skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/displayAbstract?fromPag...

Abstract

Each of four theoretical traditions in the study of American politics—which can be characterized as theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy, Economic-Elite Domination, and two types of interest-group pluralism, Majoritarian Pluralism and Biased Pluralism—offers different predictions about which sets of actors have how much influence over public policy: average citizens; economic elites; and organized interest groups, mass-based or business-oriented.

A great deal of empirical research speaks to the policy influence of one or another set of actors, but until recently it has not been possible to test these contrasting theoretical predictions against each other within a single statistical model. We report on an effort to do so, using a unique data set that includes measures of the key variables for 1,779 policy issues.

Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence. The results provide substantial support for theories of Economic-Elite Domination and for theories of Biased Pluralism, but not for theories of Majoritarian Electoral Democracy or Majoritarian Pluralism.

Martin Gilens is Professor of Politics at Princeton University (mgilens@princeton.edu). His research examines representation, public opinion, and mass media, especially in relation to inequality and public policy. Professor Gilens is the author of Affluence & Influence: Economic Inequality and Political Power in America (2012, Princeton University Press). Benjamin I. Page is Gordon S. Fulcher Professor of Decision Making at Northwestern University (b-page@northwestern.edu). His research interests include public opinion, policy making, the mass media, and U.S. foreign policy. He is currently engaged in a large collaborative project to study Economically Successful Americans and the Common Good. For helpful comments the authors are indebted to Larry Bartels and Jeff Isaac, to the anonymous reviewers from Perspectives on Politics, and to seminar participants at Harvard University and the University of Rochester.
Ask HN: Does it really matter which language you use to write code? Pros and Cons
As someone who has worked at Google for a few years, I can't agree with the author's characterization of tech behemoths. While they have embraced the start-up mode of doing things for some new projects and are very free with their investing, their core business is everything you'd expect from a big business.

I'm not sure it's possible to grow as large as Google, Apple or Facebook and remain agile. The product and organization gains too much inertia on its own. Even if you have a brilliant idea for improving the product there are hundreds of people you need to convince, months worth of meetings and reams of design docs required.

The big companies may be innovating on the edges, but their established products are all ripe for disruption.

Of course, if you look too disruptive they'll probably just buy you with their mountain of cash.
do read Joe Duffy's blog on Microsoft Research's later Midori project.

Link: http://joeduffyblog.com/2015/11/03/blogging-about-midori/
That was not my experience. I did a PhD in quantum physics in the UK (Imperial College) in 3 years + 6 month extension. I collaborated with Oxford University and I was able to publish in Nature Physics, PRL, etc ... (in other words, the top journals in the field). I was offered post-doc positions but eventually went to industry.

I really enjoyed my PhD as a time to learn and think about deep and difficult questions. Regarding employment, I think it shows that you can commit to a problem. It shows perseverance and drive. And those are good skill to have at any technical job.
The vast majority of candidates have either law degrees or non Stem undergrad degrees
They are probably judging it by its mission goals and whether or not they were completed successfully.
I'm not sure I understand. JSON is text. JSON provides an array as part of the grammar.
Being yelled at, scared, (wrongfully) guilted, manipulated and lied to are violent and dangerous (in the negative effects on my life sense).

IMO it's violence and IMO the danger isnt in getting bruised/battered, but in losing the ability to carry out normal life for fear of what is "out there" on the streets. Safety isnt the only point, sure there maybe a low chance of issues, but safety is also about how people feel, do they feel secure? In this case I think its a resounding no, the behavior of many of these street people is outright disturbing and makes people, likely those least able of defending themselves, live with a burned of fear/insecurity.
Good explanation. By way of background, I'll add that Bitcoin Script runs on a stack machine, similar to Forth (except Script is non-Turing complete).
You're question was if it was illegal. It pretty clearly is. People are prosecuted and convicted of computer crime on an increasingly frequent basis to think you would be able to get away with disruptive behavior like that in the long term because you think common people don't view it as real crime is naive. I also see no evidence this is true.
Some group could not just change the blocksize. Instead, what can happen is that someone publishes a piece of software implementing a protocol - call this Bitcoin 2.0 - that can process all previous blocks correctly, but relaxes the rules for future blocks. People can then choose whether or not to run this piece of software.

However, Bitcoin is only useful because of the consensus on what the protocol is - so in practice, people must generally run whatever everyone else is running. At the moment, there's a general consensus that everyone should be running software implementing the same protocol as the latest version of the Bitcoin software implemented by a certain group of people. That could, theoretically, change if the majority of the community doesn't like some change to the protocol, forcing the dissenting minority to follow along with them.
Um, no. This isn't about block size exhaustion. According to the article (I didn't do any research of my own to corroborate) proponents of various sides are throwing real DDoS attacks at bitcoin nodes and/or web content friendly to the "others".
The important difference between a FLOSS system like Debian versus the walled garden of Apple is the ability to choose which keys you trust. If I lose trust in one of the Debian signers I can remove that key. I can select a different repository to download packages from. Or I can stop accepting updates and apply patches manually.

As to a key being a single point of failure, PGP allows for multiply signed documents. Couldn't Debian require packages to be signed by at least two keys?
It's not pestering, it's getting the opportunity to speak with scientists directly. I would ask the same thing. It doesn't matter if I "already know the answer" - I have no place at the table and assumptions that you're right are so often wrong.
Is he suggesting that the RightThingToDo™ is for companies to make their users' private data (search, location, chat, health, etc.) freely available to anyone?
What your link is getting at is if you increase the tax on property/land value, it instantaneously reduces property values to account for the net present value of the future tax payments. So passing it is one-time very bad for current property owners.

Because the housing market is extremely efficient. Rents are essentially property value * current interest rate + taxes + property maintenance costs. But rents are also set from the other side by what renters can afford to pay. So if you increase the tax, the property value goes down to compensate. Anyone who buys the property after the tax is already in place is unaffected.

So there are two ways of looking at it. One is the renter pays the tax (i.e. the formula for rent has "the entire amount of taxes on the property" as a component) and the other is the tax is paid entirely by whoever owned the property when the tax was enacted, via a large reduction in property value. It depends which point in time you're looking at it, the moment when the tax is enacted or rent paid by tenants in the future as a percentage of then-present property values.

But in any case the tax isn't paid by speculators who didn't already own the property in year zero of the tax being enacted.
"Those with political power are also often wealthy or represent business interests" is different from "being wealthy or representing a business interest offers you political power"; the abstract seems to support the former (which I'm sure is true, you'd be stupid not to turn some of your power into money) but not really the latter.
Even as a lowly developer I paid $60K in total taxes, it would easily pay for the extra truck maintenance from desert driving.
Achieving the highest levels of Message Queue performance
The only difference between those machines is the CPU. While the clock speed is lower, I wouldn't be surprised if the current quad i7 is much faster than the 4 year old quad.

Which really only adds to the confusion - its really not easy to tell how much faster this years i7 is against last year's i7, since clock speed doesn't really matter anymore when comparing across architectures.
Ambition: A short film celebrating the Rosetta mission
> I appreciate that science cannot operate in isolation of the rest of the world

I can't. It's absolutely atrocious they're limited because of the shortsightedness people have. I get it, we can't live in a moral vacuum, but I'm not talking about human experimentation but the best method of producing energy is unavailable because some people are idiots. /rant
I'm not sure I follow you. The JSON response itself is already text.

Besides that, nobody processes JSON on the command line without a tool like JQ, and I'd suspect all of those JSON tools support arrays.
Co-watch movies with friends or families in real-time
Completely agree. It would be nice if we could get some much better architectures in more common hardware. This stuff just isn't top of mind on anything in the SOC world (raspberry pi).
Even in 2008, there was a lot of denial about the impact of the downturn on Silicon Valley.

"And they assert that they are not feeling anything like the pain that followed the collapse of the dot-com bubble, which led to big job losses, an exodus of talent, a plunging commercial real estate market and a significant drop in investment in start-up companies."
ESA visions a permanent base station on the Moon [video]
I am pretty sure Germs, Guns and Steel, never implied anything remotely like that.

If you look at size as a main driver here, that does not match up with reality. South Korea, Japan, Singapore etc, neither of these countries are bigger than your typical mid sized to large european nation.

I think people are reading a bit too much into this. In the stage of development many asians nations are today, western nations also had a similar reverence for engineers.

What strikes me most when people from developing countries talk about unique cultural traits of their country, is that it merely represent a development stage. I can point to similar traits among earlier generations in my own country.
Because it's fissile material that somehow has to get into space, and the mechanism for that is 200tons of explosives controlled by 2 million movable parts each procured from the lowest bidder :)
> Cognizant and Infosys will stop the gaming the minute you detach the H-1B from the company.

While I agree that people on an H-1B visa shouldn't be tied to one particular employer, I don't think this will solve the problem at all. The lottery model will always unfairly advantage these outsourcing companies precisely because all they care about is billable hours, and the people working there are interchangeable. That's why they can afford to be relatively indiscriminate by throwing thousands of visa applications at the wall and hiring whoever sticks. Product companies like Google, Facebook, and Microsoft who have to actually care which individuals they hire are always going to be at a disadvantage in a lottery - their hiring bar reduces the pool of visa applicants and gives them fewer tickets. That doesn't mean that there aren't great engineers at these companies, but as a whole the system perversely incentivizes quantity over quality.
Here's the thing, many classes are taught by (sub)minimum wage temps or grad students. The students often don't get any benefit from the researchers.

It would be nice if colleges published how much of your tuition dollar actually went to the teachers - a bit like some charities do.
There are people who are mentally ill through no fault of there own.

There are people out there who at the very least significantly exacerbated their condition via 'shamanic rituals' and 'kundalini practices' and then some.

Kenneth has chosen to remain quiet when asked about his substance use. I rest my case.
Lies! Lies by the "other side!" /s
Show HN: Send your items worldwide with travelers or make money while traveling
This war will be settles and ultimately Bitcoin the network will be more scalable to onboard new members.

This is only an issue because the network is growing at a rapid rate, aka a "good problem" to have.
"Had there been any malfunction causing the Cassini space probe to collide with the Earth, NASA's complete environmental impact study estimated that, in the worst case (with an acute angle of entry in which Cassini would gradually burn up), a significant fraction of the 33 kg of plutonium-238 inside the RTGs would have been dispersed into the Earth's atmosphere so that up to five billion people (i.e. almost the entire terrestrial population) could have been exposed, causing up to an estimated 5,000 additional cancer deaths (0.0005 per cent, i.e. a fraction 0.000005, of 1 billion cancer deaths expected anyway from other causes), but the chance of that happening were less than one in one million."

Would it be true to say that your loved ones are thousands of times more likely to die in a car crash than in the worst-case scenario of this project?

This is a stupid reason for having an outcry.
I've been chatting with the author over email about my no-freezing-interfaces idea, and the discussion helped uncover two situations I haven't considered sufficiently:

a) Security issues. We need some way to allow people to quickly apply certain tiny changes without having to worry about the possibility of an interface change, while ignoring all the others.

b) Clients sometimes end up in situations where they can't control when upgrades happen. That would break things even worse with my approach than it already does. My proposal really relies on people being able to control when they upgrade.

Back to the drawing board..
Well... She does also say sleep on the article and rewrite/fix the next day. Maybe there’s an idea that you shouldn’t write with a censor sitting on your shoulder interrupting your train-of-thought.

I have found it valuable to separate “generating” from “filtering,” and I understand this is a standard piece of advice from people peddling “creativity” seminars.
Check out my repo: https://github.com/andrecp/django-tutorial-docker-nginx-post...

Exactly this tech stack, step by step :)
Feel free to try to provide any kind of citation for this.
There's a question of intent though. If someone hits bitcoin with a DDOS with the intent of extracting money out of the system, I'm pretty sure that a jury would decide that this was stealing/fraud/etc. regardless of the method.
No question, we're quickly moving away from physical Kroner. There's also political and especially business pressure to get rid of them. However, it's not true that they're obsolete or somehow similar to new yen.

I think it's a point worth emphasizing because going cashless is a huge decision, especially the way we're moving towards in Denmark. There's a discussion to be had around it and if we just accept that it's inevitable or has already happened then that kills that discussion before it's even taken place.
While san francisco maybe dense, one thing I've noticed is that people live very small here. It may just be my social circle, granted anecdotal, but I seem to see tight living situations here. A quick search didnt turn up data about over crowding conditions, consider things like People per room, People per sq ft. Nearl everyone I know has housemates, may have roommates (literally same room).

Compared to what I've seen elsewhere San francisco is a very compact city and people are making great sacrifices in order to make rent affordable on a per person basis.
Ask HN: Whats best way to learn all there's to learn about Unix Pipes?
I think a lot of people would be better off without Twitter.
My motto in this regard is 'simplify the hardware as much as possible and do your partitioning and structures and abstractions in the software'.

So single address space or no? I ask 'which way gives the smaller chip footprint'?

I think we spend (waste?) too much time trying to do things in hardware when we could offer an extremely simple core to the s/w layer. That makes h/w designer's job easy and leaves a ton of footprint where you can put more cores.

Make the core RRISC (reduced-reduced-instruction-set-computer) and offer it in 64-core or 256-core versions and let the programmers have fun with it.

Looking at the brainiac-vs-speed-demon debate (from this [1]), I'm squarely in the speed-demon camp.

[1] http://www.lighterra.com/papers/modernmicroprocessors/
Isn't that discredited by Apple's "goto fail" bug? A critical function was mistakenly circumvented in an extremely transparent way, and yet the source code sat on their website for a long time without anybody noticing. Nobody even ran coverity on it.
Heh - I brought that up to the Mill guys when they announced at Stanford. I asked them if they knew about that system in the Newton. They did not.. They mentioned that there was a Burroughs system (probably the 5000) that did that.
> Those beans were harvested, loaded on ships bound for the port of Houston, Texas, and ended up at a factory within sight of downtown Houston: Atlantic Coffee Solutions.

I occasionally object to business' use of the term "... solutions," noting that my science-educated mind is wont to interpret "solution" as in "solvent" rather than as in "solve," but here for once I guess it works either way.

The article makes me curious to know what coffee brands are sourced through such industrial means (though my initial guess would be, almost all of them), and its interesting that even the manager of this plant has no idea what products his caffeine is actually winding up in. Are there ways to track this sort of commodity-flow? I imagine large parts of it must be public to some degree.
The Brexit delusion
but we know from all those "the pig that wants to be eaten" philosophy questions that this stupid outcry is normal and predictable.

More interesting would be how to present information to reduce the outcry.
After reading the article, I get that now, but is there a difference? If there are 1,000,000 bitcoins and you can only use 100,000 of them per day in transactions, then there are only 100,000 bitcoins in supply. I understand there may be more than one bitcoin per transaction, however, the fact remains. The supply of bitcoins, via the ability to use bitcoins to transfer value, is controlled by human beings.

The consequence is identical. Is it not? Perhaps, the consequence is the opposite? If there is no ability to transact with the currency, the currency has no value?

I'm seriously ignorant, you can tell, but I would like to understand. Perhaps my questions can help reveal the answer? If not only to me, then to the community? Is that too scary? The truth? Too scary?
Nimble Leapfrogs Competition Unveils Predictive All Flash Arrays
this looks really cool!

I think it's weird that the author dings matlab and mathematica for being unable to do counterfactual reasoning. matlab and mathematica are computational tools, they don't do "reasoning" the way that say coq or other proof assistants do. and proof assistants can do counterfactual reasoning, so what's the deal? beyond that it would take a lot of work to encode these graphical diagrams into coq I guess...
Why Microsoft's Xamarin purchase is a blunder
>>> the social benefits outweigh the very small cost.

Of course they do, when it's somebody else's money. Bye bye karma or whatever it's called on this site.
My understanding is that it's primarily a safety issue: these long-duration missions tend to have to get delta-V boosts by slingshotting around the Earth. (Rosetta did this three times. And a slingshot around Mars once.) While the RTG capsule is robust enough to survive a launch failure intact, it's not robust enough to survive reentry at interplanetary speeds if the slingshot goes wrong. It's not like we don't have tonnes of vapourised plutonium in the atmosphere anyway, but that's no excuse for adding more.

Plus, the kind of plutonium that goes into an RTG is fabulously expensive, not just because it doesn't occur in nature and has to be made via transmutation, but because it makes handling so much more complicated.

They'll have done the cost-benefit analysis and decided it simply wasn't worth it.

(Also, RTGs are big and heavy. New Horizons, which is a really small spacecraft, has a 50kg RTG. Philae only massed 21kg.)
> why do they resort to illegal tactics like DDOSing

Who is the "they" here? Mining operations that are in support of core? Core developers that oppose the change?
Why not make a case about why this is a bad thing?

Talking about it like it's incredibly obvious isn't really productive.
They have all failed to become layers, and that is the sole job remaining where you do not need to know something.
Huum, not quiet sure what is was expecting, but the results were not great :(

But I could see the use of this kind of service.

Also does not work with accentuated char.
The flip side of this is that software didn't get non-major-version updates unless a bug was bad enough to justify mailing out floppies with the patch. Minor bugs pretty much lived forever.
If you look below the surface at what is going on it becomes pretty clear. Essentially one well funded Bitcoin company, Blockstream, has managed to hire a majority of the current top Bitcoin Core contributors. They also control discussion on a handful of the historically important forums for discussing Bitcoin and censor any comments critical of Core or supporting a blocksize increase. Blockstream has a business plan that revolves around providing private blockchain services. For whatever reason they feel like in order to be successful they need to limit Bitcoin's block size so that it is very expensive and inconvenient to use Bitcoin. They have 55 million in funding and probably feel like they have a lot at stake. Hence they are playing very dirty to try and kill Bitcoin's first mover advantage so they can essentially privatize Bitcoin under their corporate banner.

It would be like if AOL tried to kill the Internet by limiting packet size and line speed and then introduced AOL w/o the same limits.
Yes it is completely useless against random strings as one would expect, but with word salad it not completely useless. For example, it can find words like "tequieromuchogerald" and "paulaalejandrailove" easily enough. I haven't fully explored its ability to do this, but I suspect starting with a dictionary of words instead of a random population might aid it in finding XKCD like random passwords. In general I don't disagree though, passphrases if chosen correctly can be completely intractable to a password cracker.