skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Most of the non-working are the poor. 60% of the poor don't work at all, and 89% don't work full time. See table 3.

http://www.census.gov/content/dam/Census/library/publication...

Are you claiming that there are more than 15.6 million non-working rich people? What do you mean by "rich"?

Also, 45% of poor people own their own home. Who is evicting them, the taxman?

http://www.census.gov/prod/2008pubs/h150-07.pdf

Lastly, disability fraud as a substitute for welfare is a huge problem that no one is attempting to solve. NPR did an expose on it: http://apps.npr.org/unfit-for-work/
It may be that the candidate doesn't want to waste time. There's a big difference between putting in some time on weekends and evenings for an important work issue that arises, vs doing some homework assignment that might not even get looked at.

I think this is one of the reasons Ms McDowell suggest doing the take home project later in the process, only once a candidate is promising, with a higher pass rate.

If you're using it simply to screen (i.e., if your pass rates are low), and the take home demands are substantial, you are likely wasting a huge amount of candidates time, in aggregate. This can legitimately harm a company's reputation among developers.
Let's take banking as an analogy: is it perfect? No, it definitely isn't. But it is 'good enough' to power worldwide commerce.

So until these systems reach reliability parity with 'ordinary' banking we'll see reduced trust. But once a system gets launched that has staying power and that appears to have made the right decisions in the founding phase you can expect more and more commerce to ride on them.

When more commerce is involved the 'bounty' on finding a flaw increases and so any system that carries a substantial amount of commerce and that keeps on standing can be presumed audited to that level.

So it really remains to be seen, which group comes up with a system solid enough to carry a substantial fraction of the worlds commerce. Bitcoin is interesting because even after a couple of years it is still standing, which all by itself is impressive.

Will we ever know for sure? I suspect we will not because this is akin to proving a negative, just like you can never be 100% sure that you've found the last bug in a system. But at some point the premium will be so high that failure to exploit the system should give good confidence that all avenues for exploitation have been exhausted and that even if the system still contains flaws those flaws may not be exploitable. It's an asymptotic curve.
I actually wonder where most police officers end up working, we all have the picture of large police departments like LAPD, CPD or NYPD where one can have a long and distinguished career with medals and awards but I'm leaning on the fact that most police officers in the US are employed by small police and sheriff departments that don't exactly have the same resources as the NYPD.

Police, EMT's and Firefighters are underpaid globally, and in the US somewhat especially and the US police has somewhat a long history of potential abuse by the police (tho we do need to take it's size into account), I don't think that what is effectively a tax on police officers would result in any beneficial results.
This is not that much different than paying teachers based on standardized test scores which is a policy that to outsiders seems smart but once you dig even a little under the surface you realize how idiotic it is.

Malpractice insurance will do nothing but to drive even more people away from law enforcement, it will also actually hinder the investigative and disciplinary process regarding true abuse cases because insurance companies love nothing more than settle.

Malpractice insurance for cops will turn any abuse complaint be it true or false into a standardized pay out process just like virtually any other insurance claim out there, yes there will be some investigation by insurance adjusters but like in most cases it would be superficial and just for due diligence and not for the truth.

Malpractice insurance makes as much sense as privatizing the police force, the police must be kept public because that whom they serve, they do not protect the state, they do not protect the city, they serve the people and that's what make them different from the military and other law enforcement organizations.
Chris Osborn is the best!
Poor people, which was exactly my point.

http://www.marketplace.org/2013/11/04/wealth-poverty/income-...
You can still buy those. But probably not at a price that you are prepared to pay.
Not true: many lawyers work entire careers in the human rights field. Many modern law schools have produced these types of lawyers. It's just not as glamorous as what people have in mind for a lawyer, and thus not as publicized.
Don't want to sound ungrateful, really, but sharing a little more info about the book "before" asking for my e-mail would be nice. A table of contents in the book download page, maybe a small summary.
While personally I would prefer a functional approach, I take your point that a much more restrictive imperative setting would also be considerably better.
FAX TO EMAIL RESELLER BUSINESS OPPORTUNITY
All law is ultimately backed by the ability to enforce it, it is just a little less obvious to those who have grown up as a member of the privileged majority in a prosperous, liberal western-style democracy (the privilege that I am referring to is precisely that of growing up in etc.) It is so unobvious to some of them that they turn to a fanciful version of libertarianism as the imagined solution to their mostly-imagined slights.
I haven't seen any policeman at there. They are poor because their only income is donation. They are students without families. Even they have a new place, it won't change.
I agree that there could be a future for it. I just haven't seen anything demonstrating it's market viability. So far it feels like VR has been all talk and development and less so people rushing out to get headsets in mass droves.
I think you just pointed out the problem with vocational education. Going to law school is a vocational education, as is getting an education to become a mechanic. Vocational educations take years (sometimes almost a decade) to complete. From the time you start your vocational education to the time you finish it, the market can drastically change (see Law and nursing). That lucrative job that you thought was waiting for you...isn't. What then?

What happens to mechanics if cars become fully automated? Will we need that many mechanics?
"I suspect there's a lot of restaurant businesses with very conservative owners."

That's probably most restaurants, given how shitty the margins in that business are. An owner can ill afford to make a mistake.
IMHO the wrong thing about most startups (no offence), is that they all want to change the world. Everyone wants to redefine an existing market as that all previous guys who tried to do it were idiots or didn't know a thing about what they were doing. It's not a bad thing to be ambitious but don't think you are the only special in the universe.
It's interesting how in China they kinda leapfrogged credit cards all together (they still exist, but they're not ubiquitous). Here it's either cash or payments through phones and QR codes using Alipay/Wechat/etc. It's pretty fantastic and there is very little lock in like b/c these aren't hardware-centric technologies. Just download an app, connect it to a bank account and you're good to go (both merchant and customer). So competitors are free to disrupt all they want.

Meanwhile parasites like Visa skim an insane 3% off of the whole US retail economy. How this isn't banned by the government is beyond me... I'm sure it rivals the sales tax in some jurisdictions.
Many of these horrors are individual failures. If you believe it's a minority of cops who do such bad things, making them buy insurance or bonding would wash the thugs out of the system. It would become uneconomical for them to continue. The same with prosecutors and other people in the CJ system: Open them to tort claims, but make them pay up front, by requiring bonding.
2016 deductibles can be $6,850 for an individual and $13,700 for a family.

Of course the Medicaid limit is higher for the family.
Shut the fuck up! The hivemind is speaking. Non-neoliberal perspectives are terrible and advocacy for them will be punished by context-free links and downvotes.
> But then also: no-one will ever trust the concept.

I think they will. In time, one of us will be proven right.
Here are some newer numbers: http://www.mckay-brothers.com/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/201...

CME -> NY4 latency is now slightly higher than that allowed by the speed of light.
Reminds me of when Craig Newmark did a stint with Veterans Affairs, becoming a real evangelist for the agency and getting into the nitty gritty of office IT:

http://craigconnects.org/2009/11/why-craigslist-founder-join...

http://craigconnects.org/2013/04/veterans-disability-claims-...
Maybe because except for the 1% most of the population feels the negative effects of it?

A Bernie Sanders meme isn't reality. Vastly more than 1% are doing fine.
Applied Economic Philosphy: Brief Background on the DAO
Western-style poverty (i.e. little work + wealth transfers adding up to approx $15-20k/year) doesn't kill.

We have various randomized control trials which demonstrate this.

Giving poor people money doesn't significantly affect health: http://m.qje.oxfordjournals.org/content/131/2/687

The medicaid expansion similarly had no statistically significant effect on health, though it does make people feel better: https://www.nber.org/oregon/

The RAND experiment back in the day had similar results based on variation in coinsurance levels: http://www.rand.org/health/projects/hie.html

Why do you keep spreading myths?

Now, you may have discovered some correlations between poverty and bad health. As correlation is not causation, and an RCT is the best way to check. So apparently the correlation is caused by something else - i.e., some third factor which makes people both poor and unhealthy.
Ultimately, though, aren't you helping soldiers stay safer so they can continue to kill others? I'm not saying that in a judgmental way, but that is the reality of war and military-related work.
And thus lets charge 5x more and gave this money to the government appointed but not government owned company. Hardly a justification.
I'd call their drm opt-in, not opt-out.
In the European Commissiom aka the public sector the only test you take to go into any position even clerical is an IQ test. I can't comprehend this it should be the other way around. Since maximizing profit is not so important but serving the public is.
Profit margin is very hard to compute on an individual item. How do you allocate capital cost, cost of labor, r&d, etc? For instance, a recipe may consist of ingredients that cost a few dollars but it may include the work of the chef in crafting the recipe, capital depreciation of the equipment used, space allocation of the restaurant and a million other factors that are though to explicitly account for.
Why Every Entrepreneur Needs a Startup Co-Founder
No food, no teachers, violence in failing Venezuela schools
Ask HN: Is there a good book on IT/Silicon Valley history?
Whenever I read about a technology company or a smart mind in the field, and I surf Wikipedia, I am most often left with a feeling of a very small tech world: some of the most interesting technology we use today has been invented in a garage and then been acquired by a "big tech corporation" which itself was likely been founded in another garage. And people involved in those fields are well known amongst each other.
Of course, the valley plays a big role in that field which leads to even fewer distances between the "stories" and thus, more interconnection between them.

Since I love to read inspiring biographies, I wonder if there is a biography of the industry-a book about the who is who of tech and/or the valley which would make a delightful and inspiring read.

Any ideas?
That not how international law works.
International law doesn't really "exist", it's a convoluted assortment of treaties that were signed and ratified by different countries and if you and another country signed the same treaty it gives lawyers the legal framework to work in because in this case all parties have agreed to play by the same rules(there is a slightly different between being a signatory and ratification which gives lawyers a weaker and a stronger argument but that's besides the point).
Now while you might want to hyperbolically claim that the US has violated international law, the state department and the white house council would strongly disagree with you and they will be right.
People throw the words international law and war crimes way too easily these days, and while I do believe that they believe that a country has violated international law or has committed war crimes they more often than not do so on moral reasons not on legal ones, and more often than not they are wrong.
The tax is not clear in both cases, but it is present in both cases. The difference is in one case (Nova Scotia, in this example) you walk up to the counter with $37.64 and pay 15% tax on the $27.65 portion because the $9.99 feminine hygiene products are exempt; you don't work out the tax in your head because you can never remember which items are exempt, you figure it out by looking at your receipt and see you paid $4.15 in tax. Meanwhile, in the Netherlands you walk to the counter with 43.38€ worth of goods and you pay precisely 43.38€. You again look at your receipt and see that you paid 2.46€ in tax (6% rate for food and medicine).

Certainly, people try to argue that Europeans don't realize they are paying tax, but this is simply false. In both cases, people know they are paying taxes; even foreigners realize it. The only real difference is that it is trivial in Europe to work out how much money will be paid for the goods picked up before getting to the checkout and there is no need to have memorized the tax code. The only thing you need to be able to do is add and you will know how much money you will need to pay.
I think you're correct :D
I believe ethereum is dead, but I also believe that a better implementation of the idea has merits. So long term I'm optimistic but it would have been better if DAO had been a bit more conservative before taking on substantial outside involvement. Overselling something is never good.
> "What, what would those characterists be that you've pointed out? I missed them."

National origin, gender, and profession. I believe I've mentioned them a few times.

> "I'd say with profiling you spend LESS money"

Which is why I pointed out that since nearly all terrorists we know about are men, your logic is that women should get less scrutiny in TSA lines then men.

My logic is that if you are right, then gender-based screening is the easiest to implement, with the strongest correlation. So that's how you should start, because it gives you the biggest gains for very little cost.

> "Illegal doesn't mean much with regards to the actual practice."

I don't deny that. Just like you don't deny there are cases where screening was used to enforce racism and xenophobia.

But now you've lowered the bar. Now you say that people screen "even subconsiously, but usually consciously too". I agree with that.

What are your historical precedents for showing that those cases of illegal screening are more effective than not screening?

And you still haven't mentioned how you might evaluate if screening on the basis of ethnicity, religion, or other protected category is effective.
Thanks!
Shot on a Canon 5D, with a very battered 70-200L F4, and a 16-35 F2.8.

Have a selection from the smartphone that came out very nicely too, surprisingly!
Yes, mechanics to build the machines to repair them in a fully automatic fashion.

For a thought experiment on this, check out http://thelightsinthetunnel.com/ which explores the idea that eventually humans will stop inventing because we'll have everything we need
Sounds really inefficient (and that's ignoring the eye strain, headaches, sweaty headbands and nausea).

I'll use vim and you can wave your arms around like Cumberbatch-era Sherlock with your mumble-powered magic hat and we'll see who's the fastest!
Thanks for that! So I was looking at the one for Montezuma's Revenge:
https://github.com/mgbellemare/Arcade-Learning-Environment/b...

The reward seems to be only the game score which I believe is meant to be problematic for this game because your score doesn't go up very often (so you have to perform a lot of actions to get any feedback)? The lives are recorded but aren't part of the "get reward" method...are the lives factored into decision making somewhere else? Seems like knowing you just lost a life would really help decision making for such a game.
Fantastic photos, thank you for sharing
Great post. Thanks!
+1 for a Dockerfile to quickly install everything together.
The problem is deeper, this idea of contracts enforced by computer code written by humans ( = full of bugs) is a dumb one.
> India's Jammu and Kashmir

Except there was no ethnic cleansing by the Tibetans like in Kashmir.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethnic_cleansing_of_Kashmiri_H...
Quite a few of my dreams seem to be slightly scary situations (dangerous behavior of other drivers while I'm driving, for example).

This makes me think that we have a "scenario generation" engine as part of our brains, and so we're being presented with novel experiences (often "wild and unrealistic") to react to.

So this seems to be a pretty big step beyond the idea of presenting previously seen situations (which sounds like a really good first step, of course).
> US/UK/France are particularly bad in this, constantly getting involved in all sorts of international diatribes while rarely (if ever) actually picking up the tab when things go to hell.

To be fair, US got dragged into open conflict in ME and surrounding region because Saddam invaded Saudi. And Afg because of 9/11.

There are other nations that cause troubles outside of their border and don't pick up the tab when things go bad.

-China in Korean War, helping North Korea survive.

-Japan and Korean peninsula. Japan's colonization of Korea in 1910 ultimately led to creation of the monster called North Korea.

-Indonesian invasion of East Timor

-Germany stopped causing trouble internationally only after the entire nation was put under foreign occupation for decades after WW2.

Pretty much any nation is capable of causing trouble internationally. Most just can't do it at the scale of US/UK/France, because they don't have the ability, not because they are somehow better members of international community.
> IIRC there is evidence rats replay their experiences...

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

for anyone that's interested.
Are you aware of the primary purpose of the Department of DEFENSE?
I am reminded of the engineering triangle, and like most code, the DAO code looks FC optimized.

There is a logistical asymmetry. DAO had to allocate resources between engineering the software and selling the idea to investors.

There is also an economic asymmetry. DAO can only use a small portion of the total fund to cover the expenses related to code quality. Funds for future projects have to be retained. Returns on investment have to be provided. Conversely, the attacker can potentially cover their expenses with all of the DAO funds. For the DAO, $1,000,000 of defense is a significant portion of operating expenses and has low marginal return. For the attacker, $1,000,000 is an investment in potential 70x return.

That's enough to attract sophisticated actors even up into the state level. But even ordinary fintech could pull it off.
Glad I never touched alts. My bitcoin are safe and increasing
> Labyrinth? I have a feeling that Doom is next.

This would be really interesting to see. I'm curious if Google would avoid this game though since that the media would likely have a field day reporting about a murderous Google developed AI if they did this. Technically we already have this in games anyway though (e.g. bots in FPS games).
The parties of any contract are free to amend the contract. You're referring to a situation in which one party of a two party contract seeks to exploit the terms.

In this case, which has an enourmas number of parties to the contract, 99.9% agree to amend the contract.

I don't thinks much legal precedent for a contract with thousands of parties, but it also means that there's no simple legal "source of truth" to the contract.
I am not sure that the author isn't confusing America's wealth disparity with differential treatment of intelligence (which still seems to remain undefined).

Sure, those with high SAT scores have greater access to the means for economic success, but I don't think that is because of any intrinsic difference in high-SATers and the run of the mill dummy. Rather, I'd suggest it is due to the winner-take-all nature of the current American society.
That is a Western view of things where spiritual and material realms are different. Dharmic religions consider the spiritual realm to be a superset of the material, not separate from it.
There is nothing wrong with doing a job for money.
This is why faster confirmations eg. Litecoin mean nothing. It's computing power and time.
Accidental Empires
The real question is whether smart contracts can ever be safe enough so that they have real world applications.
Dupe of https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11923933.
How successful were those companies?
Can we please keep HN from becoming r/politics? I know it's too late now, but every single post even remotely involving government now turns into a USA IS EVIL type discussion and it's very irrelevant.
EB-1: You must have been employed outside the United States in the 3 years preceding the petition for at least 1 year by a firm or corporation and you must be seeking to enter the United States to continue service to that firm or organization.

O-1A: very hard to get in business without either a letter from a senator/governor or a long history of speaking gigs (according to my immigration lawyer).
I don't claim to know what the fair price for the .com registry. I will say this though the hosting isn't free. There are millions of requests per second across all networks from all across the world. They must respond with low latency. The major registries are nearly always under DDoS attack. There is a reason verisign has some of the best DDoS protection.

All the data centers across the world, the network connectivity, the DDoS hardware, servers, custom software and staff to run it all must be expensive.
Microsoft is nowhere near dead, not in the short to medium term anyway - and if you're a startup, that is all that matters. MS can put a 100 million dollars into a product sphere and not bat an eye if it fails within a few years (see Nokia). I wouldn't discount them anytime soon.
Except Henry VIII destroyed all monasteries and outlawed all monasticism in his realms. I'm sure there are Buddhist monasteries and seminaries (or whatever they are called) elsewhere in Tibet and China.
I agree with this and it's baked into what I said. I wasn't referring to his use of labels.