skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think their upcoming release is more interesting:

The International Consortium of Investigative Journalists will release on May 9 a searchable database with information on more than 200,000 offshore entities that are part of the Panama Papers investigation.

The data [...] includes information about companies, trusts, foundations and funds incorporated in 21 tax havens, from Hong Kong to Nevada in the United States. It links to people in more than 200 countries and territories.
Ridesharing Services Explicitly Legalized in Toronto
Apparently it's binary coded decimal.
i did, multiple search permutations all came up dry, circling back by linking to this same nautil.us article
Inside Palantir
Yah sky only won because I think it's tied to the govt
The idea that a group of SpaceX employees chanting "USA", not "Europe Sucks" or "Death to Russia", or some other chant that specifically calls out and demeans another group, but simply USA-USA-USA, is somehow analogous to a Nazi rally is very surprising to me.
"Cringe-worthy"? Hardly. You owe it to yourself to watch it. It's easily one of the best hacker movies.
True, and this has a legal implication too. If privacy while browsing the Web isn't expected, then law enforcement doesn't need a warrant to ask for this data. So let's maintain our expectation of privacy.
I think the key difference is that UCTs and CCTs aren't (or at least don't have to be) doled out to "qualified" persons. They can just be given. I like UBI (Universal Basic Income) as it is a scaling UCT that disappears once you earn over a certain amount. So the traditional inefficiencies are no longer a concern.

CCTs could be issued in a universal sense as well, with an income threshold of some sort. But admittedly they are more complicated than UBI. But not necessarily as convoluted as current systems.
Thats very interesting. When you post about that could you go into why you choose that over say large files (say 32 gb or so) that contain each of the collection of blocks? XFS or Ext4 can preallocate large chunks of the files beforehand, so the data looks nice on disk. A fully custom block level device sounds like a nice way to minimize overhead, guess it goes to show that extreme scale makes certain decisions that seem crazy from a support point of view start to make sense.
Sorry if this is too late to not be annoying.

What're the downsides or limitations of ecryptfs/encfs or git-remote-gcrypt – I was looking over Pass again and realized all of what you stated. I figured ecryptfs/encfs would work well enough to encrypt the Pass repo itself.
Cool pastebin! Does it have some way of linking up multiple pastes, or is the list linked compiled manually (the latter, I assume), i.e. manually entered hyperlinks?
It's too early to tell about the Bangladesh Bank hack, but in the Sony case there weren't any long term consequences as far as I'm aware. Which goes to my point: business value isn't in technology for the most part. Attacking technology doesn't do much to change the underlying value of a business.
You might enjoy Go
> There are only two conditions for entrapment - government inducement of the crime, and the defendant's lack of predisposition to engage in the criminal conduct. And I think this qualifies on both counts.

Since the students are not charged with a crime, I'm not sure how either prong of the entrapment test could be met. There's literally no crime at issue in the students cases, which are non-criminal immigration cases.

> the government pushed this visa mill on them indirectly, via the brokers

The brokers are the only ones charged with crimes, though.

> Had these brokers not reached out to these students, it's unlikely that they would have sought out the same illegal method to enter the country.

Which, insofar as its true, may be a good argument against a lifetime ban (which is a possible penalty in the students' cases, so not completely irrelevant), but not so much against revoking the visas.
Yes vultr is great
>financial sense behind it too

The classic counter example to that would be health care
You mean similar to this?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4cvGGxTsQx0

(Video of the first SpaceX attempted landing and explosion).
GOP Implosion updated – follow in real-time as the GOP mortgages its party
HBase: The database big data left behind
Bastiat's petition is well-enough known to be included in his (lengthy) Wikipedia entry.[1]

No, the parent is not "describing either the absolute or the comparative advantage of trade", because they said:

>"If Toms shoes dumps 1,000 pairs of shoes in the city center every week, how the hell would a cobbler stay in business."

and

>"[I]f the U.S. pumps an endless supply of rice into Haiti, how could Haitian rice farmers sell their inventory."

This is basic mercantilism, as described in the 'theory' section of the 'Mercantilism' Wikipedia entry, and more specifically the following points of the theory:

>"That every little bit of a country's soil be utilized for agriculture, mining or manufacturing.
...

That a large, working population be encouraged.
...

That all imports of foreign goods be discouraged as much as possible.
...

That no importation be allowed if such goods are sufficiently and suitably supplied at home."[2]

Cash is a better gift because you get to buy whatever you want, not because 'dumping' goods is bad.

[1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fr%C3%A9d%C3%A9ric_Bastiat#Eco...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mercantilism#Theory
I think it's a shame that the only options we'll likely have are Trump or Clinton. I don't support either.

I'm also continually disappointed with some of the small mindedness I see in Silicon Valley towards people that don't think or believe what the herd does.
Idk. A van with a Wi-Fi antenna sounds fun. I'm excited. Getting some cases of vodka and a gun.
I believe the point was that they draw positive attention to science, not that they do science or improve on scientific methods.

Science classes in school rarely advance anything other than the number of scientists in the world and the lay public's understanding.
Let's Build a Raspberry Pi Cluster
> There was one fundamental mistake made, however, which is that we shouldn't have used channels.
> they make it very hard to prevent message loss. If unbuffered channels are used everywhere, performance plummets unacceptably due to context-switching costs. But using buffered channels means that many messages are in flight at a time, most of which are sitting in channels waiting to be processed.

That's really interesting, I'd love to hear how people overcome similar problems.
Japanese scientists have used skin cells to improve a patient's vision
How come the quality is different when looking at the GIF file and when looking at the default share link?
> (that I can think of right now).

It probably changed peoples reaction to Guy Fawkes masks, but that's about it.
> Right now, millions of people are working hard every day to make a relatively small number of landlords richer and richer. It's unsustainable, and I think some major societal change is coming.

It may be even worse than this scenario, which sort of assumes no/minimum mortgage debt on the property. Imagine a world where the masses toil simply to meet minimum debt service on price-inflated, highly mortgaged housing. You're treading water just to stay alive.
Just answer quick question: do you believe that the Snowden leaks improved people's ability to resist NSA surveillance and increase privacy through technological responses?

Their ability? No, I don't. Did it promote people's inclination to resist the NSA. Certainly. But I would argue that those things would have happened over time anyway. So if Snowden caused any harm, I believe it was likely to be minor and of little consequence.

He wasn't justified because he didn't have to leak it. That simple. He could've just leaked the ones that targeted Americans or showed gross abuse rather than a lot of what we already, as Americans, allowed NSA to do.

Fair enough... But that'a assuming he had the time and means to carefully sift through it all and make those determinations. I believe his argument is that he turned the data over to credible journalists (as opposed to simply dropping it all over pastebins or uploading a torrent) exactly some somebody could go through it and determine which parts to actually publish, and which parts to withhold, so as to avoid serious harm to legitimate intelligence operations.
English Channel timelapse [video]
Very cool project.

Had to stop the music at first. 1990s' western music (pop music that is, can't see anything else there) was... well - bad. Didn't even realize up until now.
Well I tried out Symantec's/Norton's Cloud Storage (25GB freebie) They lock you out.

I expect what Amazon does: Amazon just let me keep the files, but won't let me change aanything when they removed their free ofering.

Dreamhost had 50GB of backup which they no longer offer, their file permissions were so mangled you could traverse and download stuff from a good portion of their clients.
The trend is Chinese companies attacking other companies. Hacking back is not a trend, as of yet.
In a very real sense it's crazy to give people free housing in the world's most expensive locations. And it's kinda unfair too – the only people that get those units are lottery winners.

From the perspective of wanting to do the most good with our limited resources, paying for housing in SF or NYC, let alone SLC, is probably pretty stupid.
" those ongoing operation are Un-American"

Says who? A few of you keep saying that but it's un-American itself to let a tiny, anonymous minority determine what's right for whole country. What exactly is American? I think it takes a consensus or compromise from voting public to determine that.

"many reasonable people, perhaps a majority, in this democracy of ours never had chance to vote or have any say in their creation."

The intelligence services were created by elected representatives in response to a second, World War that killed tens of millions of people. They actually helped end the war sooner. Their existence and general goal, although not all specifics, were repeatedly accepted by Americans. Instrumental in helping us with Cold War. Yes, most of the voting public is fine with the existence of spy agencies going back decades. It was abusive activities that harmed innocent people here and abroad that we fought against. Not surveillance or actions that protected our interests or citizens, though. Almost no protest.

"Then taking into account legality, many consider them a violation of the 4th amendment. "

That's why they were supposed to spy on foreign countries. They don't have 4th Amendment rights any more than they have responsibilities to America under our Constitution. And, yes, there were public discussions about the existence of military and intelligence activities going back decades. Americans knew they existed and were fine with the concept.

Wait, maybe I made a mistake here assuming you're American given your comments. You may be a foreigner who never read a U.S. history book. My apologies if you were referring to your own country where people never had a choice. Americans, on other hand, chose spying repeatedly with a big chunk choosing domestic spying in restricted form. The latter were foolish but the former are matter of public record.
Remote Work Vacation – The Workcation
Kelly Slater's wave: is surfing ready for the 'perfect' wave?
Does it not work for you? It's working perfectly on my iPhone 5 in mobile safari.
I do freelance work, when I am well enough. I am developing a number of web projects. I left San Diego County about a year ago and moved someplace cheaper within California and things are still hard, but it has been some months since anyone hassled me for being homeless. That is partly because this is a nicer area, partly that I look more middle class than I used to.

If you want to help, there is a tip jar on the site. (You can click on $1 and then enter any number you like.) Money is always useful. Promoting my work in some way so I get more traffic would also be appreciated.

Thanks!
I don't think it needs to be depending on Facebook stuff. It fatals out if Facebook is blocked or down.

More and more developers are forgetting that some users won't load all or some of the script tags. I have people linking me stuff like this all the time, and all I see is a blank screen.
Technically the different copies of the buckets aren't "identical" since they may get populated in unserialized ways (they may store data in different orders) but yes they all store the same set of blocks.

Note that I just described the replicated data storage in the blog post. Approximately 24 hours later these volumes get packaged up and erasure coded into a much more efficient storage representation, so the initial replicated writes are just there for high durability and efficient writes while the buckets are mutable.

I'm not sure I understand exactly what your question is but I think it's asking why we use 1GB buckets allocated all over the place rather than just picking a set of disks and filling them up RAID-style?

This is a pretty important point: If we picked X nodes and stored all the same data on them then if we lost one of those nodes we'd only have X-1 other nodes to re-replicate from. This sets up a hotspot in the system and limits how quickly we can re-replicate. This can be a pretty big deal if we lose a machine storing 1PB of data - we need to amortize that reconstruction cost over a large number of NICs and disk spindles (this is covered in more detail in the blog post).

The other advantage of having "small" buckets is that they're a manageable unit for combining into larger volumes when erasure coding, or for tracking partial repair operations, or for garbage collection and compaction when data is deleted.

Seems like it might be worth going into more detail on erasure coding in a future blog post.
I am impressed at how well it's written.
According to my depreciated appengine console, I would not say that Google thinks "App Engine Rocks."
it's the best one, by far.
Your analysis seems largely as expected but this part to me seemed a bit wrong-headed:

>The vast majority though will waste the money on things which benefit them in the short term, but provide no long term economic benefit //

Things like having a TV? Do you have a TV, is it a _waste_ of money too? Would you say most of the people who own TVs would describe them as a waste of money? After you've got a bed, clean water and food, some sort of diversion from the humdrum is probably the next "need" that most people would address. TV can be a benefit, an inspiration, it's just not an obvious direct economic benefit (unless you're running the local TV shop, electrician or repairer).

Part of the problem with providing utilities with an expectation of them being used to create economic benefit is surely that people don't know how to use them for such purposes? Did you address that with your projects - like if you bought this apparatus for this amount you could process millet and run a company earning this amount.

Couple of questions about your electrical mini-grids - was there any cooperative buying, like setting up a TV in a communal building? How was the power being generated?
Is Google App Engine under performing? I wonder why do they would need a fluff marketing piece like this.

I hope they're not in trouble or anything, I have been moving my project from VPS over to GCM for the past year now. I love it.
If you're just saying 'when locking is cheap, fine-grained locks can be easier to deal with vs coarse locks' I can agree with that.
Note that the Tesla car factory in Fremont and the Tesla Gigafactory in Reno are different.
Because working a day job takes approximately 100% of the work capacity (not to mention overall time) most people have available?

Most people don't function on 3 hours of sleep, for one thing. And if 5-7 PM is your between-jobs time, that's all you have to do errands and chores.

Personally, I have a little capacity (2 hours, maybe?) left over before burn-out starts to set in, and I am using it to fix up my house. I could cut that out and live in what I have, but there's no way I have 8 hours available.
That doesn't solve a major problem: Who is to say what these people need? Give them the money, and they decide for themselves.

UCT fits free market theory, including market flexibility (if needs change or the first idea fails, consumers can change their spending much more quickly than donors can change their programs), and promotes democracy and empowering individuals. It also avoids common problems such as donors' bad decisions and their unanticipated consequences, corruption among those controlling distribution of the goods, and perversion of local markets.

As one example, according to a report in Foreign Affairs, the West's focus on AIDS, malaria, and TB, and their relatively enormous market power, took local medical resources away from more standard health care needs such as child birth, and might have resulted in more sickness and deaths than it prevented (IIRC the details of the article from several years go).
>Some were a LAMP stack on a managed hosting service. Some were running as a cron job on someone’s workstation.

All that whiteboard interview pedantry doesn't seem to shield them devs who don't know how to deploy a basic production grade app. But hey they were able to memorize tree inversions before interviews so thats good.
How is hiring a lawyer to defend yourself against legal attacks any different than hiring a "cyber-thug" to defend yourself against technical attacks?
The problem with this is the assumption of the god. God of the gaps argument. Unless the evidence points to it being a god we can not start making claims about it.

Example. You can't disprove god but he is all knowing loving and created the universe. This logic makes me scratch my head. Thinking Why just Why
You'll never be able to please everybody, just look at the WMO and their tropical storm naming methodology. I've actually heard someone complain about a perceived bias in the ethnicity of the names. You wouldn't even be able to use a true random number, because of tetraphobia [0].

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetraphobia
> it does mean they weren't spending all of their time trying to figure out where they were going to sleep or where their next meal was coming from.

This is also a crucial concept in understanding why the poor stay poor: they simply can't afford to spend time and resources on the long term if they need to worry about meeting basic needs on a daily basis.

If you're interested in learning more about this, I would recommend to read Scarcity, a wonderful book that explores this in more detail: http://www.amazon.com/Scarcity-Science-Having-Defines-Lives/...
Change careers like tarzan:

https://sivers.org/tarzan
So, we do all the colonial stuff you mentioned (and plenty more you could have mentioned), and then when someone suggests we provide Universal Basic Income in that same region, we suddenly get a "conscience" about it and say no way, it might go wrong? I'd have to say, that sounds a little off, to me.
> I mean, right now, not 50 years earlier.

I'm saying even the transistor is amazing. Be amazed!

> Do you know why landing a rocket in salt water is bad. I mean, do you really, really know?

I'm not working for SpaceX. Are you?

I didn't design the rocket. I assume they have some idea of what they're doing. They just landed a rocket on a damn barge.
The Cato Institute has a related site called:

http://www.policemisconduct.net/

And there is Photography Is Not A Crime:

https://photographyisnotacrime.com/
Just FYI, I know some great people in Cleveland. West Cleveland is a fine place to hang out and think in reclusion. I've camped out there several times, and if you wanted to stay longer, you could find a decent house to buy for under $20k. I'm sure one could find an extended-stay situation with room and board for $1 a day, or so. The city is relatively walkable. Food is cheap enough. Lots of shit to do.

I so want to do it again, but now I have kids.
Unconditional cash transfers (what is being proposed here) have proven to be more effective than the "dumping" of material aid you're protesting. If you give a village shipments of rice their rice farmers go bankrupt, if you give them cash they can spend it at local businesses or start businesses of their own or import things they couldn't get otherwise. It's also hard to give too much cash (as long as you are distributing it equitably), because if there is excess capital in one place that will only encourage trade.

http://www.poverty-action.org/study/impact-unconditional-cas...
love the simplicity, replacing "youtube" in a url for "gifs". very clever.
1.5% with a 50% reduction and 2%/year growth cap for a single primary residence, transferable if you want to move housing, but not inheritable. This stuff is not difficult from a policy perspective.
And maybe one day they'll build one on Mars
I'm partial to operation takedown which is a pretty solid representation of Kevin mitnick.
I have very mixed feelings about Bill Nye. I've never watched his show. The only time I've ever seen him in action is during his debate with Ken Ham, and that performance made me cringe. (If you want to know why, see the footnote in http://blog.rongarret.info/2015/02/this-is-why-prominent-ath...) More generally, I think he promotes a negative stereotype of scientists by choosing to wear a bow tie.

I just now watched this:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PGRRXKek8G0

and it's just horrible. To my eye, Nye is indistinguishable from a Creationist caricature.

Compare that to how the Mythbusters handled the moon landing conspiracy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wym04J_3Ls0

The Mythbusters actually did real science, and they did it with style and panache and grace. They started with a problem, advanced a hypothesis, designed an experiment (often a series of experiments) analyzed the results, drew conclusions, and often went back and re-did things when a viewer pointed out something they did wrong. That is science. They democratized science in a way that no one else has ever done. A kid watching Mythbusters could come away thinking that science was something that they could do themselves. Ultimately, the Mythbusters advanced science by busting the myth that science can only be done by scientists.
It would be more interesting to compare TTH (Time To Hitler) on different websites. Not sure reddit is a contender. Maybe look over to Fox news.
This is a pretty important point. You can get a very small apartment in Austin, TX, for $500 (and many other non-SF cites). If you're able to, spending ~$16 a day versus living in a van makes a lot of sense. Completely different if you don't have that $16.
> Who knows what unintended side effects of UBI will be?

Care to make a guess?
New Incentives does conditional cash transfers (CCTs) in West Africa. CCTs have a lot of research behind them as the parent comment noted.

GD's one-time, large transfers help achieve concrete benefits. Super excited to see the basic income experiment in East Africa evolve.
One consequence is unbalanced justice.

In the case of mandatory binding arbitration, as a citizen you will be denied public access to prior cases. The monkey court that is arbitration does not require the arbiter to be impartial, the arbitration is not required to follow the rule of law, and the previous cases are secret to everyone but the corporation you must challenge.

In arbitration you face a biased arbiter, secret proceedings, with secret results. You face unlimited financial liability and you don't know what a good argument will be, as all prior arguments are secret.

We won't the consequence of a secret court system run for and by corporations for a long time.