skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why don't we say that gunmen attack Planned Parenthoods because of income inequality in the United States?

I do. I think the Planned Parenthood shooting is due to a combination of mental illness and lack of education. I don't think it really matters which crazy ideology you pick, you can use it to justify your actions. And if the crazy, uneducated, people weren't shooting up a Planned Parenthood, they would be shooting up a theater, or a school, or any number of other places. The solution is to educate kids and to treat the mentally ill.

Why does this tiny group of Muslims commit hate crimes, while the vast majority do not? Piketty thinks it's income inequality, what's your explanation?
It's not a case of believing what's coming out of ISIS' mouth - most people, even on the Left you decry, do. The question is why, when they utter this stuff, do so many people listen?
Well, their absolute R&D spend seems to be working very well for them!

That said, I wish Apple would invest more in their web services. I find iCloud, Siri, etc. to be not as good as services from Google and Microsoft.

Because of (at least what I percieve is) Apple's fairly strong stand on the basic human right of privacy, I would probably award them all of by business is their web services were much better.

As it is, in addition to Apple gear I also use a Chromebook, Android phone, and even a Windows 10 laptop (I was curious to kick the tires of Windows 10).
He's sort of right, but not in the way this article is going to be interpreted domestically (see comments in this thread for an example). Oil revenue in the Gulf countries has enabled wealthy elites to sponsor madrassas around the world, which are pivotal to the spread of Wahhabism, an arch-conservative branch of Islam. The Gulf elites are not the cause of Wahhabism (its roots go further back and it was more of a grassroots movement in the 1970s), but they are its most important promoters.

Another contributing factor is high birthrate in poor Muslim countries which has caused a bit of a demographic shock (the low-birthrate Europe has simultaneously benefitted and suffered from it, first importing immigrants from MENA as a source of cheap labor, and them having to deal with the disaffected and radicalized 2nd generation of the original immigrants, after failing to integrate them successfully into the mainstream society). It is no secret to anyone that poor uneducated people who are also highly religious tend to have more kids on average. This is one of the primary causes behind Islamisation of Turkey, formerly a staunchly secular country. Turkey is now, together with the Gulf countries, one of the major "sticks in the wheel" behind eradicating ISIS in Syria.
I know someone who is a Software Reliability Engineer at Google (sysadmin on steroids is my interpretation of the position) that's written a few back-end tools in it, and I think those were likely shared with his department. So there's that.
Came here to say this... but actually, when I think about it, I use it much less than I could/should. It gets confusing after a while: you can't find the lists you have, and start making the same list over and over again (in my case, things to pack when going out on a photo trip).

It would help to be able to attach metadata to items, and especially to have the app record the date of each item, and then be able to sort all items by date (regardless of depth, etc.)
Downstream from academia, how about education? It's not too hard to imagine what a great education would be, and yet, you know, schools, here we are. Parents with any number of opportunities from home-school to public to private still find themselves unhappily optimizing among several unpalatable choices. Looking at something like Musk is doing, or even more ambitious, Khan academy as an experimental platform, you'd think there's a lot of room here. I just wonder how it would best met by a small crack research team with a 25 year mandate. Unsure.
What data warehouse to choose, what are the different visualization tools available, what events to send, how to setup Redshift, how to choose the keys for the tables, and yes, how to recreate popular dashboards with simple SQL queries.

Of course, we also have more complex queries for analysis, that we will share at a future post.
It's amazing to watch phrases that get used in politics take on a life of their own.

If you say, "Revolutions happen when the masses can't afford to eat," probably nobody will bat an eye.

If you say "Revolutions happen when income inequality grows to the point where the masses can't afford to eat," people freak out.
Unfortunately, until the Google team can be bothered to address pretty critical issues like columns not being printable [1], I have little faith that they really care about print support at all. For most people, printing is a thing of the past, and I'm grateful for that, but certain use cases demand it - a site providing educational resources, for example.

[1] https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=99358
I'll agree with you there. Among impoverished and religious, they're still a tiny percentage. It's definitely complex what causes the individuals to convert. However, the factors that promote it seem pretty consistent. ;)
Then what is behind the rise of the Islamic State's recruiting, whose targets aren't suffering any obvious economic strife?

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/03/22/world/middleeast/from-minn...

Modern liberalism offers no solution to the problem of evil. It assumes that as long as your basic needs are met, and you're mentally sane, that you will behave as a rational, non-violent person. It sees humans as essentially materialist, subject to the same universal desires, which can all be met in similar ways, and which are never distorted to any great degree. So it is stumped by the sort of despair that such jihadists harbor in their hearts, for according to its philosophical principles, such a thing should not be possible.
To address your analogy, proponents of Planned Parenthood aren't killing pro-lifers en mass using robots and tacitly supporting the most extreme pro-lifers to address a third enemy. The analogy doesn't work at all.
A new, distributed open source metrics platform
Hey everyone.

I have created a distributed metrics platform that I plan to open source in the coming future. I have setup a business around it to make it a SaaS platform to further continue its development.

I thought I would post the website link here: https://www.skeyl.co/

My goal for Meteorite is to replace Graphite and eventually Nagios and alert based on metrics rather than having many adhoc scripts that check alerts, etc. My background being in DevOps and Linux System Administration I felt that it was time to build something using modern scalable solutions that is not proprietary (ahem New Relic).

If you guys are interested please contact via email (see site). I'll temporarily make any nodes you create premium so that I can get your feedback.

Also, to be clear; when I say "entire stack"; I mean everything:

- `meteorite-client`; which gathers the metrics.

- `meteorite-worker`; which processes data from brokers.

- `meteorite-server`; which listens for data from `meteorite-client`s.

- `MeteoriteJMXBridge`; which is the JMX tool that gets embedded into `meteorite-client` to collect Java based metrics.

- `meteorite_web`; which is the django code that includes D3js code to view metric data (you can actually view this now if you go on the site (its not obfuscated)).

- Database schemas, and ER diagrams to roll your own.

I may also open source the ansible code too; it depends on how much people want it or if it's necessary. I'm being clear because many companies do not open source their backend tech.

I also should say that I started Meteorite before I started the company; my goal has always been for the benefit of Meteorite; I started the company as a means to fund the continued development of meteorite; if that works then so be it; otherwise it'll be open sourced regardless of the outcome.
>Shrimps on Treadmills

Serious question, meant with no sarcasm at all: Can you give an example of something as ridiculous as the shrimp on treadmills study that cost a fortune and ended up being incredibly important in a way that wasn't immediately obvious at the time the study was conducted?
A funny joke, but a telling statement. Words so commonly used reflect attitudes and history. For instance most of the English-speaking world says Goobye ("God be with you") while the French use the more neutral AuRevoir (until we see again). Web browsers now greet websites with "PRISM", the equivalent of "the walls have ears".
Why would I believe their reasons?

If there is one thing I've learned in life, it's that people don't know why they do many (or even any) of the things they do. They do them for reasons unknown to themselves, and then afterward, supposing there is demand, they fabricate reasons. Not lies necessarily, more like their "best guess" as to why they did it.

When the judge asks the teenager why he microwaved a live hamster and the teenager says "I don't know" he's not only being honest but actually insightful. And because society demands reasons for every action, most children soon learn that "I don't know" is an unacceptable answer.

So no, I don't believe what comes out of ISIS's mouth(s) regarding why they do these things.

I'm not sure why you do either, and it's a fact that neither do you.
Instead of a more efficient business model, I'd offer that it's actually the difference between being a hardware and software company.

Being a year or two late in software can often mean you product never has a chance to disrupt the first to market (assuming roughly equal quality product). Contrarily, Apple has shown time and again they can be several generations behind in specific technology (until they can "get it right") and still maintain demand for their products.
NPR Planet Money: Who Invented the Hoverboard?
Ah. People are in poverty and to get out of poverty they blow themselves up in a public place such that they can murder a bunch of innocent civilians in the process. Got it. Good to know.
AOL President Bob Lord to Leave Company
List App Founded By Celebs
To me, there is a mild quantitative difference between a civil war with a death count in the hundreds of thousands and millions displaced versus a few dozen killed every year.

I don't see anywhere in Piketty's theory a place to plug in "Amount of Inequality" and expected number of deaths.

I'd like to see a regression plot at least.
This is easy to explain. You want to wear something close to what your manager and his peers wear in case you get called into a meeting.

The CEO/MDs wear suits and it goes down from there.
Calling for "far more education" does not at all address the inconvenient facts that education in the Muslim Middle East is illiberal and will not produce the same effects that increased education in a Western environment will. See anything by Will McCants or Shadi Hamid for more info.

This is an economist's view of a non-economic problem.
I should also note I have made a post about this on reddit here: https://www.reddit.com/r/linuxadmin/comments/3uvr0s/a_new_di...
No experience with the ifixit stuff, but my set of 'small weird bits' is from wiha, and it includes a bunch of tiny pentalobe bits, one of which fit the screws on the bottom of a friend's apple laptop. I personally really like Wera, xcelite and wiha for my screwdrivers/bit drivers.

Or, to be more specific, I like wiha for tiny bits, wera for regular 1/4" bits and ratchets, and xcelite for fixed screwdrivers. The Xcelite XPE102 is my favorite screwdriver, and the tool I use the most often.

I have an iphone 5 that needs repairing, so I will soon be able to report back on how well the wiha works for that.

Now, I personally like nice tools the way some people like nice watches, so if the difference in price between the cheap tools and the good tools is significant to you and you don't use the tools often, you probably want to ignore my advice.
> In that example, Sandberg tried a tactful approach twice before being blunt.

This seems to be an overlooked aspect of the anecdote. If we were to pay more attention to what people are saying (and try to look at things from their perspective), there might be fewer occasions for bluntness. A word to the wise...
There's over 50,000 violent deaths per year in Brazil. Not that the Paris attacks weren't bad, but yes, Brazil suffers from violence due to inequality.
The cause of ISIS is Islamic extremism.

Not income inequality. Not climate change. Islamic extremism.

Those who claim otherwise are merely playing politics to advance political agendas.

Sam Harris, the well-known atheist author and speaker, describes such people well[0]:

"These people are part of what [Muslim reformist] Maajid Nawaz has termed the “regressive Left”—pseudo-liberals who are so blinded by identity politics that they reliably take the side of a backward mob over one of its victims. Rather than protect individual women, apostates, intellectuals, cartoonists, novelists, and true liberals from the intolerance of religious imbeciles, they protect these theocrats from criticism."

To say the problem with ISIS is anything other than Islamic extremism is a red herring. In this case, Piketty has long been advancing his political agenda regarding income inequality. He is merely playing politics here, using the ISIS problem to advance his agenda.

[0]: http://www.samharris.org/blog/item/sam-harris-the-salon-inte...
I think it can be traced well before the Arab Spring, to the (insane) policies of the US government during the invasion of Iraq.
Agree, it really distracts from his point when Piketty deliberately ignores the other obvious factors (religoius extremism, tribalism, power vacuums, etc) and fails to integrate it into the quagmire everyone is aware of.
That's actually a great mental model for a scalable business:

"Can I imagine Private Equity coming in and doing a regional rollup of this business model, slapping a slick marketing package on it and returning 10x the value?"

If the answer is "no", then it's probably a money-losing business, because that's the exit strategy for a lot of these local delivery businesses.
Things don't have a single cause. "ISIS grew out of staggeringly unequal distribution of Mideast oil wealth" and "ISIS is motivated by extreme interpretations of Islam" are able to coexist perfectly well.

Do you have any examples of "the same people" being inconsistent here? Because usually when people complain about inconsistency like this, it's actually different people being mentally categorized together, not actually the same people.
Little syntax error: for hashes, you would say:

my %hash = (
# your key/values
);

and not,

my %hash = {
# your key/values
};

I think that may be one of the problems people have with Perl - the syntax gets a little whacky and it's hard, sometimes, to wrap your mind around Perl-style references.

My personal way to solve this is to almost exclusively use references in complex data structures, so:

my $hashref = {
another_hashref => {
key_name => [qw(
value
is
an
array_ref
)],
},
};

Is a hashref, that contains another hashref, which contains an array ref. Easy to bring up the 3rd thingy in the arrayref:

print $hashref->{another_hashref}->{key_name}->[2]; #an

This should be somewhat palatable to do actually, if you're slinging JSON all day.
On the surface this explanation doesn't make sense. Is there a correlation between extremists and countries with high income inequality? If so, provide some evidence apart from cherry picking countries which happen to have high inequality and other problems. Why aren't free democratic regimes which also have high inequality equally plagued by these problems?

Also, energy prices have fallen dramatically, affecting the coffers of many middle east governments. I don't know why he doesn't address this.

Maybe he addresses these issues in his actual research but it is missing from every piece trying to link inequality to all societies ills.
Dridex Black Friday
If your country was destroyed, there was no jobs, you had no money, no food, your home was crumbling, your siblings starving, your parents helpless... and you were 17 and powerless, and someone offered you $10,000 to do it... would you? Would you do something terrible to ensure that your family got a huge payday that would put food on their table for potentially years?
I thought it crazy to make the iPad Air 2 so thin. But now that I have one I see the benefit. Just reducing the effort required to pick the thing up is a big benefit.

I rarely use corded headphones and would not miss the jack.
I really don't understand the problem they are solving. Browse lists of what celebs like to do?
But... bluetooth exists!
>consider the hypothesis that your supposed inferiors were actually doing fine until colonial powers that share your values decided to forcefully exploit them.

The problem here is that part of 'doing well' is being able to exploit those weaker than you and to not be exploited by those stronger than you. (We may consider exploitation wrong in our own moral frameworks built from our own desire to not be exploited, but we should remember mother nature knows no such concept.)
Swallow the Doctor – The Present and Future of Robots Inside Us
You're thinking of ISIS' intent, whereas Piketty's argument is about the circumstances that allow one entity to acquire so much power.
these guys took a shot at short lists of favorites http://www.5avs.com/
They aren't allowed to say that they're selling oil to Turkey to pay their "holy fighters" while being kickstarted by USA and Saudi Arabia.
What is the origin of the Islamic extremism? Why does this group of Muslims kill people while the vast majority do not?
Pewdiepie?
Yearly world trade is around $37T, of which around 60% is done in $US. So, no.
Does Linux frighten off Hackers? attempts on Apache vs. IIS (2008)
Can you expand on this a little bit? What exactly are you trying to say?
Genius. I can carry batteries on my ears. Oh, that sounds heavenly. /sarcasm.
I honestly don't understand the reason why it's so hard to try to help terminally ill patients with unproven methods as long as everyone agrees that there is no other, better way to help and as long as the patient wants it. Prohibiting this seems like a lose/lose decision to me.
You are right, these comments are really helpful! It's so easy to say something that gives people the idea quite opposite to what I'm trying to say...

Yes, adding you to mailing list...

Love the idea of turning the book into a kind of video game; also thinking of building some tools that will make it easier to implement ideas, and buidling community around the book...
Because the left in the West, more than being attacked by terrorists, is afraid of being seen as politically incorrect.
Audio fingerprinting is nothing like trivially modified.

Retaining a fingerprint (and yes this has been litigated) is not the same as retaining the original material.
I stopped reading as soon as he compared having few resources to living in "conditions of semi-slavery". Slavery is the treatment of people as economic goods to be bought and sold, full-stop. Having to work harder for a living than others in wealthier areas is not slavery, it's not even close to slavery. Not being able to leave your hometown because you can't afford a plane ticket is not slavery. Not being free does not make you a slave.

I dismiss any purported economic argument as a political one when the arguer makes this misrepresentation. You're not talking about how the world is anymore, you're talking about how you want it to be.
Hey Apple when you start making my life more complicated (gotta carry around a lightning to headphone adapter) it's time I stop upgrading.
> "Members of Hezbollah's militant wing who were killed in action in the 1980s and early 1990s were at least as likely to come from economically advantaged families and have a relatively high level of education as they were to come from impoverished families without educational opportunities."

> "Instead of viewing terrorism as a direct response to low market opportunities or ignorance, we suggest it is more accurately viewed as a response to political conditions and long-standing feelings (either perceived or real) of indignity and frustration that have little to do with economics."

quoted in http://www.nber.org/digest/sep02/w9074.html
I'm pretty sure I have read about some pretty strong stands for privacy from both other companies you mentioned too.
Autism, vaccines and why some people believe Jenny McCarthy over every doctor
Ok, then how about China.
This misses the point entirely, I think. The problem isn't income inequality so much as low income in general in that region. There is very little opportunity. But low opportunity is coupled with generally high education and literacy rates and a massive population boom. A young population, unemployed intellectuals, and authoritarian government has always led to revolution. Always. It's human nature. It's happened at points in European history, and it's happened in China and Japan and elsewhere.

As a musician, I play some middle eastern music and own several instruments from the region. I have a doumbek (cast aluminum goblet drum) from the well-known GEF in Egypt, and another from Syria. The difference in construction quality is shocking. When showing the Syrian drum to people, I sometimes say "You've heard about the precision industrial powerhouses of Syrian manufacturing, right? No? Here's why." But what's even more shocking is the difference in the quality of the "good" Egyptian drum versus pretty much any instrument made in China or Indonesia these days - CNC-milled parts, quality finishes, and tight construction rule in even the cheapest Asian manufacturing.

Manufacturing in the Arab world, such as it is, is mostly trapped in the 19th century, unable to escape craftsman roots. This is terribly inefficient and unproductive. The Arab world is technologically incapable of manufacturing complex devices like cars and surface-mount electronics. And it's not for lack of educated people or a desire to do better. Other forces are at play here.

Revenue from raw resource extraction (oil) is just exploitation, and it's time-locked. Sooner or later, oil fields run dry, and they'll be back where they started, basically just agricultural communities. It's a shame, because the region and cultures there have provided some of the most important advances in history (like the number zero and algebra), and I'm sure it could rise to that effectiveness again, given the right conditions.

But oil exploitation is good for both the local authoritarian regimes, and for the western powers that run their economies on cheap Arab oil. That leads to a massive militarization and government-level resistance to modernization and advancement. It sucks. In a way, oil is the worst thing to happen to the middle east.

And who has an answer? Clearly, the world of desert kingdoms and post-fascist Baathist regimes is ripe for revolution. But the answers seem to be either go forward, into the scary world of modern relatively peaceful democracy and freedom, or backwards into the glory days of centuries ago. And the Islamic fundamentalists who want to go backwards are strengthened by the general lack of interest in the west for real democratization, and the preference for petty regimes we can control from afar.

Sigh.
ISIS does a lot more than just suicide bombing. They aren't called the Islamic State just because. They have bureaucratic and governmental functions: http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2014/06/the...

So, yes, they could be the way out of poverty for some people.