skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
That's not what he's proposing at all. There is a whole paragraph in the article about how Romer is not a libertarian and recognizes the importance of rules. But some rules are good and some are bad. The electric utility example is a good one: price controls are very popular in third world countries, but just about the worst way to meet whatever objective you want.

Getting the government out of the way can also help in countries that have ingrained cultures of low-level corruption. One of the things that drove my dad to leave Bangladesh and move to the other side of the world was having to pay a bribe to a functionary for the phone company to hook up a new phone line in our house.
And without sufficient auditing and enforcement you'll get scams and your goals will not be achieved. You're essentially betting the farm on the honesty of corporations controlled by people who now have a direct incentive to cheat. That's putting an awful lot of faith in humanity right where it has the biggest chance of failing (at the CEO level).

Note how in the article the people working there were saying they were 'expecting an audit any day now', but as long as their paycheck depended on not being audited they were all fine with it.

It's rather strange how the CEO is the only person indicted.
I do not agree, e.g. the verb "flâner" in French can be translated in "to wander around" but this translation does not convey the pleasure of the person loitering in the streets (something induced by "flâner"). I already tried to translate it in some situations but there is nothing perfect, "taking a walk" is similar but it induces a physical activity whereas "flâner" only means enjoying your time outside, thinking loosely while walking and watching what's around you.

And as you can see after these two long sentences, the lack of a word to describe extensively this experience makes it quite absurd for non-French speakers. Words are such a great way to describe our environment thus I agree with the author that "our world is parsed by the limits of our vocabulary".
You still have to check if everybody has paid their emission tax.

Also a tax has to be high enough to offset the average cost of lowering Co2 emissions (since you force everybody to lower their emissions), whereas in a cap-and-trade system the price will the the lowest cost to lower the emissions, since anybody who would pay a higher price will be better of buying the emission permissions and anybody who can save co2 cheaper will be better of selling them.

Thus a cap-and-trade system is always going to be more efficient.
>Cap and trade systems have the huge advantage that no revenue goes to the government.

The revenue certainly goes to the government in California, unless I am completely misunderstading the program: http://www.lao.ca.gov/reports/2014/budget/cap-and-trade/auct...
If there is no server, where does my application run?
As you say, most semigroups are just monoids where you forget the identity. Here's an MO thread on examples of monoids that aren't trivial restrictions:

http://math.stackexchange.com/questions/460/are-there-any-in...
How useful is a lock-free (not wait-free) approach in a real-time context? The point is that any thread contending on lock-free data is liable to starve, so the worst-case behavior is still quite bad, no? The only benefit I see is freedom from priority inversion, and that's a fixable problem anyway. Are there other properties of the system that you somehow use to get real-time guarantees?

On the other hand, if you combine interrupt-disabling with a fair lock, then your lock wait time can be bounded in every thread. This is probably only an option inside the kernel, though.

In userspace, and with more threads than CPUs, the lock-free approach probably will save you a lot of context-switching time. It'll probably also be at least as fine-grained as the most fine-grained locking scheme you can come up with, probably with less overhead.

So I'd say that the lock-free approach is an optimistic strategy, and I don't see the benefit except for performance. I say this as someone who really likes lockfree programming.
While you find reciprocity in many visa-agreements, it's not mandatory. If you look at the example from the parent comment:

Germans can enter Vietnam visa-free, while Vietnamese can't enter Germany visa-free. You find those one-sided visa-free agreements especially for many African countries.
You can't exactly affix a number to a specific gallon of bio-fuel. That's where the whole scheme goes off the rails, to create unique ids that only exist in spreadsheets with no 1-1 link to some quantity of product.

It's a liquid, not a box of stuff.
> It's just a matter of reciprocity

Not in the EU as the Schengen agreement regulates the Visa rules for the entire Schengen area.
Education doesn't help fix poverty or move people from lower middle class to upper middle class.

http://www.demos.org/blog/12/2/15/why-education-does-not-fix...

Edit:
However, it will increase wages in absolute terms:

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/01/upshot/why-more-education-...
Autotools: a practitioner's guide to Autoconf, Automake and Libtool [pdf]
A tutorial on how to use Git submodule
The single-writer, single-reader limitation is a big deal. You can work around it, but it's no longer the same thing, as what makes such queues so fast is that they don't do CAS or other kinds of atomic operations at all. Such queues are extremely useful when you can ensure single-reader and single-writer, but it does not prevent us from need more general purpose solutions. More general solutions will require more synchronization, and if they do not want them to be fixed-sized structures, they will usually require some kind of linked structure.

For practical examples of all of the above, see Boost's lockfree structures: http://www.boost.org/doc/libs/1_61_0/doc/html/lockfree.html
Seriously? I expected more than a cheap infographic from KQED.
I wonder how countries choose which colour to use for their passports. Black and purple seem to be the rarest colours, with generally no light colour (other than bright red) being used.
It's always good to hear about IOT companies using CRDTs because it seems like the perfect
fit for it, yet you don't hear very much about it. Also interesting hearing you mention you
were using plumtree for your replication backend.

To elaborate more on your point, CRDTs are super helpful while trying to distribute a lot of devices,
but they only get you so far. While building Lasp[0][1], a distributed data-flow language using CRDTs,
we found out a lot of scalability problems with naive usage of CRDTs. We are aiming to reach 10k-20k nodes
in the near future, so we are focusing a lot on reducing network usage.

State-based CRDTs send their full state to all their peers, which works ok when your states are small, but
they introduce lots of overhead in any other case. Operation-based CRDTs only send the actions performed
on it (add 1, or rmv 2, for example), but these are not idempotent and require a lot of guarantees from
the underlying distribution backend.

We are focusing on using Delta CRDTs, that combine the low network usage of operation-based structures,
with the idempotence of state-based approaches.

Using plumtree for your backend makes it resilient to network failures, but using the default full
membership protocol makes it almost unusable when you're dealing with a big number of nodes. Using
alternative protocols like Hyparview greatly reduces the number of protocol messages in your network.

Finally, since Lasp is a data-flow language, we are applying control-flow analysis to select and remove
unused or intermediate values in the program, thus also reducing network usage.

[0]: http://lasp-lang.org/
[1]: https://github.com/lasp-lang/lasp
Last time I was checking this index is pretty crappy (as in inaccurate and spotty; for instance it claims that swiss citizens can access North Korea visa free). Henley & Partners have one that is more reliable. I spot checked last year's version of H&P and that website against timatic which is the source for both and H&P was at least mostly correct.

Unfortunately there is no good way to get access to this information in machine readable format. It's all free form text and full of special rules.
It's one aspect of the Sapir-Worff hypothesis, and it's not 'nuts' (although not 'universally accepted' either).
Which provider won't give you a /64 (that supports IPv6 at all)?

Even my residential cable provider gives me a /60. Anything less seems absurd.
"Papers, Please" is a game that includes passport inspection:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Papers,_Please
* `parallel` for scripting parallelism

* `make` for scripting parallelism with dependencies
If anyone is interested in the main webpage for the project, I think it's this:

http://marroninstitute.nyu.edu/programs/new-cities
The article does talk about that but it's primarily addressing the growth in the upper middle class as a percent of the total population. From 13% to 30% in the last 40 years.
Another way to end poverty in the third world would be to convince the poor people simply not to breed anymore.
You could do the latter too, and that's what V8 does for example (at least until they roll out the interpreter).
OPSEC Guidance for US Government Employees Playing Pokémon Go Posted to Twitter
With few exceptions the long-form articles posted here are all normal articles padded with bullshit, not very in-depth articles. I wouldn't want to read them either.
Intel also has patents on many x86_64 extensions and AMD has patents on x86_64 itself. I believe MMX expired recently, so a Pentium III level CPU could be implemented without infringing on ISA patents.

Hitachi still has patents on SH4 (though they expire this year). IBM has patents on POWER8. Oracle and Fujitsu have patents on SPARC. etc.

Incidentally, I believe HP also owns some of the Itanium patents.
In case anyone else was curious as to the difference between "Visa on Arrival" and "Visa Free", check out this Quora thread: https://www.quora.com/What-is-the-difference-between-visa-on...

It seems the practical difference is mainly in name only, although it's possible that immigration officers are given more leeway to restrict entry for the "visa on arrival" countries.
This podcast talks about scaling Second Life which has a strong geographic component:

http://www.se-radio.net/2009/07/episode-141-second-life-and-...

My naive intuition is that sharding on two or more axes with some denormalization makes sense: e.g. sharding on both geospatial location and information layers. Infrequently modified elements that overlap several geospatial regions could be stored alongside each. This implies eventual consistency and high availability. On the other hand, some elements might need higher consistency and therefore have lower availability.

Which is to say that the proper architecture is one that allows accurate metrics and high levels of tuning based on actual use and application requirements.

Good luck.
I never thought I would write an article about Pokemon. . . Never
In Akka you can have typed actors, however you're missing the point.

In the actor model you often end up modeling state machines, and especially in the presence of asynchrony, it is impossible to meaningfully add types to such state machines. Because you see, the full set of messages that an actor recognizes at some point is much less interesting than the set of messages an actor accepts right now.

Another problem is that actors often communicate with multiple other actors at the same time, possibly aggregating data from multiple sources, outputting data on multiple channels. Thus a single actor can expose different APIs, depending on whom it is taking to.

And yet another problem is that often actors act as proxies or supervisors, simply forwarding messages around.

Basically people complaining about the untyped nature of actors are terribly misunderstanding the actor model. Or distributed systems.
Vietnam relaxed visa requirements for some European countries to attract tourism: http://www.ibtimes.com/vietnam-allows-visa-free-travel-visit...
What if the few people mucking about the peat bog ran into it, said "Oh gross that's a dead guy", and went the other way, for thousands of years?
Britain could become 'data haven' after Brexit
> You still have to check if everybody has paid their emission tax

Presumably the tax attaches to fossil fuel importers and vendors, rather than trying to tax each individual consumer.
Because they'd end up with a bunch of unusable fuel that they would have to get rid of somehow. They chose the environmentally cleaner route ;)
Agreed with your sentiment. What makes Fricken say his friend is a "natural athlete"? Is it just because Fricken did not see his friend practice athletic activities since being very young, or did Fricken's friend really excel at athletics without any practice? There are a lot of examples of athletes crossing over from one sport to another, because their prior sport's skills transfer well. I wouldn't say they are a "natural" at the new sport.
I always assumed it was a cross between the newish tech industry, usual finance industry salaries, fracking, and the ever expanding defense contractor industry that has been generating thousands of millionaires [1].

All of these require an education and most importantly living in the right places. These industries while booming are better at generating upper middle class with a lot of low wage jobs in between, rather than the healthy middle classes common in older industries like steel, mining, and other union jobs that fueled the 1950-70s middle class boom.

[1] https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-enclaves-reap-reward...
Except that to cross into Hong Kong from China you need a special permit: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Frontier_Closed_Area

So they couldn't concentrate the Chinese workforce, whereas there is nothing to prevent that concentration just on the other side of the border.
How the eff does it work? Who gets the credits to start with? Why do you think the companies prefer cap-and-trade? of course it's more complicated to end up monitoring both the pollution and who owns what credits.

the whole point of cap-and-trade is to avoid the word 'tax', and to create a vast rent-seeking system and potential for gaming the system, and make it politically palatable by paying off the people who might object.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/energy/69126...

http://www.france24.com/en/20160503-france-trial-multi-billi...
You are right. I suppose there are many parameters, for instance countries trying to live from tourism are probably more likely to accept visa-free travellers from wealthy countries even without reciprocity.
In relation to passport power - I find Trump's proposed ban on Muslims pretty interesting to think about. Although widely criticized, it seems to me more ethically wrong to base entry decisions on country of origin (not a choice) than of religion (a choice).

Obviously there are many issues with the practicality, unintended consequences, and the blanket nature of a ban on muslims. That said, I'm not sure I see an ethical issue compared to restricting based on country of origin (what this site shows).
Yep, nobody's going to target you with an MITM attack to inject a false image: http://www.symantec.com/connect/blogs/w32flamer-microsoft-wi...
You're right! The name of it was so generic it fooled me. Sorry!
Not all education is the same. If memory serves a recent Chronicle of Higher Ed study had gender studies bachelors making $14/hour with software engineers making $100k/year.

So maybe education is the most important factor if you only count in demand fields.
The passports with a symbol of a circle inside a rectangle at the bottom include biometric information:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Biometric_passport
I've seen smaller ones do /128. Probably just cluelessness.

The bigger issue is the need for a secure backplane, which will remain until all server software authenticates all sockets in a strong way.
This is pedantic, I know, but also interesting (to me, at least): the country is actually The Gambia, not Gambia. They want the article! And yes, I cringe when I hear news announcers say "The Ukraine" too. :)

(They also have an unusually tasteful flag, that manages to represent the geography of the country without looking like a map.)
I'd love to see a detailed write-up on how an ISA is protected. I've never really understood what protects the x86 instruction set. I'd always assumed there were patents covering implementation details which would make an effective implementation extremely difficult.

Can you really patent a list of instructions?
Given "uses absolute income thresholds adjusted for inflation", the result is not surprising. You would expect this result as long as you had real GDP growth (i.e., growth above inflation).

What this doesn't tell you is what percentage of that real GDP growth did the middle class get to participate in. And this is where the growing economic disparity is coming from.
It's not necessary to dump it, they can burn it to run the rest of the factory, or a bitcoin mining site, or the biggest communal sauna ever, or ...

(I'm not sure that there are not some provisions to close these loopholes. https://xkcd.com/1494/ )
The consistency of the design between passports is remarkable. They all follow a basic pattern: Country name at the top, centered logo, then the word 'passport' at the bottom. There are only a handful of countries that deviate from the pattern. It's almost like there is a universal passport design language. Does anyone know if there is a official specification counties follow?

Edit: The international Civil Aviation Organization issues the specification. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Civil_Aviation...
Yeah, that's the tradeoff–gain the ability to work with multiple parameters but lose the ability to reuse a single one.
The article explains:

> Though you can not patent an instruction set, you can patent machines and methods that are necessary to implement a particular unusual instruction that is part of the instruction set. That legally blocks competitors from creating a fully compatible clone of your processor.

The author is making a very clear and correct distinction.

It continues:

> There are four instructions in the MIPS-I instruction set that were protected by one US patent, 4,814,976. These instructions, lwl, lwr, swl, and swr are known as the unaligned load and store instructions.
Believing in a religion is largely a choice though some arguments could be made for conditioning from childhood meaning it isn't but being a member of a religion definitely isn't a choice in large parts of the world.
> The only benefit I see is freedom from priority inversion, and that's a fixable problem anyway. Are there other properties of the system that you somehow use to get real-time guarantees?

Priority inversion was what I was thinking of. When you say its a fixable problem, the common way to fix that is to have a real time scheduler deal with it. Lots of systems don't have real time schedulers available to them, so lock free algos make sense there and you deal with the starvation issue instead of the inversion issue.

That said, I'm no expert on real time systems and my use of lock free algos has fallen into the exact category you are talking about, which is wanting to avoid context switches in user land, but that is more a property of the OSes I use than the algorithms themselves.
The title is slightly misleading. This is an article dominated by the discussion of buying land, specifically farmland. I don't see a lot of discussion about buying a home has a disappointing investment.

With that said, I disagree with the author because he's failed to examine the long term security of buying land. Buying a parcel of land can pay off in ways not completely obvious in the present tense. It can be used as collateral on the purchase of a home. It can be used to build a future home on, or if all else fails, pitch a tent and count your blessings.
Intermediate js_of_ocaml usage, typing of JavaScript objects in OCaml, DFS ex
Surely not if you're actively using it every day.
The definitions of middle and rich in the report are pretty close to made up. In the latter case, the study literally uses "people who identify as rich".

The study appears to define "middle" as 90% of respondents, which is laughable. Everyone thinks of themselves as middle, no matter how far from the actual middle they are.

The obvious definition would be percentiles of income, or wealth, or other measurable advantage. This would put a lot of readers in an upper class, as which people really don’t like to think of themselves.
Ho wow, you are totally correct, and I didn't know that. Thanks for pointing that out!
More detail; you're assuming a binomial likelihood function?
What exactly is "uniform prior for gamma" supposed to mean?
Check out the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, also known as "linguistic relativity".

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Linguistic_relativity
One could say it's a backdoor in certificate validation.
The claim isn't that it's impossible to have a thought unless you have language for it, but rather that having language for something makes it easier. It's a close relative of Kolmogorov Complexity and a variety of theorems from machine learning regarding hypothesis classes - different languages have more or less effective ways to express the same concept, and choosing a language with better notation for a given topic can make that topic easier to handle. In many cases (especially technical topics) this change makes the difference between the topic being completely intractable and being a two-week unit in eighth grade.

As a concrete example, consider mathematics. I can mostly handle the theory behind integration by eyeballing it and using spatial intuition, but I can't get any farther than that without introducing language that allows me to precisely circumscribe concepts and relate them precisely.

edit: also note that "the thoughts that I'm having don't use words" doesn't mean that those thoughts aren't using language. It's just not a language that you could serialize to something that could come out of your mouth - it's some private, unique internal representation that your brain has constructed for it to work with concepts on its own. Still a language, for the purposes of this discussion, since that internal representation will have all the same properties as above - some people have better internal representations for particular topics.
That does not mean that all human experience is communicable. In fact, internal mental states are only communicable to the extent that they are universal. Suppose I am eating cake and you ask me what it tastes like. I say strawberry.

Ok, but now supposed that you never tasted strawberrys. How do I describe in language the flavor of strawberry to someone who never tasted them? I can make an approximation based on flavors you know, but once you taste strawberrys you realize that, although what I said is true, it does not convey the sensation of eating strawberrys at all.

Even more: the less types of fruit you have tasted, the harder it is to convey an approximation of the flavor of strawberrys through language. So a lot hinges on culture and shared experiences.

Languages come from different cultures and sets of shared experiences, so it is natural that they develop more conceptual density in some things than others, and it is also natural that the grammar more naturally fits a certain way of thinking and seeing the world. You can discuss German philosophy in English, but it is a bit clunky. If you ever had the experience of learning a foreign language, you probably felt that you achieved proficiency when you were finally able to "bend" your thought process like the locals do.