skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Whether you've read the contract is entirely meaningless when there are only three competitors in your market who all offer the exact same contract and have the freedom to tell you to fuck off if you don't want to sign it.

It is all about bargaining power.
quora is extremely annoying.

i always get a link like this one, read something, then any link i click i get to some crippled page instead of the content and some bad ui that doesn't even make it clear what weird ritual they expect to show the content.
http://www.huppi.com/kangaroo/CIAtimeline.html

enjoy
It's also a manuscript[1], presumably written by the author, who doesn't have particularly good handwriting. I'm guessing the illustrations were drawn by the author as he was writing.

There is no real comparison with professional illustration; a professional illustration would likely have been an engraving, and would certainly have been much better. Forex: [2], from 1707.

[1] http://wellcomeimages.org/indexplus/image/L0040806.html

[2] http://www.mtsu.edu/english/minorsandprograms/history_of_reb...
I'll take now over never.
It's not just the length of the initial contract, it's the lack of a sane "diff" system.

Even if someone is willing and able to read a 44 page contract the first time, the next time version 1.0.1 of something comes out you are generally given a 44.5 page contract to re-agree to. "Somewhere" in there, they changed something; good luck figuring it out. So even if the version you read gave you permission to sue, the amendment that you clicked-through-in-agreement later may have given away that right (an amendment they probably made because somebody sued them).

We solved this type of thing years ago, the solution just hasn't made its way into legalese: use revision control. I wish that large documents were:

- Publicly revision-controlled with a system that has clients everyone can easily use (i.e. no arcane commands, and push-buttons for the most common things like "compare to last version").

- Public accountability for the entire revision history of every single line. If somebody wants to add [Horrible Clause A] two months after I first signed it, then I get to know exactly who made the change and if I want to I can take a look at other changes they've made to other documents.
Tarantino writes in long hand

http://allwomenstalk.com/interview-with-grindhouse-director-...
To clarify: this is to counter the statement that security through obscurity is a good thing. Yeah, that worked out well for the Enigma and countless other systems.
Show HN: Dockerfiles for WordPress on armhf devices (ex: Raspberry Pi)
> I assume you would take the same position in regards to internet advertising which is quite a bit more controversial.

I do take the same position. If I visit a website looking for one type of content, I want to see that type of content, not ads.

> Do you see a meaningful difference between the two? I honestly want to understand.

Ethically, yes, I think there's a difference: I think internet ads are actually worse because in addition to wasting your time and mental energy like other forms of advertising, they contribute to nearly omnipresent surveillance, which is actually more harmful than wasted time and mental energy, IMHO.

As ad blocking and anti-tracking software becomes more common, hopefully these businesses will die out. The prevailing opinion on Hacker News seems to be that the death of the advertising industry would be a bad thing, but that's entirely selfishly motivated: advertising is driving the tech bubble by keeping afloat thousands of startups which provide no value, and a lot of the Hacker News crowd is coasting on that easy money. But if you can't find an ethical way to make money, you don't deserve the money. My advice to these people is to get a real job: I've worked in software for over a decade and have never worked for a business which was supported by advertising.
I've always wondered: since I don't have the ability or power to negotiate these contracts, are they even a legal contract regardless of if I agree to them?

Moreover, as a consumer, all (or nearly all) establishments that sell similar products use similar contracts, so do I actually have a choice?
By uploading your content to some private corporation, you might be giving them the right to do whatever they want with it? Big surprise there!
Since we know that caring capacity will drop (eventually to zero; if nothing else, the sun doesn't last forever), there is no long run sustainable population on Earth.

So true, no population pattern is sustainable indefinitely on Earth. (Or, for that matter, in the Universe.) So in the end, considering infinite timeline sustainability is pointless.
> ... does have a very well-defined mathematical meaning: a x b := b + ... + b.

Please complete the definition. which is that a x b = b x a, so a x b can also be written as a x .. x a. There is nothing special about the order.
I just blocked the overlay with my adblocker.
Does this mean your phone would have an air intake? Would it get heavier as it binds with the O2?
The post is about consumers but there are cases when an employers's binding arbitration agreement is void. I am writing an article and will post when finished. It's important that employees know our rights.
>Most consumers... They simply sign without reading...

You seem to be implying that many people on HN do read them, and if that's the case, I would be very surprised. I certainly don't. There's frequently a new EULA I have to consent to when I update iOS, or iTunes, or some app, or sign into a cloud console, and the list goes on. If I read all of them it would probably add up to a good workday every week. I'm willing to bet that the number of people who are willing to devote that large a chunk of their lives to reading EULAS is somewhere near zero.
They are generally legally enforceable contracts but sometimes not: see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contract_of_adhesion.
Dropbox: https://www.dropbox.com/privacy#terms

Opt-out of Agreement to Arbitrate. You can decline this agreement to arbitrate by clicking here and submitting the opt-out form within 30 days of first accepting these Terms.

Which links to https://www.dropbox.com/arbitration_optout
> Price signals work better as the rationality and level of informedness of participants goes up, this should be obvious.

It actually isn't obvious. Optimal strategy is not a continuous function of game parameters (ultimatum game is a good example). You can find situations where prices are entirely useless no matter how close to rationality or well informed you happen to be.

> you still need prices

I agree you can use prices as a substitute for preferences, but I disagree that you can use them as a substitute for information about the product.

> Ballot-box style voting is not a replacement for markets.

I actually wasn't suggesting it as a practical alternative, I was only saying that the same moral arguments OP had for the free markets work in that case too.

> Which are in a sense highly democratic.

If we were all only consumers, it would be true. But market participants also invest or save, and that's a problem - these are ways to gain votes over other actors. That's the reason why I find democratic voting morally superior to free markets.
Manned Orbital Laboratory: the Pentagon's cold war plan to put spies in orbit
"they would have to get a lawyer involved with literally every feature change they make (or feature experiment they run) in the future."

Sorry, but I don't see that as a bad thing. Impractical and costly? Maybe. People are on the hook for what they sign up for, so as long as they keep letting this stuff go, they shouldn't be surprised when it goes bad for them.
Looking for Beta Testers – Configo.io
"Don't pay the ransom" is just the first sentence. The rest of the paragraph would be: "Restore your data from backups, and have an IT professional come in and remove the malware if it's also on the backup."

Just telling people to pay the ransom is idiotic. It actually leaves the malware in place, and what guarantee is there that they won't be blackmailed again the next day?
Yeah, but the problem is: repeated addition is attempting to take something very concrete like I give four children three marbles each, how many marbles does each child have?

You then use that addition technique to have them add up the number of marbles (in essence it's as if you are asking them to count on their hands, which is a valid technique at this level).

But that helps the child understand the concept of addition in a very literal and concrete fashion, because at the age of 4-5 years old (sometimes older), children don't think at a higher level of abstraction. And using symbols to represent multiplication IS a higher level of abstraction.

It seems to me, a non-educator, that the counting technique has value in word problems. But as soon as the child shows they understand the concept, then you introduce the notation (e.g. 5 x 3), explain the numbers can be added up either as five values added up three times, or three values added up five times.

That the test talked about a "strategy" is not really maths, and frankly it seems to be misapplying a solid teaching technique, leading to confusion, anger and a lack of confidence in the child. If that's happening, then I'd suggest the technique is not all that solid and teachers and other educators should seriously consider whether it is causing more harm than good.

P.S. If you have a Bachelors in Mathematics, then surely you can see that there is a fundamental problem if a child is taught that 5x3 is not the same as 3x5?
Printing money and putting in into circulation has historically caused hyperinflation. Money is just a proxy for goods and services and without a gold standard it's nothing more than paper. Germans were burning and wallpapering with Marks in 1922 and 1923 because of the printing of money.

I don't doubt that some people in the underclass would have an opportunity to take some risks that they wouldn't have otherwise, but many may also drop out of the workforce happy with 30k per year. My opinion is that there would be runaway inflation if you ended up with a situation where people had the option to drop out of the workforce funded by printed paper money.
We didn't solve this type of thing for the adversarial case. If contracts became easily electronically diffable, then companies who didn't want their diffs comprehensible would randomly move sentences around and substitute words in every version of their contracts.
That's where my step 4 comes in. They won't all offer the exact same contract they do now, because it will be too expensive for them, and since people are actually reading the contract then competing on clauses will actually be a way to get customers to switch over.
Bacteria in space: why the International Space Station is riddled with 'germs'
There is also an imbalance in negotiating position in these agreements. If every credit card company you deal with says you must agree to arbitration, what leverage do you have to push back on that? There's just not enough competition in the market to push back on each one of the issues raised in these agreements.

Either the government needs to create enough competition in the market such that consumers have choice on these issues, or the government needs to advocate for the consumers.
That "key notion" ignores market failures like externalities, in which everybody could make trades that help themselves, but everybody ends up worse off.

In fact, this whole article makes a ridiculous mistake. Nobody is arguing for a command economy. Democratic socialists just want regulations that fix market failures.
This is probably a stupid question, didn't know about bg and fg before. But after playing around with it, it feels pretty amazing, why even use screen/tmux when you have these?
Interesting.

The DAB iniatives doesn't seem to work out (eg Canada) though the lobbyists are still strong. Analog radio works even with bad signal quality (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Digital_Audio_Broadcasting )
Now it is gone again. Looks like the registry only restored the account of the owner of tcl.tk, but didn't close the security hole that allowed the hijacking at first place.
Build yourself a low pass filter before transmitting:

http://www.ebay.com/itm/LFCN-HFCN-FV1206-Filter-Design-Kit-M...
Yes, I agree, I'm glad that people of the past sacrificed their dental health to build civilization to where it is now.

However, that's completely irrelevant to our food choices today. Modern agriculture is quite capable of producing foods which are more similar to foods we subsisted upon pre-agriculture. On an individual level, there's no reason for us to choose to eat grains. I suppose if everyone in society decided all at once to stop eating grains, it would cause problems, but that's unlikely; I think if society slowly shifts toward eating fewer grains, modern agriculture will be capable of adapting.
> Whether you've read the contract is entirely meaningless

No, and that's the whole point. If courts nullified contracts that even a reasonable person would "sign" without reading, phonebook contracts would carry enforcement risk, discouraging the practice.
So your only beef is with the nationality of the pastors? Really?

It was the US evangelical pastors that shaped their beliefs:

http://www.theguardian.com/world/2007/dec/09/tracymcveigh.th...
I wonder if you would mind if your boss got burned out writing pay checks and decided he/she needed a break from writing them for a while? Meeting payroll is a stress that can be so huge, it will make you yearn for the day when you could just write code and wait for your paycheck to come from the magical paycheck tree.

Obviously no middle manager is feeling that specific stress at Google, but the higher up you go the more your issues and stresses involve keeping the company afloat.
Triplicate Coding Font
Great, so they have the best of intentions but what happens when they go broke and their data is sold off, the new owners have no obligation to the old users they just own all the pictures and could do whatever they want with it.

Additionally who is to say that they don't decide down the line that using user pics for profit is fine and something they want to do. How often do we saw laws enacted for what appears to be good reason and then used for other purposes. Why do we think a for profit company would be better at this sort of thing than a government?
Snapchat just reserved rights to store and use all selfies taken with the device
And you haven't really "lost" anything since you never had the ability to trade at the theoretical future fair price to begin with--nobody does. As you mention, your best alternative is to work non-marketable limit orders. This, too, has a real price: adverse selection, risk of missing your fill, connectivity costs, time spent monitoring multiple markets and updating your order. If you're a large investment bank or fund, your cost to do this may be lower than crossing the spread. For the average investor, no way.
A particularly good example of a delusional use of "passion" by homejoy's other founder here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8794956

"i can't be 100% sure but i think people choose to work here because they believe homejoy is not just another cool startup; it’s a mission; it's a passion. we're building things that enable and will change the way people live and work. this is not an overnight venture; we know it'll take a long time, and we’re all committed to it."

Yeah, that's not miopic, self-important and delusional at all.
Then I guess me wanting a 950 is BECAUSE of their apps is a bit ironic. I use Office365 for Business, OneNote for both personal and business, think the Band 2 is probably the best smartwatch out currently, use Skype heavily, etc.

Also, Cortana is kind of shit on Android right now. It's not ready to replace Google Now yet.
Selfies hav killed more ppl than sharks this is a list of selfie deaths
You've edited the quote to make it look like I said something I didn't say.

I said that "most consumers" could understand what contracts say if they actually read and put in effort to understand them.

I said that "people," meaning basically everybody, don't read contracts in the first place.

"Most consumers" and "sign without reading" aren't together in my original comment, either in space or meaning!

In any case, I certainly didn't mean to imply that HN readers are any different in either respect. I'm sure most HN readers could understand contracts, and I'm also sure that almost none of them actually read the boilerplate ones.
Right, but narrow passband filters are not that hard to make.

I see this as a way to get more experimenters to be hams. It also makes it much easier to demo explain / teach / get people excited about SDR and what you can do with them.
Does it though?

Yes.

Does it do its job well?

Yes.

Does it have scheduled maintenance every evening for the mainframe batch job?

No, its used 24/7 and does not run on a mainframe.

Does it not handle non-ascii in names?

Who the hell cares? It doesn't have to.

Does it not have the perspective of knowing how much better it could be done, like webmail before gmail?

I don't even know what you mean. I think webmail before Gmail was great. Gmail is always changing its UI and confusing users. Gmail didn't bring anything to webmail except a ton of free storage.

The software is fine it doesn't have many big flaws and it operates in a space where people depend on it working right so they don't die. We still release new versions once in a while but its not too much work.
Google’s “Smart” Contacts Analyze Your Tears
Its pretty much this for me as well. Microsoft wants me, and everyone who I influence, as a customer? Selling me on their devices by giving me my first hit for free is a good way of doing that.
Wow what a wonderful answer. This is the most clear and succinct way of explaining the transition in dealing with employee termination from a small to larger company.

Regarding the guilt, I think you're right -- a lot of people don't realize that every day spent trying to work with an unproductive employee/coworker is a day lost by the productive one. At a certain point or company-size you can't continue doing it.
The article linked near the top is worth checking out too: http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/jurisprudenc...
I'm not sure if others noticed, so I'll be the first to point it out: This post is by Andy Lester, author of the search tool Ack.[1]

1. http://beyondgrep.com/
I agree with you, demand for goods would skyrocket. So much so that so would prices. All of the sudden that 30k basic income would have the buying power of 20k, then 15k etc.

There have always been and always will be crap jobs that people would rather not do. If I'm making 18k working a crap job (been there) and I get a 30k basic income, why would I not quit the next day? Now I'm not producing any good or service, but I can demand 12k more in goods or services from the market.
If the company is making MONEY your job is safe; If not, management will find 101 reasons to SACK you;
Company Halloween costume contest and an awesome staff photographer
My wife is a teacher in the NSW education system (Australia) and I've seen her use the rectangle system. However, the rectangle system is used to also show that if you take the same rectangle with the items placed in it in a uniform distribution, the rotate the rectangle and its contents by 90 degrees the the number of items are the same, but the row and column numbers swap around.

If anything the rectangular system shows that multiplication is commutative, which I feel is its real value. Interestingly enough, that isn't ever explained to most teachers so I'm not surprised if it's being misapplied as a technique for learning!
>People on the other hand have different and changing values. Money is a distributed consensus system to figure out how to satisfy them. Markets help to do this more efficiently.

How is this substantively different from just calling human beings (or perhaps "rational" human beings?) money-maximizers and pretending we don't even need particular items to be bought and sold as long as economic transactions take place?

What you're proposing sounds far too vulnerable to the "Disneyland with no children" scenario.
Use of video games in physical therapy
Your Beliefs Don't Make You A Better Person, Your Behavior Does.
The Role of the Business Analyst in Agile Projects
Baile cu plante medicinale
One of the commenters mentioned that it's harder to explain a short term at Google to prospective employers, but realistically anyone is going to understand that sometimes a particular job or team just doesn't work out regardless of the company's reputation.

Any employer who doesn't understand that closed allocation will not infrequently result in this is probably to be avoided. Worst story I remember as related on HN, but my search fu is not able to find it, was a hardware engineer who was also good at programming and Python. He was put on a team writing Python hardware testing code, and because he found out, as is related by many others (and at many other companies) that the policy of immediate transfers is often fictional, he had to quit to avoid ending his career.
You've obviously never done this in anything more than toy examples.
Sorry, you think any manager at Google worries about making payroll??

The guy was ill, he should have been put on sick leave not a "performance improvement plan".
Bear in mind that Grigory is describing his experience in Switzerland (confirmed in a response to a comment: https://www.quora.com/What-does-it-feel-like-to-be-fired-fro...), so this might not be the same as elsewhere.
Just add "?share=1" to the Quora URL. Or install a browser extension like "Quora Share" to do it for you:

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/quora-share/
"In private discussions I was asked why don't I leave by myself, to which I answered that I'm happy with my Google salary. "

He basically stopped working, and when asked why stay and take the huge salary from google when he's not working he said he's satisfied with the salary, and he was given plenty of opportunities. No wonder his managers didn't like him. There are tons of other more competent people who make the same salary as him working hard. It's not a matter of whether the company treats people like a "resource" or not. If I had a guy on my team who doesn't work at all and sticks around AND is proud of it for some reason I would be pissed. I'm sure not just his manager but all other colleagues probably would have been super pissed if he acted like he described in the answer.

For some reason everyone on the thread is talking like Google is in the wrong and he's being noble for sharing it non-anonymously, but I don't really get what's so noble about this. If I was that burned out, I would have asked for a hiatus. And even after that if I can't focus, I would still try hard, and when asked why I don't just leave, I would take that as a sign and leave. I would definitely not say "I'm happy with my Google salary". Normal people don't feel OK with taking someone else's money while not doing anything, and "being burned out" is not an excuse.
Blockchain based DNS and HTTP server
I hope things have worked out for the author, but I can't help thinking he would have been so much better off leaving on his own terms. I understand not being able to walk away from a salary, but when you get to the point where you know your attitude and the job are no longer a fit, and you stay for the money, then I guess you own the outcome on that.
> Democracy has a similar basis to capitalism actually.

I absolutely disagree with this statement. In democracy, you cannot trade or accumulate votes, and it is one of its tenets. In capitalism, you can trade and accumulate "votes".

This means, at the very least, what family you were born into influences your life. It's better than feudalism, for sure, but it's still far from the ideal of equal opportunities.