skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What?! The problem with monopolies is nicely illustrated in this little diagram that everyone who ever had econ 101 has seen far too many times: http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/thumb/e/ef/Mon...

Of course monopolies are not intrinsically evil. I can’t really see what that has to do with the question as to whether states should prevent companies from becoming monopolists, though.
Looks like many of these pictures were taken when the kids were not looking at the screen.
I think the author completely fails to understand the problem caused by monopolies and why the underlying capitalist philosophy implies the problem - namely that they can jack up prices without competition and its always in their best interest to do so.

Really the problem with monopolies is how we implement capitalism with so few checks and balances - in an "idealised" setting you want monopolies to get the most efficient use of resources globally - its capitalism that messes it up by driving the monopoly to do "evil" things like jack up prices. The incentive to be greedy and selfish needs to be removed - this is a LOT easier said than done, but it is something that governments are most certainly capable of.
Corporations of this type are "executed" by starting the first criminal prosecution. E.g. Arthur Anderson, the shell of which was ultimately vindicated.

WRT to Goldman, a pointless discussion since they are primary dealer of Federal government treasury bills and bonds. As long as the government is depending on borrowing 1.5 trillion a year at low interest rates, they can't afford to trash primary dealers.
Yeah, if it the command buffer was being passed through to the hardware in exactly the same form then there shouldn't be these problems - I assume its something that is being done out of necessity for driver emulation.
Even for a hardware implementation, the LED will be driven by an output pin of the onboard microcontroller. If the webcam firmware is flashable over USB it could be remotely disabled by software.
bad defaults = bad design, home and end should be the only keys that you need to work like home and end...
I had expected something a little more profound than 50s science-fiction theories... There are so much more theories (i.e. non-biological life, etc.) that the view in this article seems awfully limited.
I'd guess some guys custom HN Mod, so he can easily see what he has read and what not. Maybe it has more features for him when he's logged in, like saving etc. Also it's pink.
This article is written by a crazy person.

It fires its first shot with "Wall Street corporations were designed for the sole purpose of making profits." Moving on, we see "US Economic and Financial System Is Incapable of Meaningful Change." And then, "The United States is supposed to be a democracy, and free market economy. But is the free market system really smart? I don't think so!"

And finally it talks about how importing resources is bad.
Contrarily, I think that any civilization capable of reaching Earth must also exhibit the most humane (aliene?) characteristics such as love for justice and respect for other lives. I'd imagine with their great power, every individual in their planet can, with the flick of a finger, wipe out a large portion of their own race if not entirely. They must have learned to coexist or face self destruction. It's a prerequisite to freely roam the universe.

What about killing for their own survival, after all respect for the lives of one's own race doesn't translate to respect for lives of others. This may be true, but with their intelligence I'd think they're smart and reasonable enough to explore other possibilities. I don't think aliens in soon-to-be-out-of-resources ships desperately flying around the universe for energy is a scenario advanced intelligent life forms planned for. It's more likely that they accept a peaceful conclusion to their existence.

Of course, it's very possible that we're all wrong since we're projecting our own primitive reasoning on species that are a lot more evolved.
"If any business attempts to charge prices higher than the market will bear, he will lose all his business to his competition, since he cannot force his competition out of business."

This seems dated in our modern world.

Of course you can force your competition out of business if you're big enough. It's even easier if you're willing to use some dirty tricks. It's also sometimes impossible to compete in some modern industries like software. I can't simply sell a cheaper version of Windows -- only Microsoft can sell Windows. It's not as simple as going to the shoppe to pick from different brands of top hat. They're basically the same thing so they can compete against each other directly. Capitalism is great for soft drinks and tennis shoes but I'm not convinced it's the best choice for everything.
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I'm using the Firefox add-on LeechBlock to block access to "www.facebook.com/plugins/". (Facebook still works fine. It wasn't immediately apparent that you could use Leechblock to block access to individual folders.)

http://www.proginosko.com/leechblock.html
I saw the Mass Games in Pyongyang last year. This interview is spot-on that the North Korean ideology is tightly tied to race. Hitler would have loved to have the ability to put on such a show, and it was so beautifully done that by the end I was proud to be North Korean.

Cultural pride can be weaponized.
How does TinEye work ?
Breakthrough renews focus on hydrogen cars
Bingo. As this article http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2010/04/goldmans... details, "Goldman’s ‘Victim’ in SEC Case Was a Yield Chaser":

"The German bank on the losing end of the Goldman Sachs derivatives deals that have attracted the ire of the Securities and Exchange Commission was so absorbed in the pursuit of high-yield returns from financial instruments linked to the U.S. housing market that it preferred to lose one of its top executives rather than change course."

Sounds a bit like what happened at Harvard; in that case, envy forced out the team that was earning them their high rate off return, leaving B Ark types who mindlessly continued the same strategy (it was so bad they neglected to unwind one position until they'd needlessly lost 1 billion dollars on it). In this case, their portfolio manager of the German bank in question predicted what would happen, was ignored by upper management, and then left.

The bank was getting squeezed by the spread between their short term commercial paper and their long term investments like this one, e.g. others were noticing their reckless real estate bets as things in general in this market were starting to get bad. But they needed high yields to keep the game going (they got bailed out/bought out by another German bank in the end), so in this case (not the only one, I gather) they went to Goldman to get that.

Others with a clue like Paulson (who was at the other end of the transaction) and certainly many at Goldman thought they were wrong ... but at what point do you get so sure someone is wrong that you refuse to do business with them? They were hardly the only ones betting this way!

Note also that things get really ugly when everyone stops doing transactions in a market, which is exactly what eventually happened, resulting in unmarketable "toxic" financial instruments. We need liquidity in markets and I don't think it's the job of entities like Goldman to "pull away the punchbowl". That's supposed to be the job of e.g. the Fed, especially the NY Fed (headed at the time by our current Treasury Secretary).
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On Goldman
VMKit: JVM and .Net runtimes for LLVM
K (http://kx.com) seems to be, but unfortunately it's closed-source and quite expensive.

From my (limited) experience with it, it's quite fast, especially for an interpreted language. Its primitives are extremely cache-friendly and data-parallel, which helps performance immensely. Its design also cuts away layers and layers of typical boilerplate.
Art photos & dead rose
Creating art photos sometimes proves to be difficult, but with a bit of imagination things could turn out your way.
All this guff about peaceful aliens misses the point - I think this is more like Pascal's wager.

Consider the cases where we hide:

"If aliens exist and are very nasty, I'm sure glad I didn't broadcast our existence to them"

"If aliens exist and are super peaceful and awesome, well, nothing bad happened because we didn't broadcast our existence to them".

Consider the opposite cases:

"Aliens are nasty and we told them we existed - now we are all dead"

"Aliens are super awesome, we told them about us and they didn't wipe us out, possibly doing something good for us".

No matter how good the potential benefits from "nice aliens" you are a fool to stake the future of the entire human race on what is essentially a gamble when you don't have to.
I did, but it didn't influence me because I knew they were worthless.

Interestingly, we're accused of not wanting to pay our dues and and the same time expecting to be rewarded for merely (but more importantly, being judged on) quantity, not quality. Seems like an interesting juxtaposition if you ask me. (I recognise this sort of thinking is pretty indicative of an arrogant 'millenial' ;)
Oh that. That's just Fred.
Games are not the only exception. Pretty much anything soft-realtime that needs to do elaborate graphics (3D rendering, etc.) is pushed towards similar trade-offs.
Brazil has a lot to learn from the US too. Feynman pointed out (in the 50s!) that our universities don't teach science.

Brazilians schools are geared towards getting people into university. And Brazilian universities are terrible at teaching science. Those who don't get to college are left with very little; US high schools, on the other hand, prepare for life, to put it poetically.

And it's not lack of money, because Uruguay is about as rich as Brazil and rates higher than Germany and Japan in the UN Education Index.

Very few get into engineering. At graduation, you might see 100 people getting degrees in law, and 6 in engineering.

This lack of skills is already hindering Brazil's growth and I just can't see how a country can be as rich as Germany, for instance, with uneducated people.
Why would you think that? I just can't see any basis for such an argument beside massively wishful guesswork...

"Of course, it's very possible that we're all wrong since we're projecting our own primitive reasoning on species that are a lot more evolved."

I completely agree with this though - you can't reasonably guess the consequences of future intelligence until you actually have it. Also, who said intelligence is on a single scale? There could be multiple types of advanced intelligence, each with their own chain of development.
It bothers me a lot that he gives so much credit to the military, who, having done a little good, also did a lot of damage.
I endured this meme two years ago in corporate America: it was patronizing and obnoxious then, too.

I hope this guy at least gets paid to to run generational awareness workshops for people to ignore over sandwiches and doesn't run through this tired rigamarole for free.
Doesn't your argument boil down to "might makes right"?
Why doesn't he raise the idea that maybe the reason they think they're good writers, but aren't, and think they think critically, but don't, could be that their pre-college education sucks?

Last I checked, most young people's parents don't grade their kids' essays. They may edit them, but that doesn't directly result in the kid saying to her professor the next year, "But I always got A's before!" There was a still a teacher supposedly being a gatekeeper between the paper and the grade.

From the comments: "There are two types of Millenials - whiners and fighters."

I dunno, but that sounds like HUMANITY in general, to me.
I meant: physically.
Actually there is - like most technology it all scales up, and if it happens you bet we'd all be in factories churning out nukes/rockets if we had to. If you do the numbers, sure it comes out big, but 4 billion kg is not really that much - especially compared to the production capacity of 6 billion people over a couple of days. We could produce the required energy to move it by collectively winding handles let alone manufacturing nukes.

Besides that impending death is an excellent motivator.
You don't have to be nice to others to survive as a species, you just have to avoid genociding your own. Humans have managed not to nuke each other yet but we are mostly a predatory species and, with a few exceptions, have very little respect for non-human life. This theoretical advanced civilization might just see us as pests and accord us the same level of justice that we do to cockroaches.
Saying as a Brazilian, since the Economist published its series of articles about Brazil last year I've been reading articles that says a lot of bullshit about Brazil and economics, they generally ignore the fact that the country growth is based on the rise of a new middle class (something that Economist touched last week with a series about innovation in the third world), that is probably impossible in the developed world (since almost anyone comes from the middle class), there are also some other measures that helped, generally the majority of them were adopted during the period in which the country faced hyperinflation.
It can happen when it's the least worst place to park your money. E.g. what's your interest rate when you put it under your mattress?

In a deflation, which we still seem to be in (or so many think), the trick is to find safe places, because the big way to lose is to have the entity you're investing in go under. This is why blue chip bonds were so popular during and for a long time after the Great Depression. AT&T with its government monopoly wasn't going to go under....

One should also note that a T-bill is funding the Federal government's deficit (hardly putting your money in a place where it will "get put to work, creating productive stuff"); you do that for safety and short term liquidity. You can get higher yield instruments ... with a higher risk (almost by definition). Obviously there's a lot of risk aversion nowadays.

(In fact, in general but in particular right now the Federal government has a perverse incentive to make their instruments look like the safest in the world....)
I've been hearing this complaint since I was really young, so it surely can't be a "millennial" thing. Wasn't "kids these days are too pampered with self-esteem" a big complaint about Gen-X education in the late 80s and early 90s? They had all sorts of crazy ideas back then, like "edutainment", the idea that playing video games was a form of education!
True. Most Apple products aren't very good if you compare them in a "tech spec per dollar" kind of way. If all I wanted was a laptop with processor X and Y amount of RAM I could have found something cheaper than a Macbook.
"Sorry. It appears that hacker news is blocking our server's IP. ridddlr news is down until further notice.
Thank you for your patience."

Ha!
The Great American Bubble Machine (Goldman Sachs exposé)
How to manipulate people with font type?
"the question as to whether states should prevent companies from becoming monopolists"

I believe the general agreement about this question is a resounding "No." The anti-monopoly regulations prevent companies from abusing their monopoly power and most of the anti-monopoly law discussion revolves around the extent of this.
I suppose it is not entirely surprising, since modern programming has drifted away from its most fundamental purpose -- processing data in a certain amount of space and time.

Look at common programming languages: the control of how much storage space is used is in the background, and the control of time taken is non-existent. The dominant, and almost only, concern is representational structure -- how the software is understandable and manipulable.

This is reasonable -- representation is important and comparatively valuable -- but the riches of modern hardware speed have brought a kind of decadence to programming.
Steve Keen (one of the less wacky economists to predict the GFC) claimed that monopolies often aren't so bad. Note, Steve claims to be part Keynesian, part math modeler, and part empiricist; and is extremely critical of free-market economists; but he'll flame any school of thought that he disagrees with.

http://www.debunkingeconomics.com/extracts.htm#4

>"The historical record gives many reasons to be critical of monopolies. Some of today’s most respectable names accumulated fortunes in the 19th century by grossly unethical means, and held on to their economic wealth by the abuse of the many forms of power that wealth can confer. This record of 19th century corporate lawlessness is the major explanation for America’s distinctive anti-trust laws, which enable the judiciary in this bastion of capitalism to dismantle corporations that have acquired the position of ultimate market power.

>Economists have reduced this plethora of reasons to be critical of monopolies to just one: the size of a monopolist relative to the size of the market. According to economists, monopolies are worse than the alternative of competitive markets simply because the absence of competitors allows a monopoly to set price above marginal cost. Perfectly competitive industries, on the other hand, set price equal to marginal cost. Economists argue that monopolies are therefore necessarily bad, and that small, competitive firms are necessarily good, because monopolies produce a lower output for a higher price, thus restricting the supply of their products and exploiting consumers by over-pricing. However, the ‘proof’ of this argument makes the fundamental mathematical mistake of equating a very small quantity to zero. When this mistake is corrected, the economic argument against monopolies collapses, as does the economic theory of competition..."
They're Macs, Apple is wise about this and it's in the hardware and cannot be disabled without doing physical "surgery" to the hardware.
> A fairly cliche example of this ...

A more practical example is http://ocsigen.org/docu/1.3.0/XHTML.M.html

The html type in Ocsigen is only capable of representing valid XHTML. Polymorphic variants are really useful for this sort of thing.
Yeah... so secret the Times found out in a few days?

Then again, it is the "lets hunt for terrorists by telling them exactly when and where we are coming" US...
Wall street would actually self regulate if the price of money (interest rates) was set by the market and not held down by a central bank. It's pretty hard to have a 50 to 1 leverage ratio when borrowing money costs 8 or 9 percent per year.
Actually, no criminal charges have been made yet.

In a situation like this, it will take some time to put together a solid case that you can put before a jury.
Can the JVM bytecode and the .Net assemblies somehow magically make use of each other or do you have to choose which one you target? If you can't this seems to be "just" an implementation of each platform, right?
Or perhaps a million years ago in their history, a sense of individualism completely disappeared as they joined into a single superintelligent creature. Totally xenophobic and without tolerance for anything that might threaten it :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xe1a1wHxTyo

Monty Python - Four Yorkshiremen (40 years ago).
I guess the point of this comparison is showing what's smarter: investing or buying junk.
One should also note the physical and mental effects of pervasive malnutrition.

I agree; I don't know about the "drift apart", but reunification is the last thing a bunch of South Koreans want. The above problems will take generations to correct.
For the same reason we consider a piece of land full of plants, animals, and insects uninhabited.
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Myopia
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Such broad generalizations are rather annoying.

Most intelligent people will realize that praise granted indiscriminately is not really praise at all. If everyone gets an A, then the A itself becomes average (at least, in an intellectual sense).

While it's possible that people are so deluded as to believe the in the brilliance of a performance demonstrably within such an average (relative to their classmates, teammates, or whatever), I have not seen this within my peers (who are, in fact, millennials).

In other words, individual egos are not expanded in light of receiving an A in something akin to the cliched "basket weaving." At most, people feel good about themselves for manipulating the system to their advantage --- that is, finding the course of "least resistance" in the first place. Such an "easy A" is only useful as an external signal of "I'm smart" to employers or grad schools; it is not typically used as a proxy for the quality of one's inherent intellect.
Fair enough; I can understand why you'd want to (a) tune, and (b) make sure your benchmarks are going to stand up to scrutiny.

Regarding 'secure by default', though, your answer is very hand-wavy. Do you employ cryptography for your network protocol? On-disk crypto for persisted data? Authentication? How are credentials stored, assuming you do provide authentication? What steps have you taken to avoid buffer overflow attacks?

These are all questions that customers will ask; be prepared to answer them.
Off-topic, I have the impression that the same applies to US policy on Iran, the majority of people appears to not understand the Iranian revolution, the Iranian regime that followed, the divergence about Iran in the Shi'a world and even what Iranians do think about their country.
So broadcasting the 1936 olympics loud enough to be picked up within a few light years might not be such a good idea? And pumping out an aggregate radio signature approximately equal to that of a small star might not be such a good idea?

Ooops, too late.
EXTERMINATE!
Buying junk, clearly. I'm guaranteed to get considerable value out of a computer, whereas $2000 of Apple shares could well have been worthless.
I'm not surprised by the poor writing and critical thinking skills he's suggesting. However, that performance has nothing to do with trophies or their parent's praise.

The English curriculum at public schools deemphasizes writing composition to focus on reading scores, which are tied directly to funding. As a result, many students receive very little instructions on how to organize an argument on paper, and generally aren't exposed to well-written essays until their freshman year of college.

These two factors create a brew of ignorance that makes students oblivious to college writing standards. This is made worse by the fact that larger colleges have their mandatory writing comp classes filled to the brim with all the grading done by over-worked TA's who, due to volume, cannot give detailed feedback on each paper.
Most people were not computer users in 1982, that’s different today. I would guess that today there are vastly more people on this planet who can write basic programs. Ten times as many, maybe? One hundred times as many? I don’t know but I wouldn’t be surprised by that.
How much does he mark down for misspellings such as "Colombine"?
If this is the case that was in the news a while back, a major issue was that students were required to use the school-issued computers and threatened with expulsion if they brought their own computers to school.

If it's the same case, that's a big problem: The defense so far is that all this spyware was required for theft recovery. If so, why not allow students to use their own computers? Requiring students to use computers that invade their privacy seems extremely suspicious to me.