skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as my brief research into it goes, it looks like atmospheric CO2 extraction is currently in R&D stages. With current bulk CO2 costs, it could become economically competitive.

So yes, it's difficult to do cheaply.
Heck: Let's change copyright while we are at it. I have never heard any good arguments why copyright should be longer than 20 years. That is of course never going to happen, but I have a compromise:

20 years exclusive rights. After that: 50 years commercial rights + dual license as CC-BY-NC-SA. That way content creators can earn money by licensing/selling their work for commercial use, and the public can use it non-commercially.
For me, I don't see this as being a problem.

First, I am a believer in economic momentum and money multiplier dynamics (perhaps irrationally so). But with this belief more money being spent (consumption) makes for a stronger economy, for everyone, including those of us who are not in need of welfare. Our current welfare system places too much restriction and I feel leaves too many welfare recipients with non-optimal purchasing decision...not to mention there is an overhead to our (America's) current welfare system as far as administration and what-else.

Another thing is that there have been studies done which show that giving cash to the poor has better outcomes than expected: http://www.economist.com/news/international/21588385-giving-...

There are also deeper things we can theorize about regarding poor behavior, but at the end of the day I can't help but feel like a UBI would be a more efficient welfare distribution (more money spent actually issued as monetary welfare benefits) which would have a stronger economic impact than our current welfare system.

Disclaimer: The above is just my opinion, not claiming it to be right or wrong.
You can make money renting out your toilet
I guess I'm not talking about basic income as much as money not being a good motivator for work. Basic income might become necessary if there aren't enough jobs to go around to keep people alive. But until that point, where machines do all the work, it's not feasible.

>And there are plenty of people out there that are very passionate about shoes, and would share that enthusiasm

How many would sit in the mall for 40 hours per week? That's the fallacy -- that enough people like doing something so much that they would do it enough to make up for the hordes of people that would stop doing it if not paid.

> people bring or wash their own dishes

Who will make the dishes? And the dish washing detergent? And the bottles to hold the detergent? And the refinery to make the plastic for the bottles? And dig up the stuff to supply the refinery? And construct the refinery?

This is why so many -ism's are a seductive idea, but don't work in reality, because the narrative focuses on just the last step or so of a very long supply chain full of unpleasant work for someone else.
If you're learning Clojure there's a site/book that incorporates much of the original SICP text: http://www.sicpdistilled.com/
So if this has the potential to change the future energy economy, what are some good investments to make now? Should I be looking at SolarCity, who sell the panels, or the energy companies like Sempra, PG&E, Edison? Something else?
That's fascinating. I especially like where he's going on the cost of synthetic gasoline. I'm a little iffy on it (what's the source for CO2 by the ton? Atmosphere?), but if sufficiently cheap solar electricity can generate gasoline straight from the air at a price that rivals fossil fuel, it both solves the storage problem (gasoline is wonderful high density storage), and makes banning fossil fuel via regulation an achievable goal.
Okay, if that's true, that's very impressive: You're saying that these guys invest 2 million each and bring home 3.1 million each?

I'd absolutely want to hear about this.
The problem is designers only being responsible for the design and not for the end product.
It looks like the markets are already moving in that direction.

The PJM capacity market had a big increase in demand response supply circa 2012, though not much of it was from storage. Still, new players are paying attention to these arbitrage opportunities. CAISO is already seeking out corporate partners to participate in demand reduction.
I agree this would be politically problematic, but not for the reason you provide. Doctors already spend tons of money on private malpractice insurance; this national pool would just be a different administration of the same insurance payments. In fact, the pool could be effected with different regulation of the existing private insurers and changes to malpractice law. And if done right, it could plausibly lower overall insurance fee burden on doctors.
Serializable, Lockless, Distributed: Isolation in CockroachDB
If you have a chance I'd recommend reading The Checklist Manifesto [1]. There's data showing that checklists are effective in medical settings. The point of checklists is not to give you a flow-chart of exactly what to do. Their purpose is to minimize human error in routine-but-complex tasks while still allowing professionals the freedom to respond to irregular situations. Medicine, like flying a modern aircraft, has become so complex that even the best practitioners make errors in routine tasks at a surprising frequency, unless they have effective systems in place to prevent them.

[1] http://atulgawande.com/book/the-checklist-manifesto/
> If you still believe this is impossible, think what would happen if a company on the day of the IPO decided to immediately and unilaterally reverse every transaction.

Yeah, this isn't a thing the company can do. The board cannot "unilaterally" take shareholders' shares and give them money in return. They can initiate a buyback, but that means buying shares on the open market, and they'd still be a public company even if everyone sold back their shares. Or they can propose a buyout, but that requires a shareholder vote and typically external money.

The first scenario still results in a public company, just with fewer shares. Neither scenario results in the company owning itself.
I think it instead assumes that journalists will do anything to sell more papers. Regardless of what the scientists actually say.
There were plans drawn up by the UK for conducting warfare in N. America, with the specific aim of countering a US invasion of Canada, the purpose of which would be to deny the port of Halifax to the Royal Navy. During this time, Canada drew up contingency plans for invading the US and fighting off an invasion. Britain hoped that the Canadians would be able to defend Halifax, but had no plans to bail out Canada in this circumstance. The US drafted a plan for the invasion of Canada, while the UK drafted a plan to defeat the US Navy at sea.

I think there's a Nova episode about all this.
Okay, I understand that there are not that many usecases for a 500€ note and whenever I paid something >500€ in cash, I appreciated the flexibility of 50€ notes. But that Harvard Kennedy School also asked for the withdrawal of £50 and $100 notes? Again, $100 is probably not that useful, 100€ notes were usually a nice touch for Christmas gifts by parents/grandparents.

But £50? ATMs tend to give me a bunch of 50€ notes and I like them. Everybody likes them. They’re not too large that you can still buy gum with one and not too small that your wallet is all cluttered up. I understand that £50 is slightly more, but not that much more to go down to £20/20€ for it.
I too am a highlighter. We should form a self-help group.
You can be paid to be someone's friend
This article is what happens when you push diversity by fiat and don't extend the initiative beyond recruiting. Even when programs like this are well-intentioned, you can see the extremely destructive fallout: the author and those like him are going to look at all "diverse" employees and think, "You got a free pass. You're not as good as everyone else."

Let's flip all these changes around to show how it's not about "lowering the bar", it's about realizing that a one-size-fits-all "bar" isn't an effective hiring method in the long run.

1. Update your interview scoring methodology to account for non-traditional backgrounds. (Extra points for ethnicity, e.g., are a detrimental hack that shows how your system is broken.)

2. Don't discount candidates because of their degrees. (While a CS degree may be an indicator of qualification, its absence isn't a disqualifier.)

3. Don't discount candidates because of their educational institutions. (While a top college may be an indicator of quality, I'd rather hire the best candidate from a second- or third-tier school than a middling candidate from an Ivy.)

4. Expand your outbound candidate search to non-traditional channels. (See #3.)

5. Don't discount non-traditional industry experience. (A developer outside of the software industry may be just as good.)

6. Don't discount candidates because of their previous employers. (An ex-Googler may rightfully be an impressive candidate, but they also might be a low-performer.)

7. Don't conflate "years of experience" with "experience". (Very often, 15 years of experience is 1 year of experience repeated 15 times. No one has 15 years of experience in Node.js.)

8. Don't discount a lack of "extracurriculars" like OSS, volunteerism, or other factors.

9. Don't rely on referrals. (You can't staff a company entirely with "friends-of-friends".)

All of these statements are focused on broadening your perspective and getting away from statistics. Yes, a Stanford CS major with 15 years of experience at Google and an awesome GitHub profile is probably a good candidate. But a developer from Temple with 8 years of experience in the retail industry may be just as good.

Yes: it will take more effort to find those candidates, and your signal-to-noise ratio may go down, but your reward comes in the form of awesome people you never would have found before. Diversity will be a natural by-product, and a way to measure your progress.
Cities like Buffalo NY exist due to proximity to enough water power to have an aluminum industry. I live in Minneapolis, a city that exists largely because of water power (although it's used little these days). So picking up and moving entire industries is viable.
"Don't go for the jetpack when all you need is a bicycle" is more the philosophy I'm trying to express.
We had 25%+ unemployment during the Great Depression, at a time when hardly any women were in the workforce. I would say that was a much more difficult time than this great stagnation we find ourselves in currently. Our economy is now largely service-based, but we are still quite a ways off from automating most services. There's a lot of speculation that the economy will imminently suffer rapid upheaval with few jobs to replace the ones that are automated, but it remains speculative.
So, is that a lot? Let’s assume a very simple model, with Reddit writers picking words from a fixed distribution, 10 words per reply, and all ‘over 1,000 comments’ threads having exactly 1000 comments.

Then, if the probability of picking ‘fried rice’ is p, the probability of ‘fried rice’ not appearing in that 1,000 comment, 10,000 word thread is

(1-p)^10000

That apparently, is around 0.22:

(1-p)^10000 = 0.22

Solving for p gives us

10000 log(1-p) = log(.22)

log(1-p) = log(.22)/10000

1-p = exp(log(.22)/10000)

p = 1 - exp(log(.22)/10000)

That’s about 0.000066, or 1 in 15,000.

Let’s compare that with https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=nazi&year_star....

That gives us numbers close to 0.000066, but only for the mid 1940’s. Current level is around 0.000008 or 1 in 125,000. Let’s compute how many words such a long Reddit thread needs to get at that level:

(1-0.000008)^w = 0.22

w log(1-0.000008) = log(0.22)

w = log(0.22)/log(1-0.000008)

That gives me around 190.000 words. That does not seem impossible for me. If long threads on average have 2,500 comments, it is only 36 words per comment. One would have to look at the distribution of thread length and #words/comment to say more about this.

Now, let’s hope there isn’t an embarrassing error in the above computations :-)
That's just not true. You will have a hard time keeping and finding a job if you can't adequately explain any open malpractice suits.
thanks. A new version is coming out in js, so no browser add on necessary. It will find the main points, supporting content, etc. automatically, so you can still use number keys to cut to the chase. Will post when its released.

This has been an idea of mine for 8 years and just got around to hacking away at it.
The client is unable to understand the technical challenges, while the developer cannot read the client's mind. Not a mystery why the project in story failed.

I am more familiar with AndroidStudio than iOS programming, and it just feels like a hackish piece of software. It looks like Eclipse, and the code is Java, but it's really a stripped down version of Java with a lot of hacks and work arounds. It seems like so much time is spent negiotating with the operating system.
Currently my reason for procrastinating on getting my wisdom teeth pulled. I freaked myself out by reading many stories of things going wrong. Ugh.
Storemapper Business Update: Q1 2016
I'm amazed that a full 22% of ultra-sustained Reddit threads are completely free of Nazi references. That's a beautiful display of self-restraint by a big crowd in an ugly world.

I would have pegged the odds of sustained Nazi-free discourse on Reddit as comparable to -- say -- the odds of finding 1,000 Medium posts without the word "f*ck" or its variants in any of the headlines.
Yes, that's what I meant. Edited for clarity, thanks!
> The term "Scheduled c-sections" can also be referred as "planned c-sections" or "elective c-sections".

Um, what? So let's walk through a scenario here. A woman has an issue where she had to have an emergency c-section in a previous birth. So far you're okay with that, right?

Okay now this woman is having a second child. Conducting a v-back can be dangerous (it's at least a higher increase of complications from a vaginal delivery especially if the previous c-section had to be more invasive than normal). So the doctor schedules it, typically at about week 38 to avoid natural delivery kicking in.

So you are saying that, in my scenario, the scheduled c-section is "elective" and not "medically necessary"?

That's a really wrong viewpoint. Kinda dangerous really.
The solution to beat this problem is to reduce the benefits in a gradient as people make more of their own income. Here's the key: Benefits must be reduced more slowly than the increase in income. I.e. at all possible incomes, it must always be the case that if an individual were to make $1 more income, benefit reduction is significantly less than $1.
And that 1 out of a 1000 person might buy a product/service worth millions which makes the marketing and acquisition costs worth it.

You're looking at this through personal assumptions and ignoring all the data when this entire industry is completely data-driven and calculated in decisions.
its not clear what it is
Take a moment and reflect on life.  Makes me ponder my defining moments
One solution would be to not give basic income for children, but to give it to children once they are working age (~16) or when they become an independent adult (18). Everyone gets a certain amount to provide a very basic life on, where they get to decide how their money is spent. If they rather spend their BI on children instead of some other area of life, then that is their choice. If they want both, then they should continue getting a job to acquire funds beyond the BI amount.
So a media officer won't do any good then.
ROLI raises $27M to take its ‘revolutionary’ music hardware to the masses
Not sure if applies to everything. For a close product think diamonds where the value is controlled by creating fake scarcity.
John Kasich exiting the presidential race
I make mistakes all of the time and most of the time I don't even think about it. But there are times where I understand that I am doing something that, if I make an error, would have a significant negative effect on others. At those times I check and double-check my work and I strive to avoid making an error. I may even have someone check my work, just to be sure.

In my opinion, this is difference that prevents be from being "inept".

As others have mentioned, checklists help in this regard. I am sure that there are other ways to mitigate the negative effects if a mistake is made. These certainly should be embraced and used extensively. If I make a mistake, people lose data; if the anesthesiologist makes an error, there is much much more at stake.

In regards to this particular story, I am having a very hard time with the attitude of "well, even an anesthesiologist makes a mistake". Unlike many situations in a hospital where something like a checklist would make a big difference, there are already procedures in place that need to be followed to minimize and in many cases prevent just this kind of error. In my opinion, it does not sound like those procedures were followed.
> the German Communist party declared "After him, us!"

They were kind of prophetic about that.
In praise of solitude in science
Thanks for the suggestions, but damn, I just headed to FounderDating to try it out. The linkedin permissions they demand for sign up are ridiculous. Access to 1st and 2nd degree connections, read/write on your timeline, etc. And of course, it's the only way to join.
Tired of Trump V Hillary Already? Try This Fantasy Election Map Maker
If you check what bird conservation organisations say, they are generally pro wind power, because most of the alternatives are worse for birds.

They do want to avoid building them on busy migration routes though.

Amazingly popular talking point amongst hypocritical fossil fuel industry supporters and semi-professional contrarians though.
The point is to eventually get rid of cash.
Medical Equipment Crashes During Heart Procedure Because of Antivirus Scan
I don't think moving off of silicon will help all that much. What would you move to? Germanium I guess, but I don't think you'll get a factor of 10 from that. We're already down to a scale where the feature size isn't much larger than the atoms themselves.
Seems likely that most 1,000+ comment threads are political.
Procrastinating Even the Little Things
Also education cost spiked because of easy availability of student loans. Could there be many more products/areas like this?
How are they differentiating between people who don't want it and people who bought a phone in the last couple of years and are waiting for an upgrade?
You're forgetting one important downside: the Israel-Palestine stuff kills a lot of innocent people. The whole point of James' idea is getting cohesion and self-sacrifice _without_ taking innocent lives or leaving people to live in misery...
You are, the total energy required for a transfer varies considerably depending on the phasing of the planets.

This is mars->Earth, but you get the idea.
http://www.projectrho.com/public_html/rocket/images/mission/...
I'd rather the reporter heard it from someone who truly understood the science.
Senior ECB officials said at the time [in 2016] that they needed more evidence that the notes facilitated criminal activity.

So did they find the evidence or not? The article omits this information.
It's not really as parallel as you suggest, though it is ironic. Using a mid-wife in the US means starting out in a birth center with a nurse midwife, and finishing there assuming no dangerous complications. There is usually a quick route to a hospital if needed, and screening for risky situations well in advance of the delivery.
This is a very interesting little point, that consumer electronics (especially ports) have little physical safeguards to prevent errors—e.g., you can plug USB2 into USB3 for backward compatibility, but not vice versa, for the B plug; ungrounded extension cords try to prevent you from plugging in grounded plugs. Medical equipment generally doesn't do this. I think the problem is that there is a tradeoff between safeguards and allowing improvisation in a time of shortage or emergency; for example, I've seen blood draw lines repurposed as external irrigators (not as catheters) and that's totally safe as long as you dispose of the needle in a sharps bin.
What you and others get wrong in that analysis is that you don't take into account that just one algorithm have to learn something then all the others can do the same.

Point machine learning towards a problem and things that normally was cumbersome and took several people to do is suddenly done in the fraction of a second.

It's like claiming that if an alien race landed on planet earth with superior skills and superior technology it wouldn't effect the human ability to survive because we endured battles with other species before. We can't use history to teach us much since the opponent is different.

This is not speculation anymore. This is unfolding right in front of us and we better take it serious.
I always ask about synthetic fuels as an alternative to electric vehicles and have never gotten a good answer on it. We already have a huge liquid fuel distribution network built up. Why re-invent the wheel?
Any recommended project of the same complexity that works on linux?
The upside of the end of Moore's law is that hardware should stabilize as the focus goes from making things faster to making things easier to work with. I think there are already trends in this direction with projects like RISC-V.
/wave

Lemme know if you've got questions.
I look at it a bit differently.

1. Do I have the right to run, inspect, modify, or do whatever to a binary running on my machine? Absolutely. Running Linux, I can inspect down to the kernel, if I so choose. But I can hook onto any program I want, and watch any program I choose. If I want to modify memory, I can. Root really means root.

2. So who owns the machine if someone else's program can tell you "You can't do this." ? That's not following what I want, therefore I can only imply that I'm not the owner. I'm all for signed hardware and protections, but things like the TPM give security and ownership to someone that's not me. I'd be for it if I had the private key of that chip.

3. So a computer that doesn't follow the user's requirements... what does that look like? It looks like a Tivo, iPhone, some Androids, Windows 10, and other locked down hardware. Yes, you may have bought it, but you don't own it. Worse yet, is instead of DRM, is that subroutines come from "the cloud" (AKA someone else's server), and streamed to the device when requested. Google shut down a platform for precisely that reason; they deactivated the API servers.

What's the way out? Free Software is a big way out, but so is Open Protocols, and Open Standards. You have a business for IoT (example)? Use MQTT/CoAP and talk via the standards and make it pretty. But also make it so I can close up shop and go elsewhere if you alienate me. Right now, that's the lockin comparable to DRM.
You'd think with the embarrassing history (as a profession) of being too prideful to do things like wash their hands there would be a bit more humility.
I get that large bills provide more opportunities for conterfeiters, money launderers, and other (in the eyes of the State) bad actors, I am surprised to see how low the line is being drawn. In the US they only go up to $100.[0]

The worrying thing is simply that it's in the State's interest to have every monetary transaction be electronic and thus entirely traceable, also in aggregate; whereas it's in my interest to be able to spend (or loan, or give away) my money privately.

The lower the available currency denominations, the more this balance shifts towards the State.

[0]https://www.treasury.gov/resource-center/faqs/Currency/Pages...