skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
innocentoldguy, I believe you when you say you don't mean to insult. I mean no insult to white people either (see the end of my prior comment). I wholeheartedly respect that you "purposefully ignored caution" and agree that

> "It is hard to have an honest conversation if you stifle yourself based on your own sex, gender, or other distinguishing features. How can we ever eliminate prejudices unless we acknowledge our differences and weaknesses and talk our way through them?"

In all honesty you are making straw men arguments.

Yes, there are many aid programs that don't help in the long run. But in my point I'm not asking whites to give aid. I'm asking them to first recognize and then stop taking advantage of their unfair privilege, privilege that came on the backs of the disadvantage of others, privilege that perpetuates privilege. And to call out unfairness when they see it. Too many do not. That is the tragedy of the shipwreck, both the one in the story and the one that is racial relations today.

Keep in mind that being a single minority person is not the same as being a member of a minority population. Individuals of other colors or countries are often treated as guests, or even royalty, when they number very little. It is only when the minority population is large enough does the prejudice of the dominant population start to get ugly. My family was the sole one of its "race" in the farm town I grew up in. You were a sole white guy in Japan. Now go talk to the Korean population there and ask what their experience was and is.

To deny the Matthew Effect is to deny reality. As Aloha and omegaworks discussed, there are serious structural issues stacking things against part of the population. That a small percentage of people can overcome it does not prove that it doesn't exist or that it should be ignored.

I hope you read and reply to istjohn's excellent comment.
I have no idea what the people in the warehouse do, so forgive my ignorance, but wouldn't this be a prime spot to test out drones?

I'm guessing if you are in an enclosed area, the air-space rules that Amazon keeps fighting don't apply?
> The attacker had merely called in to PayPal’s customer support, pretended to be me and was able to reset my password by providing nothing more than the last four digits of my Social Security number and the last four numbers of an old credit card account.

Requiring the full number of a current credit card seems much more sane to me too.

Or maybe you're referring to a driver's license?
UNIX based.

I would presume that most DB's are installed on UNIX based systems so most of the people who are developing tools for them are going to already be on such systems.
Self-hating cultural marxists celebrate when good-paying jobs are destroyed and sent overseas.
I am not so sure that the coding style doesn't survive the automated tools. It's also about what features you implement and how you do it.
I don't know about current Russia, but in communist Poland (with a terrible currency) you could exchange the USD for a local currency in an instant on a black market, and at an extremely favourable rate (which reflected the weakness of the local currency).
Their profit margins are tiny. Look up earnings for recent quarters.
What if you skip selling the shares for money and you use them directly to buy something? I'm pretty sure you can buy other companies with a partial payment in shares and you can hire people doing the same, so the share acts like currency in some scenarios.
> [life's] stakes have gone down, as has our motivation, but fear levels haven’t. As a consequence, people react to minor setbacks and negligible risks with an emotional intensity once reserved for being chased around by sabretooth tigers.
http://time.com/3605924/amazon-robots/
http://www.distelli.com is another great company/service for multi-platform+multi-provider support. Dead simple to use. Discovered them a few weeks ago and it's totally upgraded my deployment and orchestration strategies.
Please, Java. Do Finally Support Multiline Strings
As someone about to go through this with a close relative, and with a chronic illness myself (type 1 diabetes), I often think of euthanasia. I haven't come to any conclusions yet.
For a change... :-/
Great, Simple Description of MCMC (Markov Chain Monte Carlo)
I do blame them. These questions are always the weak spot and any system is only as secure as that weakest point. Three answers to those questions are typically trivial to find out. I find it downright malicious to even suggest someone protects their data or wealth by asking people what the name of their high school teacher was. This is a incredibly stupid idea and suggesting this to your users shows that they are either stupid to the point where they should be considered unemployable at any company or criminals.
Why wouldn't we want to taxthe machines right now? Not enough to disincentivize R&D but enough to offset the massive demand shock for human labor that's coming. Give unconditional basic income as Alaska does with its natural resources tax.
I write almost exclusively Go these days, and I think most of the people I work with could tell you if I wrote a Go program
The customer's credit card or bank card, or even the private code on the cc. Unlike ssns, those are changed regularly and trivial to replace if compromised, if those have been hacked then the customer is already completely owned.

Forward the customer to a security department trusted to handle CCs.
One of my previous jobs we automated a warehouse using a crane and mini-RVs that drove around a picked up pallets. The whole warehouse only* required a couple of fork truck drivers to load the trucks and that was only because of legal restrictions on loading trucks with an automated conveyor.

* It also required 2-3 just out of high-school "technicians" making about $15/hour who oversaw the whole operation as well as a "maintenance" crew of about 3 people (to repair machines). I think there were a couple of managers thrown in as well. Still, much cheaper than the 100 employees we replaced and I am pretty sure those employees were happier doing something else.
> Considering the lack of a control group without major confounding factors, it'd be quite difficult to have a study on the efficacy of a patent system at increasing the number of inventions made available.

Yes, it is hard to show the beneficial effects of a patent system, just as it is to show any ill effects thereof, which is why any blanket assertion that patents should be abolished or strengthened should be met with skepticism.

Still, many studies do attempt to support their conclusions as rigorously as possible. It is, of course, never enough because of the lack of sufficient data or contextual information. Some studies get quite creative in how they find control data. For instance, some take specific events in history, such as the introduction of patent laws (or change in the strength of patent protection for a specific field) in a certain country, and compare various metrics (e.g. derived from industrial data) before and after these events. Or alternatively they find regimes that are similar in other aspects with the prime difference being in patent laws and they compare metrics across these geopolitical boundaries. For instance, http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/papers.cfm?abstract_id=1513814 looks at industrial exhibitions and finds that the diversity of fields in which technical activity occurred increased significantly after patent laws were introduced.

Different studies take different approaches, so I can't really describe them all. The best I can do is to point to this meta-study and read the studies referenced within: https://eml.berkeley.edu/~bhhall/papers/HallHarhoff12_NBER_w...

> I've seen far too many FOSS projects suppressed, features left out, or avenues unexplored, precisely because an area is a patent minefield.

Would you claim that those technologies that were suppressed, left our or unexplored were otherwise unavailable on the market? Or were these efforts simply re-inventing something already done before?

> You can write code entirely from scratch, create something useful, publish it, be sued by someone you've never even heard of, and lose, all because of an artificial monopoly over ideas.

And you can invent a whole new and useful product line, develop it from scratch, bring it to market and be ripped off and put out of business by bigger guys, all because of insufficient protection of ideas.

>... patents are one of the main things making it necessary to acquire more patents, as a defense mechanism.

Other than protecting their investment in R&D, various companies use patents in various ways. Tech startups, for instance, often seek patents to increase chances of VC funding and acquisition.
I would suggest money is probably a reasonable proxy for this. If an AI wants more servers it can buy more servers, if it wants books it can buy them etc.

As to wants, I could easily see an AI get into sculpture or staging Gilbert and Sullivan performance's using other people, and or drones as a hobby. It could get really meta where an AI pays for other AI's and people to farm an MMO, run a political campaign, or build the worlds largest pizza. Or gather resources to have children AI.

Long term, there is also investing for retirement, or starting a new business etc.
Who will determine where merit is deserved and undeserved? You? The Flying Spaghetti Monster?
> It's not a matter of privilege, it's a matter of ability. In tech more than any other field, because you don't need a college degree to get a good paying job. You just need to have the desire and ambition to learn.

My takeaway from the fact that you don't need any particular formal education to get a well-paying job is that the tech industry hires and pays people without regard to ability.

Like, the entire reason FizzBuzz has gotten popular is that it's not just possible but common to have the résumé of a senior developer (i.e., to have held all the jobs you'd expect a senior developer candidate to have held and be paid for those jobs, i.e., to have passed multiple tech interviews) and be unable to write it. You can argue about whether "privilege" got these people in the position of being a senior developer candidate, but it certainly wasn't ability.
Krebs talks about the supposed problem, but fails to point out a solution.

Without knowledge based auth, what is PayPal supposed to say when someone calls them and says that they lost their phone and therefore access to their email and can't remember their password?

Right now, to social engineer someones account (Like Krebs's in this case, I've personally listened to the call he's talking about here) you need almost all the information that's on the account already (besides payment history, which could be a big deal to someone I guess).

A detail worth noting is that stealing someones PayPal account in this manner doesn't allow you to steal money from them.
How is Kreb's at fault? Talk about blaming the victim!
> What makes you think those people have free time after 12.5 hour days and a commute out to the middle of nowhere?

I think that's what the OP called the "privilege". Those that have it, don't see why others can't do the same. It comes from having a completely different world view and priorities. That's why it is common to hear "how come they don't sit down learn to code and become full stack developers, that would be so easy."
That's what resources are for!
The same way it developed a desire to get rid of the human race.
I think you are mixing the number up. I could not find a source that said anything close to the 1.7 million metric tons per day emitted by the leaking well you used for your calculation.

The leak is emitting 1247 metric tons of CO2e per hour that is 29928 metric tons of CO2e per day. So its 0.17% instead of 9% of nation-wide emissions.
I was assuming that "merit" inherited from parents is undeserved, but yeah, perhaps that's unjustified. Do you have an argument that it is deserved?
Absolutely true, but irrelevant. Or maybe relevant because it's my point.
The important part here is that the dealership's profit is $700-1k on a good CPO, not the $7,000 in total markup, which itself is a questionable figure.

I've never worked in car sales but a classmate from my undergrad sold at a new and used Lexus dealership for about a year and a half immediately after graduation. Even back in the 2007-2010 time period, there was so much information going around that the vast majority of his deals were "minis," or sales where he got the minimum commission of $150 (I've heard it as low as $75 depending on dealership and make).

Car sales is sort of like a startup where if you grind for a while and build up a base you can make a pretty good upper-middle lifestyle. $150-200k a year is uncommon but not unattainable if you're naturally charismatic and can put a lot of volume through your pipeline, especially if you can move into the high-end aspirational market (e.g. Porsche, Aston-Martin, etc). It's also totally possible (likely even) to do $125k one year and $30k the next, and a lot of people can't handle that high level of volatility.

I really enjoy cars from a design perspective and I really enjoy business, if I had any sales ability at all it'd probably be a good part-time job.
This seems like a "thin article"...of course a dealer is going to be more expensive, why do people hate some businesses for making money? Did you know Uber charges you more than it costs to drive?

I've recently bought 2 cars (first time through dealers), in all my calculations, over the life of the car, new or CPO came out significantly cheaper not even factoring in the nicer experience than trying to buy a Craigslist car or going to gravel lot dealers. I can't believe I just defended car dealers either, but, man, this article came across as terrible.
Marketing Study Shows How Much a TV Ad Can Boost Your App Installs
Lets reduce this first to understand it. First, why would you antagonize black-market groups on the Internet? Why would you actively make yourself a possible target? Does that seem wise?

To me, that's a far less complicated question than anything security related at a technical level. You can literally ask a child this question and they'll tell you it's not smart.

This is advanced stupid.
And when someone loses their credit card? And you usually only need the SSN and DoB of your target to get their full card # anyway.
So you're comparing DDoS of a provider with everyday spending?

I was contracted a few months ago to save a website crumbling under its bills. They had $11k / month in AWS bills. Brought it down to $600 / month by switching them to Linode with a more reasonable stack.

Not everything is a nail. Sometimes the mistake is choosing AWS.
As with many other government enterprises, policing has become an elaborate ritual, intended to bless the participants with rewards of tax dollars.

If it were an ordinary business, policing would be in a deep contraction, due to the steady drop in violent crime rates in the last two decades. Fewer people would have jobs as cops, prosecutors, public defenders, judges, bailiffs, and prison guards.

Instead of either laying off unneeded personnel, stopping new hires to let the numbers drop by attrition, merging municipal police departments or turning them into sheriff subsidiaries, or giving police employees the same benefits and pension plan cuts as all other municipal workers, municipalities just send their superfluous officers out to drum up more revenue.

That started out as selective enforcement. Certain crimes, if prosecuted vigorously, have enough statutory fines attached to make them actually profitable. Say hello to speeding and parking tickets. Certain towns turned themselves into speed traps to tax those passing through too quickly. More.

Then governments started expanding their malum prohibitum crimes. Crimes that didn't have fines attached got minimum sentences, and the courts and prisons became machines to turn tax money into guaranteed jobs in criminal justice. After all, you can't just let those violent criminals go. You would never get reelected if you did that. More!

Now, the cops just take your stuff on a civil forfeiture claim or as "evidence", and never return it (cash, vehicles), or they throw it to the ground and/or stomp on it (recording devices). Now, the courts tack on a bunch of extra fees for anyone issued a civil citation. Now, the prisons are run by for-profit corporations, with minimum occupancy agreements with the government authorities. If they want more, what could happen next?

I would think that cities like Chicago would be itching to reduce their future unsustainable pension obligations by investigating every complaint vigorously, and firing the highest-paid police officers for cause if there is even a whiff of official misconduct. Wouldn't that be better than going bankrupt?

It might, if there were even one uncorrupted public official left in that town able to do the job.

It's long past time for the law-and-order budgets to be brought back under control. The only places in the U.S. that should be hiring more cops are the oil and gas boom towns.

But it isn't about the rational course of action. It's all about the money that can't stop flowing through the system that is now too big to fail.
It's funny that it took an event like this for me to realize this but now I see that it's really a bunch of companies (like Linode) all leasing out space in some huge data-center. I use ASO vps hosting and they too have been experiencing a large network outage. I'm sure you can find at least a handful of hosting companies that are SOL right now too. I guess I understand the whole premise of putting all your eggs into one basket, but then again you really shouldn't.
Go embeds paths to libraries and some temporary paths in it's binaries. Feel free to run strings and possibly find the user's home directory and skip deanonymozation of source code.
Scientists have uncovered exactly what makes a photo memorable
> Russell said it took him five minutes of Internet searching to figure out how a very small robot — a microbot — could use a shaped charge to “blow holes in people’s heads.” A microrifle, he said, could be used to “shoot their eyes out.”

I guess...I just don't get the prioritization of fears here...for decades we've also had the ability to kill each other with anthrax and sarin gas, things that can be dropped from large "delivery ships" and used to kill even more invisibly than these insect-sized drones. Why is it more likely that we're going to develop superintelligent autonomous insect drones than we are to annihilate ourselves with human-controlled mechanical systems, as we've had the capability to do so for many years now (nuclear ICBMs and so forth)?
Database of 191M U.S. voters discovered on the Internet
SPARK-2014 fits better here: http://www.spark-2014.org

Well, it described in the Chapter 11.
> But the general trigger of insurance for people is the non-linear utility function.

I would respectfully disagree. Homeowners insurance is a great example. Most people buy it and never make a claim, and they "lose" insofar as their premiums are gone for no monetary return. But some people who buy it "win" and get to collect enough money to roughly replace their house, belongings, etc when a hurricane, tornado or whatever destroys it all.

Not all insurance is the kind where you pay the same amount whether you make 1000 small payments or one big one.
Dealing with DDOS has always been way below anti-piracy on in the priority of the relevant US authorities. It's very easy to do and hard to identify those ultimately responsible. Although every now and again a big botnet command-and-control network gets shut down.

Nobody's interested in the defensive side of ""cyberwarfare"".
Infrared video of huge Southern California methane leak makes plume visible
Did anyone bother to calculate the inefficiencies caused by a centralisation or federalisation and whether they justify all the effort that is going into bitcoin and other decentralization technologies?

Who is to say that a more transparent federalised system wouldn't be more or less on par with the bitcoin blockchain in terms of power centralisation?
I've used the KS test (and several other nonparametric stats) in research a bit. It's a cool thing to learn about, though it's worth noting that a lot of applied research can make do with parametric approaches. Thank you, Central Limit Theorem.
Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment
I fail to see how your story is at all similar to Brians.
What about DigitalOcean? Its pricing is comparable to Linode's, yet DigitalOcean is now the second largest web host in the world according to Netcraft. Do you still think that AWS, Google Cloud Platform, and Microsoft Azure offer better protection?
The utility function can be specified in a way to build up something that looks like an internal motivation system. This is often referred to as intrinsically motivated reinforcement learning.

A recent paper by 2 Google Deepmind researchers on this topic:

Variational Information Maximisation for Intrinsically Motivated Reinforcement Learning
Shakir Mohamed and Danilo J. Rezende
http://arxiv.org/abs/1509.08731

and a somewhat older survey paper on the same topic:

How can we define intrinsic motivation?
Pierre-Yves Oudeyer, Frederic Kaplan
http://www.pyoudeyer.com/epirob08OudeyerKaplan.pdf
I want to soften this viewpoint a bit. I had similarly bungled experiences with both Facebook and Google (eventually got offers from both, accepted at Google). Missed phone calls, mistaken identity, inter-office communication problems and more.

It's not a fair reflection of the company at large; recruiting is very often a shit show for all kinds of reasons.
It would keep things canon with the Los Angeles of the Blade Runner opening flyover sequence:
http://www.audienceseverywhere.net/wp-content/uploads/2014/0...
Embracing the Internet of Things for Cats
I do believe in the science behind this to some degree. But for the largest part this is common sense, the questions are so personal that you connect to someone. The problem today is that everyone is afraid to expose themselves, or puts up a facade they think society wants to see, rather than talking to each other about real feelings and real stuff, no matter how odd, weird or silly.
Public shaming of prominent abusive companies is frequently what triggers those changes in law.

I don't see any reason companies should be exempt from criticism for legal-but-immoral actions.
>So they don't limit access to knowledge or technology, they just limit commercializing of knowledge or technology

"Without license."

> If someone has a patent on X then there is no competition for the production of X, so the patentee can charge higher prices, so fewer people will be able to afford X.

Right, because the hundreds of thousands of patents on various aspects of smartphones are consistently making them more and more expensive as time goes on.

> If someone has a patent on X then there is a greatly reduced incentive for anyone else to improve X, because the original patentee can prohibit you from selling your improvement unless you give them an arbitrarily large share of your profits.

Sure, they can ask for arbitrarily large shares of profits, but that's when you move to a lawsuit, where there are more concrete limits on what can be demanded as royalties. However, lawsuits are highly expensive and risky to both parties (even patent trolls risk having their patents invalidated), so there is a strong incentive to find a middle ground.
I think I've corrected it, but we're still off from each other :) Can you take another look?

I'm not sure what you're using for US-wide methane and CO2e emissions figures.
That's not even what happened, his account was only compromised once, he must've messed up something himself.

I've listened to the calls made to PayPal by the attackers.
Yes, correct, nothing short of death allows you escape student loan debt.

Lovely system, isn't it?