skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Everyone is familiar with the idea that companies pay politicians to weaken regulations, but more people need to realize that they pay politicians to strengthen regulations as well. Expertise in regulatory compliance is a competitive advantage that all incumbents have. They can create barriers to entry by making regulatory compliance harder.

Companies bribe politicians who hate regulations to remove regulations they hate. Companies bribe politicians who like regulations to add regulations that they can comply with more easily than their competitors. Centralized democracy is fundamentally flawed because votes can be bought.
>Being a public defender in a free market would be an attractive career: the stability of a public servant, and the lucrative nature of a skilled job requiring high intelligence.

It's merely the "stability of a public servant" without anything lucrative about it.

Just a require for high intelligence without the compensation (since the client is poor, and you're assigned by the state).

Free vs non-free market doesn't come into play. If anything a totally "free market" would have the clients either pay themselves or not get representation at all, making their representation even poorer.
If you are the CEO of a startup? I mean, come on.
You're comparing a statistic of one population (smokers) with a different stat of another (general population). There's no conclusions to draw from that.

E.g. healthcare costs go up with age because that's when people start dying. Smokers die at an earlier age, so they experience those costs earlier. Is this correct? Who knows, but it's one of the many ways in which the argument you wrote could be invalid.
Your comment does not address the key points in mine.

There is no doubt that marital/ spousal rape needs to be criminalized. Criminalization, of course, is not going to entirely eliminate it[1] - which brings me to the point I'm trying to make: when both social-conditioning and law-and-order have failed[2], what's the solution?

Moreover this is not a gender issue, as the likes of you ignorantly make it out to be (in an fervent attempt to distract via identity politics), as the reverse is equally applicable -- such as, to use your phraseology, letting women with divorce-rape fantasies to explain everything else away and act them out with no perception of wrongdoing[3] -- where the aforementioned question continues to hold.

--

[1] The West has historically had the idea that by marriage a woman gives irrevocable consent for her husband to have sex with her any time he demands it ... and even though marital/ spousal rape has recently been criminalized (made a crime in all 50 states in the US by 1993, for example), it has not entirely eliminated it.

[2] The very fact that marital/ spousal rape continues to be prevalent even among countries where it has been criminalized suggests that both social-conditioning and law-and-order have failed, in regards to entirely eliminating it. Hence, my question: what's the solution?

[3] Some unscrupulous women in India are wont to extort money and harass their husband's entire extended family. http://www.498a.org
You seem to see this as zero sum, meaning that the algorithm writer can only win if "the world" somehow loses. Why is the algorithm writer morally bound to give up his time and effort to the world without compensation? Or why should he consider his own needs and desires somehow lesser that anyone else's? Can not the world benefit from the work of a clever developer while the developer can benefit by earning payment for his efforts?

If the world really needs better algorithms: it can pay for them. That's called a trade, something where both parties win... and if they don't, one party or the other walks away. What this discards is the immoral idea that you can only be good by becoming some sacrificial animal that discards his own needs in favor of others.

Oh... and by the way... you can sometimes advance your own interests by NOT charging them for your work; a lot of open source actually does work this way in practice (even if self-benefit is not the motivating factor for many). Trades are not always monetary.
I've met a large number of people that code for a living that don't produce good quality code to be honest so I wouldn't say it's a basic skill.
According to https://morningconsult.com/2016/04/email-privacy-act-faces-s...

Grassley wants to give civil agencies like the FTC and SEC an exemption.
Some people are just intent on being professional victims.
No, it just means that after your death your descendants don't benefit unfairly. Instead, the money that would be used to set a trust fund baby for life is redistributed among all people.
Depends on context. I'm at +149 right now on the top-level comment, so one upvote that turned into a downvote isn't really a big deal. It could be pretty annoying if you've worked hard on a long comment and then it goes from 0 to -1 instead of +1 because of a fat-fingered downvote.
"setting a bad precedent" implies it's different from "what is". If it's doing what everyone else does, it's not a precedent.
Even if people pay full capital gains, that doesn't prevent the existence of a multi-generation estate. And those kind of estates are the whole point of the estate tax.

If a tax directly taxed holdings on an ongoing basis (a wealth tax, or much better, a land value tax), I could see an argument for doing away with an estate tax, but only then. (And I'd say not even then)
Providing bread to a community is a worthy goal. The problem is people trying to make their mission look broader than it is.

Letting a spider out of the house is a profoundly important goal. People just need to embrace their immediate work it is of the utmost importance.
Former Tor developer created malware for the FBI to hack Tor users
The thing is, his stated goal is to keep 1% of his money in the family for the next generation. Right now that 1% is 357 million. Estate tax is 40%. He has a single child as of now. So, that child will inherit 214 million dollars. She could probably live her entire life of the interest in that money, make her own (smaller) charitable contributions and still give her own single child the same amount (adjusted for inflation and accounting for the estate tax). So I don't believe donating 99% of his money and ensuring the prosperity of his family for generations are mutually exclusive to Zuckerberg. His philanthropy does not conflict with his own self-interest. Also, like Gates, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Stanford, etc, he has a lot of fame and renown to gain from doing good in his own name and during his lifetime.

Now, don't get me wrong, income inequality is a real problem and the fact that some world-scale social programs now seem to depend entirely on the wishes of a few men versus popular administration is in many ways troubling (in others, well, Bill Gates has potentially done more against AIDS in the third world than most democratic governments...). But Occam's Razor applies and although I imagine tax incentives pay a part on how and when billionaires donate (that's why they are called incentives...), I don't default to thinking that Zuckerberg is twirling his mustache over this, laughing maniacally and saying "this is how I shall defraud the IRS!". But let's see, in due time, what happens. So far the Gates foundation seems legit, for example, and there goes another mustache twirling villain of the tech world...
You didn't ask me but still: because it's relatively easy to avoid (via the aforementioned trust funds and charities,) and the cutoff is kind of arbitrary. Improving income and capital gains taxation would be fairer for everyone.
"But they do expect you to be able to reason from a problem statement to something approximating a solution."

In under 45 minutes? Are you really concerned with their ability to even naively solve an algorithmic problem in that time frame? I would think not. No, this is not only flawed, but it's so deeply flawed (and easily exploitable), that you're not even interviewing for skill set anymore, simply either 1) someone's luck for having been exposed to the problem before or 2) their ability to remember things they don't use day to day.

Congratulations, you're hiring lucky people or idiot savants.
I'm not knowledgeable about that, to be honest.
I strongly suspect that they did experience this sort of "evaporative cooling" of workforce quality when they made that decision (or quietly reversed the paycut with targeted "raises").

Ditto for GM when they offered all union employees the same (formula for) buyout from their contracts -- the best ones take it and leave because they'd get the money and the new job; the poor performers know they can't last anywhere else and stay on.
Read about DR-DOS. And then realise how long ago that is.
An Apple Employee Was Found Dead in a Conference Room
> A custom DNA sequence costs about 10 cents per base, with Twist hoping to get that cost down to 2 cents.

A quick trip to Wolfram Alpha says that this works out to about $400 million per gigabyte. Obviously it will come down, but even with exponentially decreasing cost this has a long way to go before it becomes competitive with magnetic storage. Still, it's good to see that there's more attention being paid to the need of very-long-term storage, which is woefully inadequate at the moment.
>It doesn't taste much different to the existing products, and costs more.

That's pretty typical of branded product. And sometimes the difference is worth it and sometimes not.

The broader thing that I find pretty impressive is how Greek-style (i.e. thicker) yogurt has gone from this thing I could pickup at Trader Joe's or Whole Foods to being the dominant yogurt style at Walmart in just a few years.
I always ask where they use those algorithms in their production systems.

The typical answer is that they don't :)
The information might not be admissible to implicate someone, but it should still count as probable cause (IANAL). So they could legally use it to then search whoever may be implicated, and any evidence from that should be admissible.

There's no claim that they violated any rights searching the phone (which after all belonged to them), but that the process may be unreliable. That means it's still enough for probable cause, or that seems plausible to me. I don't know whether this is right.

Edit: I did some searching, and this seems to be correct. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Taint_(legal)

>The most common of such usage is with reference to evidence, testimony, identification by witnesses, or confessions that have been obtained by law enforcement illegally.

If it's obtained legally, it doesn't count as tainted. http://legal-dictionary.thefreedictionary.com/tainted+eviden... has the same illegal language.
A Robot Monk Captivates China, Mixing Spirituality with Artificial Intelligence
I will try to believe Mark about making the world a better place when he builds a world that is not about ads and mining our data.
So sorry for the downvote. Shitty mobile experience.
I would certainly agree on both of these assertions.
Not exactly, as the functionality is experimental and subject to change. That was the whole point of the prefixes.

Syntax and behavior of css changed between proposals and early drafts of a new feature and the final result.

So without prefixes you'd have a single "XXX" CSS name that might get deprecated altogether (eg the name ends up XXY) or be defined to have different behavior (e.g. it remains XXX, but not it also makes the element bold rather than just italic).
From G+, a related concept:

Lovely discussion here with Stuart Firestein who just spent some time with philosophers of Science. It's long but quite on point although more biological than economic, it still addresses structural issues as well as replicability.
http://www.microbe.tv/twiv/twiv-385/
Enjoy. It's +Vincent Racaniello.﻿

The audio is long, the relevant part starts about 30 minutes in. That said, I recommend the whole bit, though the first 10-20 minutes are a bit rambly.

h/t Bob Calder​﻿ on G+

The G+ thread on which I posted this had a comment to the effect of "but he's a senior tenured academic, he can afford to do this", to which I say, "precisely, and he has".

Brings to mind another item I'd come across recently, regarding promoting open discussion in groups:

1. Let the junior member(s) speak first. They can venture into topics others won't.

2. Senior members, speaking later, can establish cultural norms by, say, giving credit and credence to earlier comments, and by admitting their own errors and mistakes (as here).

The cultural message is hugely powerful.
I meant color calibration. I don't work for Apple. I had a non-Apple iPhone 4 screen replacement and the colors were washed out, lacking saturation - it's impossible for me to say whether that is due to display quality or lack of calibration. However it makes sense to me that color calibration is required for consistent display performance especially when displays are sourced from different manufacturers.
Oh shit. I came here to ask if this was the release with multicore. Have you tested it for real-world performance enhancement?
Senate Hearing on National Security Space Launch Programs with Elon Musk
>Nah, we didn't need C. Thompson just really liked BCPL. It was crap. So they tweaked it into C. It still couldn't write UNIX. Ritchie added structs and that version finally did the job.

Well, Pascal was also inspired by languages that were crap compared to modern (70s/80s needs), and early Pascal's also had tons of missing features -- so I'm not sure what this "C wasn't good enough from the start" is supposed to mean, especially since C already had structs and all by the time it caught on.
Exactly. The 3rd party will hold this method (until patched some day in the future possibly) and they FBI will keep coming back, paying an initial seed round equivalent for possibly no usable data, claiming the same 'defense'.

This just shows typical contempt for the public in general. Why should we be surprised?
Wow! PhD in Economics and Neurobiology. Interesting combination.
Typwrite: chat for trending topics
Hi guys, I humbly present the beta version of an app I've been working on (http://typwrite.com). The idea is live chat (think old school chat room) for things that are trending at any given moment, this could be news items, video, hashtags etc. Whatever there are lots of people talking about right now, there should be a chat about it, with related media and links. It needs work, so any feedback you have would be greatly appreciated!
This is significantly more common than it has been in the past, and Zuckerberg is part of that trend. Google like most companies in the past were not founded with a dual share structure and only split very recently.

That isn't to say this was never done. Bombardier for example has been tightly controlled by the same family through a dual share structure since its founding.
This is bad citizenship, plain and simple, and a gross abuse of the political system rooted in the ability to abuse it in proportion to one's ability to pay for that abuse. We cannot hope to have local/state/national government by and for the People, and even hope to have a chance of it being above reproach, if we do not immediately take steps to actually prioritize and protect the People's will.

I get that handling this on the national level is a much more difficult problem to find an amicable solution that appeals to everyone's ideological sensibilities. But, at the state and local level, the abuse that money brings to the equation should be--nay, is--much easier to solve. It requires but a few sensible rules that permit the greatest possible latitude for citizens to participate in, guide, and organize their local governments to their notions of what constitutes good government and social policy, while protecting their local and state governments from outside influence. That state legislatures do not enact these rules is, in my opinion, but a reflection of the corrosive and perverting effect of money--and the desire for it--on all political activity.

- For all local and state-wide policies--especially coercive public policies--one must be a resident of the local/state entity to participate in any way, be that financial, putting one's boots on the ground, or having any other recognized part in the process.

- Make it illegal to hire an out-of-state company who brings in out-of-state workers to collect signatures for your desired proposal. Need to collect signatures? You must only use residents of the state in which the proposed policy will take effect. Require that they must be unpaid volunteers. Interrogate the signature-collection process, and invalidate all signatures collected by anyone who is not a resident of the local/state entity that will be affected by the policy.

- No more allowing wealthy citizens, who are not residents of the local/state entity affected by the proposed policy, to donate to the cause. Completely remove the ability for wealth to escape its local boundaries. There is no reason a wealthy resident of Oklahoma should be able to involve themselves in the local and state issues happening in New York. This requires a real, sensible definition of being a resident—not, say, owning a home in a place you do not actually spend your time living. Want to weigh in on a local issue? Better be a resident of the city limits.

There are plenty of reasonable ways we could protect states and cities from being overwhelmed by the unbalanced competition for mind- and vote-share that comes from allowing moneyed interests stepping into local/state political and social issues.

Perhaps once we tackle protecting government by and for the People at the local and state levels, we could then work together to tackle the same issues at the national level.
Yep, serving 503 or otherwise broken app to users is not acceptable LB behavior. Nginx aficionados fail to comprehend that somehow. Which I guess shows that nginx is web server first and proxy/LB second.
You are correct to point out that machine learning is NOT general intelligence, and what OpenAI is working on really have very little to do with AGI and super-intelligence, sadly.

But how can you say "we have no idea what the constituent parts of AGI are" or "they don't have a pathway (nobody does by the way)"? There is an active and vibrant (if sometimes eclipsed) AGI community. There is an annual AGI conference. There are a half dozen or so actively developed AGI projects with comprehensive architectures with attached roadmaps. It's an active area of research, but it's not like we have no idea how to build a general intelligence, or what such an architecture might look like.
Definitely, PostgREST is an awesome project and definitely an inspiration for PostGraphQL. I gave the project credit in the README: https://github.com/calebmer/postgraphql#thanks
I can't find the post now, but one of the RAD developers behind this codec (it's their 3rd ANS based codec I believe) has said that they would likely be willing to open source their ANS family for a one-time payment of iirc around $5 million. No need for the entire RAD stack.
This great, for my daughter who reaches high and fails sometimes, she can appreciate she is not alone! She only hears about others successes, this provides balance.
Ask HN: ES6 javascript Generators+Promises async patterns
is it just me or indeed these async patterns based on ES6 Generators+Promises are pretty hard to deal with? I find them way more complex then the good ol' callbacks pattern; and by complex I mean hard to understand, hard to write, hard to maintain, thus not more productive. I like a lot the KISS principle and I find this is not even close to that. don't we all want to move into a better direction? to me this is not doing that.
is it just me having this opinion? am I getting old here and rusty and not open to new better ways of the new age?
also, can you recommend a good source which explains these patters?
Do you realize how much computing power is behind google search?
https://github.com/alex/what-happens-when
The article cites information that refutes this. Roughly speaking, 50% are equivalent to public schools, a quarter are better, and a quarter are worse. 75% are not better, which is way beyond "nearly all cases", unless 25% is "nearly all" to your reckoning.
Perhaps Johannes Haushofer will become more famous for his primary academic works because of this document that would not have occurred otherwise. Would it not then be one of his greatest successes that should not belong in the document anymore?
Did I ever tell you about the OS that was written in FORTRAN? Here it is in case I forgot:

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

That's a CPU and OS for Fortran. I found a web framework for Fortran, too. Today, we could do Hacker News in FORTRAN from the metal up. We'll leave that monstrosity to our imaginations, though. Not even that. ;)
I'm surprised that "never trust the client" isn't among the basic concepts that everyone should know, at least on HN. It's such a basic premise.
"Its a well known fact that Google bought Motorola only for the patents. Google has also managed to use the patents to sue other companies including Microsoft."

Really? Which suits were that?

Google has never sued another company over patents. They've made counterclaims when themselves sued, but claiming otherwise is just a fiction.

And they bought Motorola because Motorola was threatening to start suing all of the other Android makers, causing infighting that Google didn't want. So Google bought Motorola....to stop those patents from being used to sue, further diminishing your point.

On the whole, Google is very much the good guys, and Microsoft are very much the bad guys.

However I will say it is naive to assume this will continue forever. There was a period where Microsoft seldom threatened anyone, and we all held quaint notions about all of their "defensive" patents. Situations and markets change, and suddenly desperation takes foot and the company that was hugs and kisses becomes claws and kicks, so I would never assume that Google will always be a fairly good citizen. It could change.
It's not that arbitrary. Computer scientists typically have PhDs and they publish papers on the theory of computer science. It doesn't mean "smart and works with computers."
Babylon 5's CG did not age well: they might have been served better by teleportation devices (left behind by the First Ones, naturally)
So, what's the story if I want to build a C# application that runs on Windows, OS X, and Linux? Do I use "regular" .NET for Windows and Mono for OS X and Linux? Or will everything eventually be unified into one common platform?
Will tomorrow's wearables be powered by flexible transistors?
Didn't see this until now.

In general, increases in the cost of land rents are an important signal that more should be built on this land; it's a bummer for current residents, but it's important that this demand is satisfied.

I believe financial instruments should help: an insurance policy taken by landowners against a rise in land value should dampen the blow. (This is somewhat related to the housing markets championed by Case/Shiller)

But in general, it would probably lead to a bigger change, that is that the property with the greatest risk (land) would likely tend to be owned by those best equipped to deal with this risk. More people would prefer to be renters (what's the advantage of landownership, anyway, other than the investment potential that the LVT would relieve?)