skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> He is not a historian, he is not a sociologist, he is not an orientalist, he has zero credentials or background which would make him in any way an authority or a source of insight.

He has traveled the world and visited lots of countries and viewed them with an open mind. He can make comparisons and contrasts. He can derive lessons as he did in the video where he touted the benefits of church/state separation. I think he has some expertise now. And definitely more than the theoretical historians, sociologists, orientalists who have never been in the field like he has.

> while government minders were close by but off camera.

Never mentioned this on camera. But he did mention that security would often inquire and investigate what he was up to.

> was carefully stage managed

He was not really stage managed. His focus was on the Iranian side of Iran, the human side, not the government side. And if he found information that he could not document, he spoke about it. That is not 'stage managed'.
https://snowdrift.coop welcome newcomers of all sorts, and meets most of these ideals.
There are legitimate concerns about police overreach, etc., but I can't get past the part where we start off talking about someone checking $11,000 in cash.

Was this guy just not familiar with air travel? Or is it less likely that money will be seized from a checked bag than from a carry-on? It's just absurd to me to put that much value into a checked bag, especially in the form of cash.
For me, owning a Mac has a much lower cost of ownership in terms of time. I boot up the computer and it's ready to go.

I don't need to reinstall the OS or download an uninstaller to remove bloatware.
I don't need to install antivirus (yeah, this one isn't required, but the reality is that there is much more malware targeting Windows).
I don't need to wait for Windows Update to finish before my computer shuts down or boots up - these are particularly painful.
I don't need to worry about programs scaling to a retina/high DPI display.
I don't need to spend time reading articles about how Windows 10 is tracking me and how to prevent it.
I don't need to worry about my laptop breaking, because if it does, I'm a genius bar appointment away from getting it fixed. If my Samsung laptop breaks, I need to ship the whole thing, likely wasting weeks.

Not everyone experiences these issues, but this is how it feels for me. I made a very gradual transition to OS X - owning PCs, building PCs, using OS X on my PCs for almost a decade, then finally buying a Retina Macbook Pro.
Such negativism. This is YC. Accentuate the positive, eliminate the negative.[1] Yik Yak has a $400M valuation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fZUmAbi0Vm4
Pretty cool. They used to have a position at NASA whose job title was "computer", which was typically filled by women. They would compute whatever was necessary, and invent any tools they needed to make those computations.
I'm in the middle of writing some software that is in the "reminds people to dance" category, it's not about making anyone rich (including myself) but about making peoples lives measurably better and easier, hopefully lots of peoples lives.

It was something I only realised I could do through shitty things that happened over the last few years but working on it has given me a peace I've been missing a long time - I've found it's way too easy to get caught up in the day to day of keeping up with the field we are in, everything moves so quickly I started to feel like if I got off the bus I'd never be able to catch back up..but the thing is another bus usually turns up (if it's a UK bus it'll be late though..).
It required quite a bit more than 50% more space, assuming you want to avoid people being constantly kicked in the shins.
npm, go get, home-brew..It is alright to me, in fact. I would rather take the risk and trust them, than doing so many manually things. They could introduce safety risk, same as you buy a can of food from a superstore and eat it "as the same user with little warning about what kind of consequences that has".
>the reality is that it's no different than using 1Password with sync enabled.

Except that a users LastPass vault lives in the "cloud" so that a compromise of that password can likely open the door and makes it a more enticing target to begin with. Compared the likely hood of merely getting at the 1password vault (assuming it's not synced to the cloud) being a significant barrier.

Again, for me this discussion is educational, I'm curious how having this data in the cloud could ever be considered more secure than local storage.
"Russian-friendly Ukraine government"

Calling Yanukovich Russian-friendly is extremely naive.

Russian officials saw him is Russian-friendly. He thought he is Russian-friendly. He wasn't Russian-friendly if you consider what he did and what friends do.
It does imply that, actually. This is a life or death topic for millions worldwide and he decided to trample all over by making an argument in a vacuum. There is a great deal of circumstance, nepotism, and luck that goes into success, and the essay read as very juvenile coming from someone as wealthy as he is.
Re: bad news --- a "find and replace" feature where unmatched tokens were replaced with unusual values.
Hawaii Baby with Brain Damage Is First U.S. Case Tied to Zika Virus
Life is short if your ego is high. Life is long if your ego is low.
Sadly, cancer goes way beyond some broken DNA, in cancer cells you have polyploidy = several chromosome copies, these copies break up in weird ways so that some chromosomes are joined to others and other random mixing, you can't fix that using CRISPR

You could, however, identify regions of DNA which make your cells more susceptible to the transformation, but CRISPR is still more unstable than the OP makes you think - in the highly debated human CRISPR experiment (using an older protocol) the scientists started with 86 embryos, of which 71 survived, of which only "a fraction" was successfully transformed, and in another fraction of that the proper target was hit but only in mosaics (with non-transformed cells remaining), in the remaining successful transformed cells the new DNA was inserted in the wrong position (potentially creating a new disease). See Carl Zimmer's take here: http://phenomena.nationalgeographic.com/2015/04/22/editing-h... There's a lot of hype which IMHO damages the technology, it's much more finicky than it's usually presented
I just saw https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/41aocn/httpsbitcoi... and https://www.reddit.com/r/Bitcoin/comments/3urm8o/optin_rbf_i...

I think this paints Hearn's attack in a significantly worse light as I had previously thought.
No, there's no connection with this essay and the last one. He's been thinking about writing about this topic for a long time. In fact, one of the things Paul and I talk most about is that life is short and we need to savor time with our kids and do things that are meaningful to us. So trust me when I say that, as PG's wife, I believe you are mistaken.
I don't think Vonnegut meant "dancing" in a particularly figurative way. I think he means it in the sense of physically moving your body. Computers are great in my book, but I agree with Vonnegut that usage of them tends to result in less physical activity.
Beats me.

I know that if I had a large enough project and had to add people, I have a dozen people in my Rolodex who speak 'C' at the expert level and that they will perform. But depending on the problem domain, that might mean C++ or it might mean Python or something else.

But given the level of hostility the language inspires, I have to wonder. To wit "bigger balls of steel" and "best programmers in the world." Both sentiments are quite foreign to the sorts of environments I've worked in, I assure you.
Researchers Develop Microrobots That Can Be Independently
I haven't done 1 but I have experienced 2 and 3 at tech companies. The scrum/agile and open plan office stuff is so bad for me that it's been all the confirmation I need to know that I need out as soon as possible into something else - life is definitely too short for that.
Depends what you're optimizing for- energy or time.

Some people, the goal is to expend the least energy. For some, it's to accomplish more things faster. This is true in realms outside of escalators, and in fact in all of life.
How to Keep Your Sanity
I do the same. However, sometimes that requires a phone call with a wait time of 30 minutes + identity verification =( This is the case with Blizzard.
All right, I can totally accept that. Thanks for the response!
Upgrade Babel 5 to 6 (It changed. Again)
Point by point:

> All you need to do is take the address of the GPIO register then toggle the bit.

Yes, and that is unsafe. Rust makes you put that in an unsafe block, to encourage you to build safe interfaces. This is a good thing.

> No name mangling.

The alternative to name mangling is not having a module system, with all the fun name conflict issues that come with it. Rust made the right decision here.

> No error handlers to override.

C has no concept of a panic handler because what would be panics in C are undefined behavior. Undefined behavior is bad for safety and understandability of the code. Having to declare an error handler is a small price to pay.

> It does seem odd to me that so many of what would be compiler options in C are hard coded.

Because Rust is safe by default. That's one of its most important features. Being more like C in the ways you mention would mean compromising that principle.
If you want to play around with the code in this post that requires nightly, multirust makes it much more pleasant to use nightly and / or stable rust.

https://github.com/brson/multirust
That character is non-canonical :)
Breaking Bread: Redemption story of troubled baker Dave Dahl begins to crumble
This package is using threads but not safely. A call to Trigger kicks off the `listen` function in a background thread, which accesses a map and walks over a list of callbacks. If you then call On() or Off() immediately after Trigger, that map and/or list gets modified while `listen` is walking it. This is a serious problem.

It's great that there's tests, but all of the tests follow the same pattern: On and then Trigger. It's the reverse order that's busted.
That's because there's no language syntax for device address space. Modula had DEVICE as a keyword, and you could define structures as being in device space.

That's a useful language feature for low-level programming. It tells the compiler that the address space is special - it can change without help from the program. Other features of device space can include that the write width can matter (some registers have to be written as a single byte, world, or double word) and some registers are read-only or write-only. The compiler needs to know this stuff. Especially because Rust makes some strong assumptions about memory.

Rust probably needs to know about both device registers and memory shared with peripherals to operate at this level. For the blinky light program it doesn't matter; for the network stack it matters a lot.
like a carrier wave in am radio?
Do you have an example of a function inherently reentrant (pure function), or a function or object used in a reentrant manner, that isn't also thread-safe?

Wikipedia's first paragraph on Reentrancy completely agrees with me; I'm not inclined to change a word.

POSIX doesn't define "reentrancy" or "reentrant", though it uses those terms. They are not defined in the documents it includes by normative reference. ISO C is one of those references and also throws the word around. ISO C refers to a document called ISO 2382, whose Part 1 gives a technical vocabulary; it might be defined there.

By POSIX, of course I don't mean the man pages on a Linux system, but the actual specification. I refer the online version from time to time, specifically this one: http://pubs.opengroup.org/onlinepubs/9699919799/
Who would have thought that using an HTML DOM and rendering for low level tasks would consume resources!?
It's not just that. If you did things yourself on dedicated hosting (which would save you 70-80% of your bill) you'd have more options. You'd have much more bandwidth, much more cpu, much more disk for the same price.

Of course it'd be more work. But if you think you can transform more bandwidth, faster calculations or more user storage into more customers, you definitely want to get off cloud.
Systems Engineering the Human from Birth Thru Death [pdf]
Gotcha, that makes sense. I suppose most of it will come from a narrow solid angle so if it were perfectly spherical you'd be okay but that would only work for the first reflection unless it was all reflection and no emission...
I think you're interpreting pg correctly. But isn't posting an essay "arguing online"?

An essay is partly a matter of working out one's thoughts on some matter. But _posting_ an essay advances some point of view with a supporting argument, attacking the beliefs of others (e.g. Sanders was not named by pg, but could have been). That seems to be _arguing_ just as much as the additional step of responding to one's critics.

I suppose what makes the latter wearying is that it's hard to hear attacks on you personally, and tedious to respond to attacks which are loud but bad. But it still seems that we should (and usually do) value those who engage with their high quality critics.
Israel never publicly announced the willing and need to destroy another country, and it doesn't not support terror organization with monetary and military aid, it has never carried out terror attacks specially targeted at civilians.
So yes double standards indeed.
>> Variation in productivity is far from the only source of economic inequality, but it is the irreducible core of it, in the sense that you'll have that left when you eliminate all other sources.

> This blames poor people for being poor. How am I misreading this?

FWIW, I read it differently. I think Paul is saying that even if we had a world where everyone had a truly equal opportunity, in the sense of having similar (or at least adequate) childhood nutrition, intellectual stimulation, education, etc., there would still be variations in productivity between individuals that would result in different economic outcomes.

The second quote I read simply as saying that Paul doesn't think the tendency for wealth to concentrate can be stopped.

If you want to complain that Paul could have expressed himself better, I won't argue; I agree that was by far his worst written essay. And I suspect he is genuinely pained by the reaction it received. To whatever extent this new piece is specifically a response to that reaction, I think it's more hurt than callous.
How awesome and how instructive for Silicon Valley's diversity struggles today.
This is the worst news this year.
More money for terror, seems legit.
If you live on the West Coast having domain knowledge from biological sciences/genetics background is advantageous. Not so advantageous on the East Coast/Washington DC area from personal experience
I think it might be preferable either to disallow deleting a post that's been replied to, or to automatically mark replies to a deleted post as dead (or pruned the way "off topic" threads are.) Comments that follow a deleted post lose a lot of important context.
But it's also more expensive and less portable. The transparency makes it easy as someone who is out and about doing work at coffee shops.
It depends what you want to learn about specifically.

For a general introduction there is an excellent 3 part BBC documentary "Iran and the West":

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Iran_and_the_West

If you want an inside account of things from a 'Prince': "Blood and Oil:: Memoirs of a Persian Prince"

For fascinating insight into Iran's geopolitics, economics and the context of the 1979 revolution (with major implications for the current global oil market) consider Andrew Scott Cooper's excellent book: The Oil Kings

here's an article from 2014 by Cooper to whet your appetite:
http://foreignpolicy.com/2014/12/18/why-would-the-saudis-cra...

and here's quite a good interview with Cooper from 2011:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7BXCx8oNvoo

His more recent book (not out yet): The Fall of Heaven: The Pahlavis and the Final Days of Imperial Iran

http://www.amazon.com/The-Fall-Heaven-Pahlavis-Imperial/dp/0...

But be aware that as always, behind every tyrant walks a cadre of sycophants with bloody mops attempting to twist history & exonerate the guilty. IMHO Hooman Majd, Reza Aslan and Trita Parsi are all varying degrees of apologists for the Islamic regime.

If you have a more specific interest, let me know and perhaps I'll be able to recommend something else.
Another thing to consider is that one could use CRISPR to make lives worse.

What if someone gave Michelle Obama a very high chance of breast or ovarian cancer by giving her BRCA1 or BRCA2[0]? What if a dictator's competition got sickle-cell anemia all of a sudden, or lost their sickle-cell anemia before their trip to a malaria zone (which is also bad[1])?

[0] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/12677558

[1] http://www.cdc.gov/malaria/about/biology/sickle_cell.html
The Bayesian spam thing was already known before the essay.

Essayists should expect critiques. His argument was that technology is the creator of inequality and it can't be stopped. That startups (and stock options) capture a lot of that wealth is a side effect. This is the capitalist thesis. It's not quite Randian but it's close enough that it comes across as one dimensional. In his defense he said we should focus on other drivers of inequality. However the counter to the capitalist thesis and the most direct way to address inequality is taxation.

This is the basic political argument that defines society.
And only by insisting on this stuff, confidently and for very rational reasons, together as a community of engineers and developers, during employment negotiations, will we ever start achieving wider spread adoption of healthy, employee-affirming and humanity-affirming behaviors by organizations.
I tend to be skeptical at times. A 400m valuation for a local anonymous chat application? Yup, I'm skeptical. Actually, I think it is ridiculous.
Nope, it's all the same in the lottery, the only reason it feels like they are more likely to get it is because they apply for more and hence the probability of getting picked in the lottery is higher. Ex: Amazon files 600 petitions and via the lottery even if they get 300, it will feel like they got more based on the number. Whereas a smaller company might file 5 and only get 2-3.
There is a thing called the Kardashev Scale[1], which is a way of measuring technological advancements of a civilization. According to the scale there are 3 levels of civilizations and we are not even at the 1st. I've done some reading on this before and the general assumption of many futurists and theoretical physicists is that our brain wouldn't even be able to comprehend what we'd see if we ever witnessed a civilization of the 3rd level. I know it's way out there, but couldn't this be the case here?

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kardashev_scale
Really great article, especially for someone like me who only has a layman's understanding of the biology involved. Thinking out loud:

In computer science terms, the method scientists use to discover and characterize genes (CRISPR, etc) seems akin to studying the assembly of a program, occasionally splicing chunks of assembly into other programs, and observing changes in the output after running. This sounds like a huge slog, and it is amazing that the method works.

One interesting thing from the article was that, even after determining the function of CRISPR, scientists still had difficulty in understanding the mechanical/chemical means of its behavior: the gene is a black box, and its expression can only be deduced when observing its effects after running.

Have there been attempts to characterize genes on a more basic level, eg by modelling how a given nucleotide sequence encodes a protein, and deducing its function from there? Is our understanding of protein folding still inadequate? Or would reconstructing a protein's physical structure still not give us enough insight into its intended function?
It will be interesting; but I'd pay a little more to have that nice yellow incandescent light in my house without the whopping electricity bill to boot.
The Portland police force is also notoriously Not Great: http://www.portlandcopwatch.org/shootings.html
No one obeys the stand only rule, at least not anywhere on Hong Kong island that I've seen - so much so that it startled me to read it in the article.
I think that evolutionary psychology might be worse, but perhaps that's because serious scientists actually care about nanotechnology and its related fields.
How is that these psychopathic people get lighter punishments for killing people for fun, than people get for taking drugs privately or stealing money to survive?
"our modern world makes money by distracting us"

I'm not getting involved in the overall discussion, just wanted to highlight this gem. This is so true.

In a conversation about Netflix's announcement of worldwide availability the other day I put it this way - so much of the economy is based on cultivating and indulging in mindlessness.

If you cultivate mindfulness you see how pointless and wasteful so much of people's activities are.
> A claim that most rich people are driven doesn't imply that most poor people are lazy.

If it doesn't imply that poor people are lazy, then what does it imply? That the rich and poor are equally driven, and that something other than effort (luck, inherited wealth, etc) makes the rich rich and the poor poor?
I'll answer your question: barter came after money because the barter systems that emerged came after money and they marked to a currency to measure the barter transaction. IOW, they used a virtual currency. Even Charlemagne's empire defined a virtual currency that was used hundreds of years after the empire fell apart and Charlemagne never even ever struck coin but only left behind a specification of the HRE currency.
Quote from the dalai lama:
Man surprised me most about humanity. Because he sacrifices his health in order to make money.
Then he sacrifices money to recuperate his health. And then he is so anxious about the future that he does not enjoy the present; the result being that he does not live in the present or the future; he lives as if he is never going to die, and then dies having never really lived.
Mathematically, it seems that 99% of peole in these communities must be snuff predators, since everyone who isn't is dead.
Update: Server is back up, but not doing transactions, all the numbers have frozen, and there's an announcement from "Big Vern" about the shutdown.

(When the CEO calls himself "Big Vern", one might question the legitimacy of the company.)
Just do it yourself. its pretty obvious Azure cost a lot more than both AWS or GCN.
Ah, didn't realize new requests used the same socket. that makes a lot more sense
... and the answers show that the loudness is indeed necessary.

I would think that those who live nearby would be more concerned about freight trains that run all hours of the night.
For many the pleasure is just the break from the norm (a chance to leave their desk and go outside). A poor excuse but it is what it is.
Python has turtle built into it
Life is short when your life is good.

Make too many bad decisions (or have too much bad luck) and it turns out life is really, really long.