skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Socialism is state ownership of "the means of production".

Socialism favors social ownership of the means of production; different branches of socialism prefer different mechanisms for this. These can broadly be split into top-down models (planned economy/state ownership models) and bottom-up models (council communism, etc.) It also includes models which are somewhere in between, like economic democracy (which tends to include elements of top-down ownership by the public through the state, by recognizing broader class of public stakeholders in firms whose interests must be served in addition to private shareholders, as well as elements of bottom-up socialism in empowering employees as represented stakeholders in firms as well.)

The latter seems to be the dominant (though not exclusive -- the group is diverse) focus of modern democratic socialists; Sanders seems to fit in this group as a reformist rather than revolutionary [0] proponent of democratic socialism pursuing (as is common among reformist democratic socialism) social democracy as a incremental step on the road to socialism in the economic democracy form.

> Americans (and pretty much all Westerners) are generally uniformly pro-capitalist.

Americans and most Westerners are generally supporters of the modern mixed economy, which is as much a reaction against the 19th century system for which the term "capitalism" was coined as anything else. That said, its a reaction which superficially retains the large-scale structures of capitalist relations while greatly altering the scope and nature of the property rights which are the defining feature of capitalism.

There are proponents of capitalism in America and the West; they are economic reactionaries.

> Regulated capitalism is a fait accompli and no one is challenging it because it works.

Plenty of people are, in fact, challenging the modern mixed economy (what you call "regulated capitalism") -- from both the laissez-faire capitalist perspective and a variety of different socialist perspectives, among others.

[0] in economic structure terms, if not necessarily in terms of the structure of electoral politics and their relation to private business, the latter of which is the focus of the "political revolution" Sanders often refers to.
Using paravirtualized devices is best practice, but a combination of PV and HVM ends up being faster for many operations - see http://www.brendangregg.com/blog/2014-05-07/what-color-is-yo... . Unfortunately HVM mode brings along QEMU which is a relatively large amount of code, though the bugs in QEMU have tended to be lower impact than bugs in the hypervisor itself.

While the risk from QEMU can largely be mitigated by running QEMU in a device model stub domain, a new mode called PVH (currently being rewritten) should theoretically be best in terms of performance, resource usage, and attack surface. See http://wiki.xen.org/wiki/Xen_Project_Software_Overview#PVH

pygrub runs in the context of the dom0 and should not be used with untrusted guests. Both grub legacy and grub2 work with PV mode now and there is no need for pygrub.
> I had never heard of "BitShares" before, and I'm an active researcher in this area.

How long have you been researching this area? I've never invested or participated in the project, but Bitshares or one of the other Larimer/Hoskins DAC projects/renames/reincarnations filled most of the top search results for "Distributed Autonomous Corporation" and "Distributed Autonomous Organization" for several years, up to this past year (indeed, I'm surprised that Ethereum's success has pushed out almost all trace of the project from the top search results).

They promoted it pretty heavily, so you either are very new to the field or you didn't spend much time looking around for actual implementations of the technology.

In fact, to the best of recollection, Larimer actually coined the phrase "distributed autonomous corporation". And Larimer and Bitshares are even featured prominently in the Wikipedia article on "Distributed Autonomous Corporations" (and it's not a new addition to the WP article).

Here's an earlier piece from 2013 discussing DACs and Larimer by none other than Vitalik Buterin himself, back when he was a writer:

https://bitcoinmagazine.com/articles/bootstrapping-a-decentr...

Also, most of Larimer's criticisms in this piece address problems with The DAO's incentives. If the DAO gets those wrong, it won't matter how well it's marketed.

That said, I do agree that these kinds of projects frequently fail or succeed for social, not technological, reasons (indeed, that's one of the main thrusts of the article).
A Clever New Kind of Intersection Kicks Risky Left Turns to the Curb
I'm glad you mentioned that, because I had just turned it to "No" while reviewing that page. Now I'm confused.
I don't think that's what he's trying to say. He's probably referring to the fact that unless you're black/poc/whatever you're not allowed to have an opinion; it's the blacks/pocs/whatevers that are making him shut up, not the other way around.
Engagement booster to your Trello board
The internet of every single thing must be stopped
Atari Pong Project
Hi Hackernews!
I am working with a couple friends in a cool project codenamed pong project. I just wanted to share this with you. If you are interested in this project and want to know more just let me know! Enjoy.
https://youtu.be/gTBcxr9KBuQ
The "email server" situation has received a lot of air time, so interesting to see some quantification of it. It will surely remain a hot button issue politically, I won't wade into that.

The relevant part of the story would center around the theme "security is hard". Avoiding such a high stakes endeavor seems a good idea, nonetheless the lessons about security apply to anyone running a personal mail server which is something I have been doing.

Turning on encryption, running behind a firewall, etc., seem like normal SOP and I do that. But it's hard to imagine meeting the way "over and above" requirements for securing a server for a high-level government official. Boggles my mind that anyone would take that on unless really knowledgeable about all the necessary procedures and having adequate administrative backup.

Definitely a bad place to be in the shoes of the folks who'd set up that system. Glad not to be there but worth learning from unfortunate high-profile mistakes.
There is a public interest test that could be applied (and is, albeit imperfectly, with the "right to be forgotten").

If said nanny said something 20 years ago and has since changed her views completely it is not really relevant - people's opinions change. If she has actually killed children is very very relevant.
I agree. I feel this points towards the limits of linguistic-based technology. Relying just on text strings to find correlations/matches is not enough. What I wonder is: why don't recommendation engines go beyond and try to cluster entities by more sophisticated means? It must be possible to determine that, in this case, the person involved was not clustered -not 'close enough'- to the universe of entities related to white supremacists. Relying just on words/names will lead to this kinds of results, specially where ambiguity is involved (the person's name is unfortunately very common).
Do you think they could have raised ~150 million USD by selling 12% of the existing ETH? I suspect $150 million couldn't be raised by selling all the ETH.

It's disingenuous to take the current ETH-USD conversion rate based on a relatively low trading volume and imply that's what the DAO is worth, especially when so much ETH was bought so cheaply.
It's worth noting that Android is using SELinux in recent versions for system hardening and as part of the sandboxing model.

See: https://source.android.com/security/selinux/

While I agree usability is suboptimal on servers, there are definitely environments it can excel in.
Doesn't matter if you can't get cars on the road.
For desktop Linux, SELinux is indeed difficult to use on a day-to-day basis. To the point that there's no way I'd consider using it.

However, it is working great for Android. Where all apps are already sandboxed, and you don't have to worry about the user installing some app that will use a new system call, or try to touch random files on the system.
How is two individuals doing what makes sense for themselves not a free market? Free market doesn't mean altruistic
LOOTERS BLOCK ALL OUR EFFORTS TO RECOVER £300M ABACHA'S LOOT----FG
Did all 7486 William Johnsons on LinkedIn have that sent out to their contacts?

The top William Johnson on my LinkedIn page is black. I wonder if the algorithm cared about the race of the guy in the photo before sending out the mail. In some ways that would be even worse.
OpenAI Team Update
Unless of course no person checked it. Might this be, and I am wildly hypothesizing, an experiment with algorithmic content creation?
Well, that's splitting hairs, isn't it?

If I run a pizza parlor, and somebody describes my restaurant as "selling flour, water and cheese", should I loudly object "No, in fact I take those ingredients and process them into something else that I sell!"
Unfortunately, Boing Boing has gotten increasingly clickbaity in the past few years, and Cory Doctorow in particular has a strong tendency to write about the story he would have enjoyed reading instead of the one that was actually published, up to and including lying outright if it makes a more exciting article. (E.G., the 2014 article "Small Town Sheriff Buys Tank," which opens "Rural counties across Indiana have been purchasing Afghanistan-surplus tanks with gunner turrets..." It turns out he's talking about armored trucks with no weapons.)

I'm not sure if he's doing it on purpose or if he's having genuine issues distinguishing boring facts from exciting fiction, but either way Boing Boing shouldn't be trusted at all. Shame, as they used to be quite good.
If you try it will get easier quickly. What is a fearful burden to many becomes a place of ease for you, and a whole new population of people is suddenly available to speak to, like learning a new language.
Don't talk to cops indeed. They had a meandering 5-hour conversation and they still had nothing to go on, but ended up arresting and convicting him of murder for having mentioned a medicinal tea and because his memories of the hours surrounding the time of the murder (two years earlier) were fuzzy. All the while the guy had no idea he was even being interrogated!
At this point when people reflexively sh*t on Stephen Wolfram in HN threads, I reflexively assume they're just piling on, don't actually know who he is, and have never used any of his company's software (except maybe for some class in college where they struggled with it for homework in which they were required to use it).

I'm not above such things myself, sometimes I can't help myself when people are just a little too worshipful and idealizing of people like RMS or ESR. But the Wolfram comments are always so content-free that it just sounds like people having knee-jerk emotional responses to the guy based purely on other peoples' knee-jerk emotional responses.

Seriously, reflexively shitting on Stephen Wolfram in content-free HN posts is like the new "obligatory XKCD" of HN, not unlike hot grits or petrified Natalie Portman jokes got to be on Slashdot back in the day. I really don't get it.

I don't have strong feelings about the guy either way. Yes, he can come across as full of himself in a lot of his writings. But I don't ever get this visceral level of loathing from people being narcissistic, and I honestly don't know how anyone else does either. That's a reason to dislike and/or ignore someone, not a reason to reflexively post about how much you despise someone in literally EVERY SINGLE THREAD that has anything at all to do with Wolfram (the guy, the company, or its products). Seriously: I just don't get it guys, I just don't get it. AFAIK he's never hurt anyone or said anything about anyone or anything that was hateful or damaging to anything but his own image.
My favorite - if you don't like somebody, give them an endorsement for water fall project methodologies.
It's questionable whether QNX has any advantages over a Linux kernel anymore, and BB10's application APIs were unremarkable. I've used Meego, and it's a nice tablet Linux, but it has nothing like the userland innovation of Android, with a unified managed language runtime for both apps and system middleware. Both Android and iOS created new app APIs, and new UI/graphics stacks on top of open source kernels, and new multimedia stacks. They both went much farther than "a nice tablet Linux."

While Nokia had the resources to succeed in smartphones, and a unique market position with S40 that would have been even stronger but for some of Elop's decisions, I don't think one can claim Meego would have been a slam-dunk. None of the efforts to mobile-ize Linux that have been short of the kind of rethink of the userland that went into Android have gone very far. Tizen, Jolla, Meego, and Canonical's mobile products are all variations on the theme of incremental changes to Linux, all with about the same outcomes.
Your links cites a report that itself gets its numbers from the "Global Trade Alert," which is an org that aggregates a variety of trade-related actions published by the governments of each country. Only a fraction of these are actually related to governments being protectionist. A huge number of these "actions" appear to be petitions by companies inside a country for trade investigations against other companies or nations. Another big chunk appear to be listings of every law enacted that gives even a few million to some factory in a given nation. Not unsurprisingly, the aggregator just lists a bunch of state laws in the US.

The fact that America, with its very transparent political/legislative/corporate-grievances system would be recorded more often by this aggregator, is not surprising. In other words, this aggregator is going to be biased to record more trade-related events coming from more transparent nations that have more corporations located inside of them, and whose corporations will tend to try to resolve their trade disputes in the courts.

But I guess you couldn't be bothered to investigate the numbers when you could just cite BusinessInsider.
Another 100 klocs of code before my first 100 klocs of code? That wouldn't have been possible...
I also got tripped up by that. I eventually decided to go with "yes" to mean "don't show my info". It would be interesting if someone with a smaller employer could test, though.
Well I'm not american so I'm not hardwired TO SUE SUE SUE THREATEN TO SUE.
Hearing about a Clojure project being dropped feels like a slap in the face. I only wonder if it was more of a political decision.
>> Ah, the myth of the expert investor. Time and again, it's been proven that the experts don't pick stocks better than an index fund.

"Myth" and "proven" are interesting words to use. Your citation doesn't support the conclusion that experts are proven to perform worse than index funds. What your citation supports is a claim that it is very difficult to beat the market.

I see this zeitgeist expressed on Hacker News very frequently, as though we can't simply look at the numbers and find out if there are experts capable of beating the market consistently.

In point of fact, whether or not a fund performs better than index funds has nothing to do with whether or not it's managed, but rather with how it is managed. You've made a falsifiable claim here, so let's pursue that:

>> If they did, managed funds would do better than index funds.

Pick a timeline, ideally one that seems rigorous enough for consistency. How about 15 years?

The PRPFX and JENSX funds have both beaten the S&P 500's average annual returns over a 15 year timeline. [1]

You might say that 15 years is not long enough to be sure, so let's go with 20 years.

The legendary Renaissance Technologies Medallion fund averaged a whopping 71.8% annual return between 1994 and 2014, which trivializes the S&P 500's ~7.4% during that time. [2]

How about 30 years, you ask? In that case, Baupost Group has enjoyed a 19% average annual return, soundly defeating the S&P 500's ~7.3% average annual return over the same time span. [3]

How many of these can we find?

Bridgewater's PureAlpha had an 18% average annual return between 1991 and 2011 [4].

Farallon Capital had a 13.4% average annual return for 27 years, between 1985 and 2012 [5].

This list goes on. One could look at this and say, "but index funds beat most actively managed funds" but that is not at all the same thing as claiming it is a provable fact that experts cannot beat index funds.

We do not gasp in awe and terror when software developers are capable of actually writing a for loop despite wide reports that most candidates are unable to complete FizzBuzz in an interview. Successful programming is not a "myth." In the same way, we should not act as though it is impossible to beat the market just because it is difficult and requires effort.

---

[1]: http://www.marketwatch.com/story/this-is-how-a-mutual-fund-c...

[2]: http://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2015-06-16/how-an-exc...

[3]: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB100014240527487041677045752584...

[4]: http://nymag.com/news/business/wallstreet/ray-dalio-2011-4/i...

[5]: http://www.forbes.com/sites/kerryadolan/2012/10/23/californi...
Ah yep, true. I'd forgotten you can still get the saddle effect from higher-order derivatives, the Hessian eigenvalues aren't enough to characterise it.

I was thinking of examples like (x-y)^2 at zero, although I guess that's still a local minimum, just not a unique local minimum in any neighbourhood.
Peter Theil Secretly Funding Hulk Hogan's Lawsuits Against Gawker
Of course you have no reason to believe anyone's story. Don't forget that the same thing was said about police brutality for decades until we started seeing more and more footage as evidence.

It's hard to imagine and even notice the racism and sexism that happens today if you're not on the receiving end of it, no doubt (not to make any guesses about your race or gender, of course).

Perhaps a relateable situation will be the denial and disbelief about CIA and NSA scandals until more information came out. Not saying believe everything you hear, but don't be so eager to dismiss a story merely because you do not see/know/experience what another part does.
The web is simply a comedy of errors and agendas.

- LinkedIn sends the wrong guy's network a libelous e-mail

- Slate reports on said wrongdoing and has to issue corrections about the details [1]

- Turns out the author is a writer with a play to hawk [2]

- And the original 'White Supremacist' gets still more press than most of us want he and his organization to receive.

It all represents everything that is wrong with the web in a single post.

From the article's footnotes:

[1] *Correction, May 25, 2016: This article originally misspelled David Sacks’ last name. It also misstated that his birthday party cost $125 million. It took place in a house then being sold for $125 million. (Return.)

[2] Will Johnson is a teacher and writer based in New York City. His newest play, Blue Balls, will premiere at the Labute New Theater Festival in St. Louis this July.
I have some stairways I must light up and they need to light up instantly for safety reasons. I make sure one of the bulbs in the fixture is incandescent, and CFL/LED the rest.
But if i shipped it as a "browser extension" i would need to make multiple versions for each browser, and it wouldn't work on most mobile devices...

And even as an app it's not that good. It's very single-purpose, there aren't really any "settings" that need to be saved, an app for this would be overkill.

As a website, it's quick to find on any device (desktop, laptop, phone, my damn TV!), it's extremely fast to install (if it takes more than a second to load on home internet i've done something wrong), has little to no footprint on the disk of the device, and does one thing and does it well.
The importance of email send time
The big difference is that nothing about Dockerfiles implies that the processes they perform to build an image are deterministic or repeatable. Will a build step that runs `curl https://github.com/something/whatever` do the same thing in six months that it does today? Docker doesn't help with that at all. Nix improves determinism by (almost) guaranteeing that if you build the same nix expression six months from now, you'll get exactly the same dependencies, all the way down to glibc. Either that or the build will just fail, if remote dependencies aren't downloadable anymore, which is always tons of fun.
Time to start building discrete transistor CPUs? This discrete 6502 project was posted here recently:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11703596

It's far too slow for most uses, but that's mostly because NMOS logic doesn't handle the high capacitance well. NMOS logic uses MOSFETs as constantly enabled pull-up resistors, so they can't be very strong pull-ups or power consumption would be too high. I expect a CMOS design would be able to run much faster, especially with high voltage and the smallest transistors available.

Individual transistors can be sampled and destructively tested, and the order they are placed can be randomized to make it harder to subvert the circuit by replacing them with microcontrollers.

That leaves RAM, which is far too bulky to build from discrete transistors. But you could encrypt the ram in hardware, and mirror it across multiple chips each encrypted with different keys, and check they all read back the same once decrypted. The same could be done with mass storage devices. EDIT -- on second thoughts this will not defend against replay attacks within the storage device. I'm not sure if reliable detection of a malicious storage device is even possible without having some known good storage.
Their response time to this sort of thing is dreadful. If their algorithm is this inaccurate and potentially harmful then they need to be responding within at least 3.75 hours to the reporter and within the day they should have a correction that goes out the door.

I wish that they had been sued in this case. There's nothing like losing lots of money on lawyers and damages to drive positive change in most large companies. Pity it has to be that way, but it was a calculated risk that nobody would have their reputation harmed by this dodgy algorithm.
The truly scary part for me is that I might have missed one little thing that will come back and bite me. I have two RedHat boxes because a vendor requires them for software[1]. Luckily, neither needs to service internet clients.

1) the same vendor that feels a 752 Mbyte SQL file constitutes a patch
> But over two years, what would the extra $200 get you in terms of CPU options?

It gets you to do the math.

The $100 estimate was based on a scenario where the AMD product ran 100W hotter and ran all year long with a heavy workload.

In reality, the comparable offer from Intel runs only 10W hotter, and a normal workload, at best, only costs some cents per year.

After all those years saving money going with the best and cheaper offering from AMD, the money you save gets you more cash to upgrade your computer.

Because economic matter.