skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the problem is not addiction itself. People are addictive to all kinds of things all the time, but most times it doesn't hurt people much. For example, being addicted to watching TV, maybe cause people to gain some extra pounds and waste their time, but in the end, it doesn't hurt much.

But sometimes it does hurt, like gambling and drug abuse. The reason those things hurt is not just because they're addictive, but also that people are making money depending on how addictive you are. The money-making incentivizes people to manipulate consumer's behavior. Drug does this by the ways of bio-chemistry, gambling does this by the ways of psychology. In this way, addictive social games like Game of War is very similar to gambling.

The problem with this kind of manipulation is that, like gambling, those addictive social games are selling people things that don't exist, don't have any actual value, and don't contribute to support a country's economy(it actually does the opposite). People won't want those things have they not been manipulated. Just psychological manipulation itself is not wrong. Even hard-working and honest companies need some kind of ways of spreading the word, and getting consumers to be in their favor in order to sell their products. It's not wrong if the product itself has some kind of actual value to the costumer.

But in the case of addictive social games, if we look at it in a perfectly neutral way, the only value of the virtual items and perks they sell to the consumer is in the context of the in-game psychological manipulation context. Does a row of numbers in a MySQL database that doesn't mean anything elsewhere really worth $20 dollars? Obviously not. Does watching a picture of a sword or armor or animation of the building of a building really worth that $20 dollars? Highly doubtful. But that's what those addictive social games actually sells. They conditioned customers to pay for something they don't need even when the actual gameplay has become repetitive and boring long times ago.

Let's think back and check: it sells people things of no actual value; it manipulates people to buy things of no actual value; its money-making solely depends on the manipulation. It sounds a whole lot like a fraud to me. If it's not illegal, I can't think of why frauds should be. I'm I missing something?
Hence his comment. He's replying to people who claim all/most transactions in capitalism are willful actions by free, rational actors.
I'm very pleased they include the link to the Trace Buster Buster: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Iw3G80bplTg
Memrise is fun, and certainly much better designed than Anki, but at the end of the day it's just another startup that will either fail or get acquired and shut down. All your content will be destroyed, or maybe, if they're generous, given to you in some crappy export format that won't be interoperable with anything else.

I use Memrise, but Anki is my extended memory. Anything I want to actually remember is there.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10702779
Totally irrelevant. This is the logical fallacy argumentum ad populum (i.e. appeal to the majority). We settle our differences democratically, but the outcome could very well be the worse option.

And, by the way, there's plenty of places where gambling is legal, including parts of the US.
Meteor Weekly Issue #7
We've been working on something very similar at work. I don't know if this solution scales very well, as others have mentioned here. One thing that seems unusual to me is the decision to use a POST request instead of GET for the /access endpoint.
Safe, soccer-ball like drone offers open Linux SDK
I wish I had X.

X looks a little like Y.

To make Y, it looks like you need these many parts.

That's a lot. I'll just use this small handful of essential parts (e.g. no GUI or Web or Mobile, just command line), and make W, an essential subset of X.

I like W, I use it all the time. But most other people would think it's too hard/manual/limited to use.

I'll use what I now know about W, and make X.

Tautologically, the key to making things is to use your experience of making things. Get into the habit of making small useful things for yourself; start as small as you need.

Don't do things manually, make tools to do things.

Then make things.
How to set up cron job for WP Tweet Machine? What cron job setting shall I use?
Wonder if it's too late for Patch to pivot... "hyperlocal news" was their bailiwick, I thought.
I understand and share all your frustrations.

One thing to consider is that the Internet is pretty big, and with a little digging (such as on sites like Reddit) you might find a way to connect with more like-minded people.

It should be possible to slowly climb into a position where you can change things, if you start by running for office or joining the campaign team of someone you respect. I hesitate to recommend this in a world where money and media clearly have a substantial amount of power but, as a candidate, you might get opportunities to bring your message to more people.

There are lots of people in the world who don't have their heads stuck in the sand or playing Candy Crush as you say. Unfortunately, they may not be where you live. I think life is ultimately too short to put up with stuff that you can't stand; if you have to, move to another state/province, or another country, where you'll interact with different people on a regular basis. (And, if you did decide to run for office, you'd have better odds.)
Actually my opposition to regulation isn't an ideological default. It's borne out of my analysis weighing endogenous regulation (contracts signed by actors with judicial assistance to enforce them) against exogenous regulations, like that of a collective body of action, i.e. government. There's been a lot written on this subject.

(To answer your statement, if there is a stalemate such that both government failure and market failure are inevitable, I would prefer the latter, for the simple reason that it entails less layers of indirection and that it doesn't impose any upper bound on heterogeneous consumer preferences.)

That said, I do have some reading recommendations.

James M. Buchanan was an eminent economist and political theoretician. I'd recommend his classic The Calculus of Consent co-written with Gordon Tullock, supplemented with his own The Limits of Liberty and Costs and Choice.

William A. Niskanen wrote Bureaucracy and Representative Government presenting a budget-maximizing theory of government akin to a utility-maximizing theory of an economic actor. Both have limitations, but it's worth reading.

Don Lavoie wrote great primers such as Rivalry and Central Planning and National Economic Planning: What Is Left? which equally apply to a mixed economy.

R.H. Coase formulated the Coase theorem in his paper "The Problem of Social Cost," demonstrating how private property rights plus low transaction costs lead to endogenous self-regulatory actions.

Oliver E. Williamson wrote a technical work on transaction cost economics entitled The Mechanisms of Governance. Another technical writer was Lester G. Telser, particularly his work on the "core theory" related to cooperation, coordination and collusion.

Essays and papers by Armen A. Alchian, Harold Demsetz and Yale Brozen are also worth examining.

For a bare introduction, see Government Failure: A Primer in Public Choice, or a recent paper using behavioral theory to analyze public policy [1].

[1] http://www.brookings.edu/~/media/research/files/papers/2015/...
This isn't about simple ads. This is about serious manipulation. Would it be okay for a car salesman to send people to follow you around find out where you hang out, then have a one of them casually start up a conversation at some restaurant or bar, befriend you, and then a few days later, after you've became friends, subtly suggest they really like the same type of car the sales person has to sell?

Maybe you're okay with that but it's that kind of behavior the OP is against. Not just simple sales tactics to say no to but full on manipulation.
1. Start

2. Don't stop
It's the next step in the ad blocking arms race. Next is FuckFuckFuckAdBlock, and so on. May the best one win.
Yes, but it's not a version that has a known solution.
How do you know you put good data into the cache in the first place?

There's always going to be a place where errors can creep in. There are no absolute guarantees; it's a numbers game. We've got more and more data, so the chance of corruption increases even if the per-bit probability stays the same. Checksumming reduces the per-bit probability across a whole layer of the stack - the layer where the data lives longest. That's the win.
And they'll actually be able to go full-speed on the highway, kill people (less than real drivers), but still continue on in development without massive public outcry!

I wonder, if someone could make a self-driving car that could pass a road test (including taking verbal instructions from the tester), would people be ok with that one being on the highways?
Apparently mentioning the word "Canberra" magically summons people in comment threads

To answer your question, we still do interesting things :)
There's a book "Chasing the Dragon" by a English missionary (I think) that lived in the walled city. Nothing in the way of pictures, but pretty interesting details of daily life from her experiences there.
Regarding the webpage: That's an interesting perspective. I'm sure it's been considered before, but could the difference between the physical and digital interfaces result from complexity and not whether they are digital or physical?

I'm trying think of a complex physical interface - not one where the abstractions are buttons rather than a touch screen, but one without abstractions (if I understand your meaning on the webpage). Most man-made physical interfaces are simple, probaly for good reasons. A large sailing vessel, operated manually, is the best example I can think of, with the many sails, ropes, the rudder, etc. On one hand, my impression is that it's easier to conceive of them when using their physical interface; on the other I think an abstract UI could hide a lot of the complexity; for example it could present only the part of the interface I need for a particular task, hiding other parts and underlying mechanisms; also it could show helpful things that would be hidden in a physical interface, such as somthing blocked from view or info such as the stress on a mast or wind speed.

But I'm just thinking about it now; I assume someone has researched and thought about this issue ...
I mean, try to fix the underlying problem. Why are people acting in this way you don't like, what's causing that? Answer that and you'll either get more sympathy for people, or discover something great to help them.
Seems to me that some isolated artificially intelligent computer sitting on a deserted island somewhere isn't going to cause much trouble. Rather, it's the combination of a totally connected electronic world with an AI entity (and the notion that the AI entity would kinda sorta be a "native" of the interconnected electronic world) that could cause a lot of trouble.

Of course there are other reasons why having everything be "connected to the internet" (light switches, refrigerators, nuclear warheads) is probably not the wisest idea... would an AI with bad intentions really be any more harmful then a human being with bad intentions who had access to every interconnected thing?
How to Rip and Convert DVD to FLV
I'm a nerd. What's the command line API for this? I really don't want to be screwing with remote 2.0; i'd rather write my own programs and call the actions on these objects.
The license is the best thing about this, hands down. It's even more offensive to GPL evangelists than public domain and closed source licenses put together. Hooray Anarchy!

(I still prefer BSD or MIT for myself though)
I was also happy to see the reference to one of my favorite all-time movies, The Big Hit.

1. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0120609/
The difference is actually subjective gauging of intent. Particularly your latter case of the "sleazy bastards" is often an intrinsic gray area and of course in the best case indistinguishable from a mere recommendation without special interests.
> the author would benefit from some exposure to actual published papers

http://www.diku.dk/~grue/

Looking at his CV, he might even have had taken a few classes in Abstract Algebra.
I know you're joking but the latest season of south park covers the "arms race" between advertisers, ad blockers, and sponsored content in a very hilarious and relatively accurate way. The ultimate result of course being terminator style AI advertisements.
How long a view are we talking about? On a time scale of decades, it sounds like a bad idea, and on a time scale of centuries I tend to distrust all forecasts. Care to present any argument in favor?
Avira is German (I don't trust American security products any more). It is also well-ranked [1].

[1] http://www.av-comparatives.org
Honestly, I'd be tempted to put in time helping on similar programs. But the question raised in another post re: "graduates earning X through a non-profit" does beg the question of how this is set up.

Might be worth looking into how Turn2U Inc is set up.
>The hardest and most time consuming part of using standard SRS software is building your deck.

This is because that's the initial learning phase. You can't just download a spaced repetition deck and run it though any program and learn it in any meaningful sense. The cards I need to create to learn a concept will be totally different than the cards you create and so on.

Connecting your cards to the relevant nodes in your personal semantic network isn't just the most effective way to learn, it's the only way human brains encode information. If you're not doing this purposefully, you're just trying to glue someone else's relevant retrieval cues into your own semantic network.

There are other ways the comment parent's site could avoid this, but inevitably in my experience this leads to FALSE learning, where you have very sparse retrieval cues, basically limited to what you see on the screen in the learning app. This gives you a feeling of progress, because you really can recall the information in the app, but very little practical use.
Leslie Lamport has also leveled this criticism against mathematicians.

http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/p...
I love Anki, been using it for the last year.
What has been most powerful for me, is that I no longer take standard notes when trying to learn a new topic. Instead, all of my notes are in "question" form, so that I can keep on top of it over time. The spaced repetition keeps my learning efforts efficient and keeps things from leaking out of my wetware memory.

The synchronization feature between devices has also proven to be very useful, as I use my laptop usually to put in new questions, but use the iPhone app to quiz myself whenever I have a few spare minutes during the day (waiting in line, walking to work, etc).

UI is a little wonky at times, but its features and flexibility more than makes up for it for a dedicated student.
Human minds in meat don't scale. But upload, and make a bunch of copies, introducing more-or-less random variation. Run in parallel, with suitable aggregation and selection. Got that from Quantum Thief by Hannu Rajaniemi.
Smashwords.com does.
Because some sites can be really annoying about a user using adblock software. They can force you to disable adblock by hiding everything until you do so. Nice sites will just simply ask that you enable it via panels below the intended adspace. In this case, this script is only fighting against FuckAdblock's adblock detection methods.

I don't mind seeing ads sometimes. I do realize this is where hosts and content producers get their funds. I would much rather have sites where you can pay subscriptions to allow access to not only ad-free content and additional premium content as long as the site actually has quality content that I will constantly come back for. Places like WolframAlpha and I'm told Chegg have quality content behind their fees. Also, another thing that is quite annoying is hearing the same ads over and over again. Streaming services have this issue all the time.
Shem: A Haskell-Derived Compile-to-JavaScript Lisp
> I'm sorry but that's not the role of government.

That is a very american point of view. The author of the article is british.
New York’s Subway Frequency Guidelines Are the Wrong Approach
That's not the same. Some people spend thousands of hours and thousands of dollars to level up in some games, they have no recourse if the company shut it down.

For a movie you clearly know what you get into.
Ah, the joys of trees that produce weird fruit. My favorite is the sperm trees of Los Angeles: http://www.straightdope.com/columns/read/569/i-want-to-get-m...
You can also extract water from feces, that doesn't make them a good thing.
As a kiwi living in Australia and quietly working on a bootstrapped startup, I'm keen to hear more about this. Is NZ really a good place for a startup? Is there any government support that doesn't involve giving up equity?
I'm not sure why you think humans don't scale. Do you think that the research done by the Manhattan Project was no more impressive than research conducted by a single individual? Or that a single individual is going to have as much success gaining political power as a political party?

Now as I said, "adding another person doesn't necessarily make things go faster." It can, but not always. But what evidence do we have that a human level AI would be able to scale easily? That seems to be a pretty huge assumption that gets glossed over.
It also fails to disclaim liability, though the WTFPL does have an optional warranty disclaimer variant.

And no, I don't know what planet you live in, but it's not offensive to GPL evangelists (especially not more than proprietary licenses).

In fact, the big irony is that the FSF both approves the WTFPL and considers it GPL-compatible, [1] but the OSI rejects it entirely! [2]

The GPL evangelists have the upper hand here.

[1] https://www.gnu.org/licenses/license-list.en.html#WTFPL

[2] http://opensource.org/minutes20090304
I'm not really well read on this stuff, but do most people think that deep brain computer interfaces are farther off than self-improving artificial general intelligence?

I usually see arguments about harmful AGI based on the idea that AGI will be able to optimize itself and acquire computational resources to become powerful in a scary way.

I just sort of think that the human brain is already a tremendously powerful computational resource and augmenting it with weaker AI is going to be easier, cheaper, and ultimately, much powerful than AGI. But, of course that depends on the development of really powerful BCIs.

Why not develop AI systems that complement the already insanely sophisticated computational system of the human brain instead of trying to replace it? Or enable groups of humans to work together along with AI to solve really hard problems?

People often seem to think of AI as an arms race, but is it possible that systems that leverage human intelligence may have an insurmountable advantage?
This is an interesting project that practically begs for the availability of smart, pluggable, physical control surfaces able to be reprogrammed using this technique.

Integration with Nest-style devices seems like an obvious first choice for a consumer product.

On maintenance: It seems like there'd be a bit of difficulty around managing a nest of "wires" between devices that are only visible under a 5" smartphone glass. So, you'd want something head-mounted (glasses), preferably with zoom. Microsoft HoloLens? That said, you'd definitely need an abstract schematic view to manage a dense network.

It would be a really curious development if, in addition to plumbers and electricians, new construction required "reality editors" to wire up behaviors between such interfaces. "This won't do; your reality isn't up to code."

Final thought: lose the digital tattoos and integrate Bluetooth/Zigby beacons for device advertisement. There's no way that those patterns are going to become fashionable. Or, use something else that's easy to print but is outside of our visual range.
Usually you created CNAMEs from your domain to your CDN's.
That goes back to my statement above about the problem being an inability to resell.
Wow, imagine this applied to manufacturing or assembly lines!
If you don't mind me asking, in which city do you live?
With all due respect, I think your comment is a bit misguided. The applied nature of this work might lead some to believe this is a developed product, but ultimately this is research. It's a unique idea and one that may inspire a product that is economical/easy to use. In a few years that is.
And liquid cooling is supposed to be news?

The Cray-2 was liquid cooled in 1985: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cray-2#Packed_circuit_boards_a...
The article the author links to is more revealing:

http://toucharcade.com/2015/09/16/we-own-you-confessions-of-...
I was here first :P (see above)
You can easily broke a leg or an arm if you step over an apple or a rotten nashi. You can have a bike accident also.

I live on a street where grapes grow freely (as in, not on anyone's private property) and it's neat to see old ladies and birds pick at them. Yeah, a lot of the grapes end up on the ground but it's not a massive problem. In inner city areas you'll find people are already quite good at looking where they're going because the density of humans correlates with the number of dogs and thus the amount of dog shit everywhere.

It also correlates with the number of assholes not looking where they're going who will home-in on you like a heat-seeking missile when their eyes are affixed to the screen of their phone and plow into you if you don't take evasive maneuvers.
Read as much about history as you can. The Hardcore History podcast is also a great intro to some of the most interesting periods of human history.

Why? Because it will tell you that we live in (by far) the most pleasant and humanitarian era in human history. You'll come to appreciate the progress we've made, rather than focus only on the progress we still have to make.
I'm also planning and building on a flashcard app; and am facing a similar dilemma on whether to monetize (make it SaaS) or go all out open-source. At the moment my barometer seems to be leaning towards open source. I already have REST API backend done, and am working on UI.

------

The only novelty on my app is that it uses an algorithm based on upvotes/downvotes (e.g. HN, Reddit, etc) to measure card performance rather than a variant based on SuperMemo and friends.

I already wrote a spec on it (feel free to steal =P): https://github.com/grokdb/spec
your conclusion isn't supported by your premise, which seems to be that it matters how much a person spends. Where is the line?
In my experience, most people have good intentions when it comes down to it. I think the place for you to start is trying to engage people who you think totally disagree with you, or you think are too stupid / low EQ to know any better. I mean, really try to understand where they are coming from. You might find your own opinions change, or you might change theirs. You may not get anywhere but its worth a shot, there's only one or two people I've met in my life that are really just terrible people.
With a boat, you might spend thousands on consumables. All that you have left is the memories of driving the boat around.

Some guys spend $100k to go motor racing for a season in single-make cars. At the end of it, they don't own anything but any trophies they might have picked up.

If people want to spend money on digital goods, putting up walls to stop or make it harder is unlikely to be successful unless you outright ban it with heavy punishment for use.

That hasn't worked so well for other items in a similar category, and digital goods are completely victimless.