.
First, I don't think "cost to society" is something that can currently be precisely calculated by a balance sheet. What's the "cost" or "savings" from x hours of y humans suffering (or not)?

Secondly, going on math alone, you're missing many variables: the (taxed) income of the free individual, hours volunteered, money donated, "positive influence" ripple effect, etc.
Brewer's CAP Theorem (2009)
Identity is not the only function for which that holds. As an immediate example, constant functions have this property as well. More interesting examples exist as well.

Also what was stated was not an equation for any old fixed point but instead idempotence—a specific kind of fixed point. In particular, this describes precisely the shape of a "validation" function so long as it either succeeds on all inputs or has a notion of failure in either its computational context or it's range ("span" I guess).