skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Inflation wouldn't work since its used by governments as a tool to adjust import and export rates.

A alternative system to taxes would be to demand payment whenever someone uses a state resource. A shop uses roads to have goods delivered, so they should pay a percentage to the state. Customers use the road to travel to the shop, so a small price is paid by the shop to the government per customer. If someone don't want to use the roads, they are free to buy the land necessary and build their own road system.

A factory has also transported goods and employees traveling to work, but they also uses the public education that those employees has. That mean for each hired employee, the factory should pay the relative price as compensation to the state. If a factory don't want to hire state educated citizen, they are free to find a workforce elsewhere.

A internet service sends bits traveling in copper and fiber that goes through state owned land. A price per bit then is reasonable. Same goes to radio waves traveling through state owned air space. If someone don't want to pay, they are free to build their own network.

Then there is the protection racket where police and military prevents theft. Those costs has to be recovered, so a monthly price in relation to the assets being protected sounds perfectly reasonable. If someone don't want to pay, the military can always go and make a visit.
After looking at all those links, I couldn't see anything that would have predicted the deals they're expecting with console vendors. That's the main reason their revenue shot up.
Snapchat Wants to Make 'Ballot Selfies' Legal on Election Day
> The financial industry arises naturally from the time-value of money combined with human greed.

Well, no. There are very definite regulatory changes that allowed bigger banks to eat smaller banks, for instance. I still remember how my parents opened my first savings bank at a bank that was regional to Northern New Jersey, which was then later eaten by something I don't remember, than by Bank of America. Likewise, the whole "mortgage tranche" fiasco happened because we allowed loan originators to sell off the ownership of loans to other parties, rather than having to eat the lunch they'd made for themselves with their own levels of risk-taking.
Indeed, you are absolutely welcome in open source. Conferences are definitely a highlight.
Thank you for bring this technology up. I wasn't familiar with it, but now I'm going to research how it works. I have a lot of questions about how it works in practice (structural considerations, materials, cost, etc.), but conceptually it makes sense.

Useful for extra-planetary construction, too, though I would be surprised if the idea isn't already used to some extent.
I am under the impression that they were experienced in IT but inexperienced in biomedical investments.
Yeah right there is not a single genuine environmentalist in the whe world. They're all just control freaks hell bent on messing with your life /s
We've had a spate of fake emails between our CFO and CEO in our company.

Seeing as we use google apps for our email, it would be really nice if google could warn in their interface that this email may have the CFO's address, but it did not come from internal mail...
http://www.diw.de/documents/publikationen/73/diw_01.c.44461....

Yes, 15000 looks about right. That being said, it feels quite low.
Thredded – A new forum engine for Rails
If the source for the citation is irrelevant, then that would have to be considered inaccurate.

I don't think an automated metric could ever check the accuracy of a source, only its verifiability and reliability.

Any system that relies on metrics can be gamed. Wikipedia has had to deal with an immense amount of gamesmanship over the years, and experienced editors can spot it normally very quickly by now.
I live across from the nature reserve. The parking lot was already there and regularly used.

But the irony is great.
> He's not a social scientist, and I don't think he'd appreciate an anthropologist evaluating the state of affairs in quantum computing research.

But, from things I have read elsewhere, there does seem to be a reasonably convincing body of evidence that there are systematic biases in social sciences. Some of this perhaps stems from discrimination (e.g., in hiring practices) based on political allegiance. Jonathan Haidt (a social scientist) has spoken out on this topic[0], including specifically on sociology[1]. While that issue likely affects academics in general, political leaning likely has a much smaller influence on one's research in physics and chemistry, compared to one's research in sociology. It's true that Aaronson is not a social scientist, but I don't think that means he is wrong.

[0] http://people.stern.nyu.edu/jhaidt/postpartisan.html

[1] http://www.mindingthecampus.org/2016/02/a-conversation-with-...
This is well-trodden ground, though perhaps long enough ago that younger people have never heard it. A lot of stuff that sounds really sweet and nice and moral turns into nightmares if you play it out in the real world. Advertising to the world that you won't strike back even if you are wiped out is, over the long term, an invitation to be wiped out. Of course if you want to signal your morality to certain types by valuing your own people at zero that may sound better than striking back, but you're still in the end advocating for millions of deaths, whether you meant to or not. If nothing else, allow me to appeal to your own naked self-interest in pointing out you'd be one of them.

It is ironic, but by taking a strong "We will strike back" stance, you decrease the chances of ever having to strike.

On the flip side, some of the well-trod ground is now out of date, too. Arguments about how maybe we could try non-proliferation instead become irrelevant as nuclear weapons become relatively speaking easier and easier to acquire due to advancing and dispersing technological sophistication.

Anyhow, upshot, if you're serious about thinking through the issues this turns out to be a really challenging stage to get up and morally preen at people on. It's very easy to end up advocating a strategy that kills billions of people while preening. It may be unpleasant to you, but you do in fact have to think. Hard. With neither rose-tinted glasses nor excessive cynicism. The easy answers don't work. The sweet answers don't work.
> If you're going to go through all that horrid FactoryFactory Factory = new FactoryFactory();

I get the impression that your only exposure to java is through jokes and blogs from dynamic typing evangelists.
Hi! One of the developers here. If anyone has any questions, comments, or feedback - we're all ears.

The primary focus of this project is to fill a niche that we feel is underserved by the larger projects like discourse. Thredded is built to be a compliment to an existing rails app, and not another entity that requires extra servers or management.

This codebase has been maintained in one way or another for over 15 years (through several different incarnations) so it's certainly not going anywhere. We're in it purely for the love of the development and the project. Let us know what you think :)
In the US, the high borrowing levels are pretty much straight Reaganomics. Arthur Laffer was an early proponent.

GHWB lost an election by trying to apply the brakes, and here we are.
Summary: Some people have different values from me and I don't like it. They should be forced to change their values so that I am not challenged.
I'm not saying Wikipedia should make those improvements; I am saying there are better models for content production. Wikipedia can't make those improvements anyway, as its community is extremely conservative, and despite the power it has, it cannot make any changes to the software. The best you can hope for is window dressing.
I've always been disappointed in the lack of recognition Dream Quest of Unknown Kadath gets. Several years ago, I read all of Lovecraft's works in a stretch, and while I enjoyed them all, Dream Quest really stood about. By the end my heart was racing and I was reading as fast as I could to find out what happened next. It's very rare for me to have any reaction to a story beyond the pleasure of reading or the appreciation of good prose.

But Dream Quest is consistently absent from lists of favorites or of Lovecraft's best writings. Maybe I just have bad taste. :) To be fair, it is a little different in theme than Lovecraft's later writings: less scientific horror and more fantastical horror.
Yep, I tried them. The problem is that they introduce either noise around edges or rainbow colored noise on light areas. Or both.

Unfortunately it is not comparable to the good matte ISP screen experience.
The ATI acquisition was very forward looking, the problem is the hardware and software stack required to make APUs successful was nowhere close to ready at the time. We are just now seeing small enough process nodes that can support real GPU performance on the same die as a decent CPU, though the software isn't there yet still it is much closer. If Zen can match/beat Intel and it scales well enough down to APUs I think they might finally find their market, and Zen on the server should be a killer as well if that is the case, as AMD has always done really well at shoving lots of cores in small packages.
Was this done with the G1 garbage collector brought in by Java 7 if not this is worth a new test.

It fixes a lot of problems that used to be introduced, and as long as you let it run wild with memory, and you are doing some parallelized work like everything real world, you should not see this problem.

There should be either no more, or less, stop the world.

There are a few things you can do to also avoid this problem all together:

The biggest improvement in speed vs memory will come from not passing primitive as function parameters. When you are doing this, you are passing-by-value, not passing-by-reference. If you wrap a bunch of ints to a function that you are using you can save a lot of allocation cycles.

Another good change that you can make would be an object pool. There is a really good and fast implementation in JMonkeyEngine/LWJGL. They have a low level, thread happy, object pool.
Sometimes, you've got to dump the old stuff because it is just too painful to make changes on. I've rewritten more than a couple of projects that I inherited from less than competent outsourced contractors... Number one, these projects mostly didn't work, and had so many bugs that I'm not sure how it was ever shipped software that somebody paid for. Number two, it was all the worst kind of WebForms and Visual Basic monstrosity. I'm sure its possible to write non-terrible code with WebForms that looks good, but I've never seen it, and it was a matter of a couple weeks to burn it down and build a proper MVC application instead. My only regret there is that I waited too long to rewrite, and wasted a few months battling the manure pile of the old version and trying to improve it incrementally.
Errr, that is exactly what happened, and an apology was due.

While it's primarily the responsibility of an upland bird hunter (anyone shooting, of course, but in this sort of hunting you move around a lot and flush out birds unexpectedly) to keep track of everyone and not shoot when any of them are down range, everyone in the hunting party also has a responsibility to follow previously agreed upon protocols to make this easier and less error prone. The guy who got shot screwed that up big time.
So from now on, do we present our credentials and cvs before commenting to any extent in public? No. The whole point about science is that anyone at all should be able to criticize any piece of work on the basis of the facts.

Let's suppose the criticism is rubbish. All to the good. That will emerge and so will salient criticism, if it exists, that may have escaped the 'credentialized' scientists.

Only my impression of course but reading a few entries in Shtetl-Optimized, I would have thought that Aaronson would certainly appreciate and argue for or against any pertinent comments that some unknown Joe Doe might offer.
In an Age of Privilege, Not Everyone Is in the Same Boat
In some you have a duty to retreat first, so it depends on if you have a safe path of retreat.
The state of Skylake software support over the last year for both Linux and Windows (with many Linux issues still unresolved) kills any excitement I might have had for future intel products. To be honest, I'd rather have a slower passively cooled ARM chip, at least then my ultrabook wouldn't sound like a jet engine when some background task kicks in (not to mention battery drain consequences).
If you give Java a try, it's got a lot more impact than Factory. Play around with the language a bit, there are things in the JVM and the language that really change the way you think about programming.
Hmm, that was a shortcoming I did not foresee.
My main objection is that the person telling the anecdote is making fun of the people in the pentagon, making it look like they didn't get his clever little moral trick, when in reality, like many things in life, it isn't quite that simple and maybe they had a good point.
Additionally, if we hand over all our earnings to the government, they'll always spread wealth equally and eliminate scarcity from the planet.
None, although some have a "duty to retreat" which might come into play, especially in after the fact 20/20 hindsight trials where the prosecutor ignores the dictum of Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes that “Detached reflection cannot be demanded in the presence of an uplifted knife."

In various parts of e.g. Europe, though, that would get you a prison sentence, very notably the U.K., since you would be using more force than the aggressor. The US principle is that once the threshold of lethal force is reached, other forms of lethal force in response are legitimate.
I am almost cynical enough to believe that a modern neoliberal president surrounded by hawkish advisors could be convinced quite easily to personally kill the keeper and retrieve the launch codes. I believe that the hawkish "at any cost" mindset of modern American politics distorts human empathy so much that it's completely within the realm of belief for me for this to occur.

More likely, I think, that those holding prestigious enough office can find ways to get around very high procedural barriers like this one by assigning the task to a secret service agent or other on-hand staff of a martial trade.

Personally I think we've seen plenty of evidence that those in high office might personally carry out and enable heinous acts of individual violence if the stakes are made to appear grave enough to them.
I'm not sure of the cost comparisons but there's permeable concrete as well, some even let plants grow in them.....or they could have just fine will a Simone solution such as a gravel lot.
1) A psychopath / sociopath willing to kill millions is not going to care about one more.

2) Politicians / leaders are orders of magnitude more likely to be psychopaths.
Well I mean he did shoot his friend in the face. His friend did apologize for it. That's public record. Mallorean didn't list any motive which would be where a conspiracy would come in. I mean yeah there were a lot of videos on youtube afterwards saying "he must have shot him from much closer range than they claim" but that's not really here nor there when it comes to: did Dick Cheney shoot a man in the face.
All I meant is that there's little point in presuming the statement is correct and then asking a followup, when there's little reason to believe that it is in the first place. Aaronson doesn't support this statement, nor does he argue it -- he just asserts it. In any event, my point had little to do with credentials and much to do with knowledge. I don't think Aaronson claims he has too much knowledge in the social sciences, credentialed or otherwise. Would you also presume his medical advice to be correct?
Doctors take an oath to do no harm, so that's another wrinkle...
Another developer/contributor here! We'd love to answer your questions!
Australia is in the Commonwealth: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Member_states_of_the_Commonwea...
Lessons Learned from Making a Number One Game, a Dark Room
The county fair does not have the goal of convincing everybody that they can do music, so the metaphor fails.

Science fairs have the goal of showing everybody they can do science. This is the only sensible goal, because as a mechanism for actually doing science they are worthless. If they fail that goal, they are worthless. Once again, this is a place where people confuse the mechanisms for the goals, a problem our society is having a lot of problems with lately. If the science fair is run in a way that extra super hard convinces people you need "real scientists" and lab coats and training and specialized equipment, it is of negative value and the optimal thing to do is just shut it down.

This science fair should be shut down. It is doing harm and no good.
That's why we have contributing guidelines to follow :)
Or to actively display sources that are edited out multiple times.
It's been my experience that it's easy to write GCC inline asm that works the first few times you use it, but subtly breaks depending on what the optimizer does with the code around it. Those input/output/clobber arguments can be tricky to get right and wrongness can be hard to spot.
I'd make sure the system allows full transparency on how the metric is formed - for instance it shows that vactruth.com has a low reliability weighting, but a high verifiability weighting; but that the Journal of Comparitive Neuroscience has a high reliability score but a low verifiability score (it costs about US$32,000 a year for a 24 issue subscription).

I'd then let people tweak their own metrics and have the ability to share them with others.
Or the dolphins are just as biased as we are and simply think that humans just appear to have a language.
I was considering doing this too, but it would have taken way too long so I never got around to it.

Instead, I used Adblock and blocked the entire div! Now if I want to see my newsfeed, I can just log in on incognito, which I hardly ever do. Works great.
What people miss is that StarCraft is a physical game primarily, with tactical elements, not the other way around. There are a lot of fans who know the game well and can make all the right decisions, but will never be able to execute it in real time.

Execution of strategy is what separates the professional StarCraft players, and in that way it's much closer to professional sports than Go / Chess.
Apparently HN is rife with bureaucrats.
Also, fallout is not restricted by borders. For example US and USSR where within 60 miles of each other at there closest borders during the Cold War. India and Pakistan share a border.
"rather than having to eat the lunch they'd made for themselves with their own levels of risk-taking"

This is sort of the big problem. All the money being made is justified by citing the risk banks/traders/funds take and yet we are constantly told that X is a good thing because it increases liquidity/decreases risk.
Researchers push for personalized tumour vaccines
I am being critical of that. The more I think through this, the stronger I come to the conclusion that this whole thing is of negative value, actively subverting the only goals that matter, and it might as well be shut down. This whole thing is a useless farce.

As long as we're discussing privilege, the correct use of privilege would be to tell the school to just go to hell, run the experiment anyhow with the probably $10 of equipment you need, and submit something to the actual science fair as perfunctory as possible that will let you pass (leaning on your "privilege" to pass). And skip the visits to the microbiologists, because that proves the wrong point. You should be doing this on your own.
I've always found this sort of "I'm going to make my own" approche as being the best for innovation. I really hope this goes through and continues development.
Imprecise thinking abound. The author starts with talking about the problem of big banks (fair enough) and then descends into longing for a command economy [1].

The author laments borrowing money to pay dividends, but the two are net-zero activities (investors are just shuffling their investment from stocks to bonds).

The author finally argues that real investment has fallen since the mid-century. This is not true in a real dollar sense [2]. As a share of GDP though, investment has fallen from the 1950s because we are no longer rushing to build up capital destroyed in WWII. As noted by Paul Graham [3] and more technically by economist Robert Solow [4], it was the decades surrounding WWII that was the exception and not the rule.

Finally, the finance sector has already been retreating as of circa 2005 [5]. The predicate of the article may then no longer be true. If it is, would the author agree we're seeing less issues and more social justice now than in 2005?

There are many precise, carefully thought-out treatments of inequality or the problems of financialization out there. I count Philippon's and Piketty's research among them. But this article seems to move in fuzzy concept space between "finance has gone up" and "we don't have a caring command economy".

I wish the author spelled out his thinking more clearly. It sounds like it would be an interesting argument if made well.

[1] "The state becomes submerged and hidden from our everyday lives, working through elaborate and blunted market mechanisms rather than helping citizens directly."

[2] https://research.stlouisfed.org/fred2/series/GPDIC96

[3] http://paulgraham.com/ineq.html

[4] https://newrepublic.com/article/117429/capital-twenty-first-...

[5] Figure 5 of http://pages.stern.nyu.edu/~tphilipp/papers/Finance_Efficien... Incidentially, Philippon's graph is used by the Wikipedia article on "financialization" but cut off at the 2005 peak to make it look like an unrestrained explosion upwards.
Apply HN: Hacking Mental Health
PROBLEM

People sometimes become depressed, or develop other serious mental conditions. The mental health establishment precisely diagnoses patients’ symptoms using the meaningless labels in the DSM-5. Most are then treated with FDA-approved drugs to hopefully lessen the problematic symptom. Patients whose condition does not allow for informed consent are evaluated, ‘prosecuted’, and forced to take whatever drugs the professionals think they should take.

BACKGROUND

My girlfriend ended up being subjected to court-ordered treatment when she became acutely psychotic after quitting methadone & alcohol cold-turkey. Because the forced drugs treated effect instead of cause, she suffered through 6 months of ineffective and harmful treatments.

During her sixth hospitalization, I obtained the prescription drug and other substances that my research indicted would help. She was still very delusional when released from that facility. My treatment protocol has enabled her to rapidly recover to a ‘normal’ state, without the need for ongoing sedation. The interventions are non-addictive, cheap, and used as-needed to adequately control her anxiety and depression.

SOLUTION

Better mental health is obtained by addressing the chain of causation behind a person’s suffering. The science has been done, but is inconvenient.

PROPOSAL

I propose leveraging the Hacker News Fellowship to begin designing an exponentially more effective approach to mental health.

TEAM

ME: I developed a nerve condition in college, and suffered through a computer science degree. After graduation I focused on hacking health. Over six months, my new friend went from ‘hopeless self-medicator’ to quitting cold-turkey. Over the next 6 months, I went from looking up “psychosis” to figuring out effective treatment strategies that address the causes of my girlfriend’s condition.

OLDER FRIEND: My first Mental-Health success.
GIRLFRIEND: See above.