skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As with all major decisions there are many compromises to be made. When our representatives spend hours every day raising money throughout their political career I think we have clearly made the wrong ones.

> The problem with publicly funded elections is that it gives the two major parties another way to lock-out independent/3rd-party candidates. There's usually some limit on who gets campaign money based off of past performance

This is already a major barrier because the federal government provides tens of millions of dollars in funding to political parties whose presidential candidate gets a certain minimum percent of the popular vote (I don't remember if it is 5% or 15%). This publicly funded party infrastructure is what makes raising millions of dollars for a campaign possible by centralizing critical information like constituent data and donor lists. As far as independent/3rd party candidates themselves, publicly funded elections actually help them because it puts a hard limit on how much other candidates can use their financial advantage. It's a lot easier to compete using a volunteer ground campaign when your opponents aren't dumping millions into TV and radio ads as fast as they can raise it.

> and if there wasn't a limit on who gets campaign money, then people would figure out how to run for Senate, and then spend their government-granted 10mil buying ads on their friend's podcast network.

This happens all the time and there are already laws against it in many cases because its campaign finance fraud. It doesn't matter whether it's the tax payer or private donors. Publicly funded elections are worth the cost to the taxpayer of a few cases of fraud if it leads to better governance (which would lead to better protections against this kind of fraud).

> It also runs into problems with free speech & Citizens United.

That's not a valid criticism of publicly funded elections as a solution, only specific implementations and their feasibility. If federal publicly funded elections were implemented as a Constitutional amendment it would override the first amendment in a variety of ways depending on how it was worded. At that point any relevant precedent would be open to review at every level of the judiciary until the Supreme Court makes further decisions interpreting the new amendment's effect on precedent.
Valuation Experts Will Be Held to a New Standard
Given that it was introduced 20 years ago on System 7 and has survived through Mac OS 8/9/X, it's kind of hard to address the audience question over that timespan. But I think it was always intended to be accessible to end users.

Personally, even as an experienced dev, I've found it hard to discover how to do things in AppleScript. The "natural" language can be surprisingly unintuitive sometimes, especially when it breaks down into a program that looks like half OOP / half NLP.
NBCUniversal has invested another $200M in BuzzFeed
> Functional doesn't mean "the semantics of everything is tied to its printed syntax" so that if two things look the same in the syntax, they denote the same thing. (Right?)

I don't care about syntax. I want to manipulate the values I care about, not object identities. I want to operate on numbers, strings, lists, trees, what have you. Not memory cells that allegedly contain representations of numbers, strings, lists, trees, what have you. This is strictly a semantic issue.

> I don't see how support for multiple equalities makes something not a functional language.

FWIW, what most languages call “physical” or “reference equality” is a special case of structural equality (which is always the prior notion). Structural equality of mutable cells (which have dedicated types in Haskell and ML) happens to be physical equality.

> Suppose we take Haskell and give it an equal operator which can tell that two bignums are different instances and not equal. Does it cease being functional?

Yes.

> What if we don't use that operator anywhere in a program and don't even know it exists; how do we know the language is not functional?

Then you're doing functional programming in a non-functional language.
Except for that time they framed someone completely innocent for the Boston bombing. We did it Reddit!
Yeah, it's a shame they gave you a cable that:

- they don't expect you to plug into a computer at all except in emergency

- can be plugged into the provided charger

- can be plugged into a computer you're statistically more likely to have than a new MBP with only USB-C ports
Don't hang your crap on me. I do not have a lot to get off my chest. I know a lot about the subject and you are making incredibly offensive, ill informed remarks.

If you want to know some of what I have already said about the topic, you can check out http://sandiegohomelesssurvivalguide.blogspot.com/ or http://whathelpsthehomeless.blogspot.com/. I am the author of both of them.

And I have work to do today. It isn't like you are going to fatten my wallet, so I don't have more time to put up with your incredibly insulting, prejudiced assumptions about me in order to try to further enlighten you.

Also, poor people do not need catharsis. They need solutions. So don't go pretending you care about me by wishing me catharsis. Any big feels I have are rooted in actual problems, not in some inability to express my feelings.
Since you are UK-based and Snooper's Charter is a thing now, how will that affect Riot/Matrix? Will you be moving the official base to some countries with greater respect for privacy?
~$1500 per month.
DB: ~400
Web : ~1,100

AWS and Softlayer
"Investors, employees, and founders, to varying degrees, will squander time, energy, enthusiasm, money in pursuit of a mirage"

Most 'employees' will never see any significant upside in any of the startups they've worked at or will work with - so their compensation is their livelihood and not exactly a waste of time.

There is a lot of inefficiency at big companies as well, so it's arguable that most tech workers are 'wasting at least some of their time' in the big disorderly march to progress.

They are also gaining skills.

But I agree it's a pretty bad thing to do to raise money to 'figure things out'. I'd loathe to think of how many of those would actually get funded.
..and for those that don't, probably a large majority of Hacker News readers live in an earthquake-prone region and worry about whether they're prepared for the next time a significant earthquake is going to happen to them.
In this case he was speaking on the phone , and that wasn't the subject matter in question. I k ow this because he was also speaking as if he were in his private office.

Certainly it's possible that some of the situations I've seen are of that type of origin - but IMO if you're interacting with a live human it's not an excuse. "I'm sorry , I just got terrible news" takes about two seconds to say.

I don't know, I see very little that could excuse the behavior. If someone is able to get into the store and conduct a transaction, then that person is generally able to acknowledge the person assisting him or her on a minimal level as a human.
Increase Conversions by Addressing FUDs on Your Pricing Page
I didn't know the bar was that high res.
> Their whole business model is built on a gamble that they know better then everyone else.

$596B in market capitalization says they had a point.
That's mostly true and he's even admitted it on several occasions. (His TED talk for example.) He thinks that you can ultimately get some sort of (possibly quantum) electromechanical microscopic description of consciousness by poking the brain with finer and finer instruments, but he doesn't know what we're going to find when we do that; so he's pretty consistent about "we don't have a microscopic definition of consciousness because the science isn't done yet--but we can at least define macroscopically what we mean."

Remember, Searle wants to stop before the scientific domain and he is very optimistic about what science can conclude. I myself am more skeptical that we can get to consciousness without some sort of philosophical innovation. Like, I got my degree in physics, so I'm predisposed to think that it's going to work like "here are the building blocks of qualia, each one needs to be identified with some worldline of some particle moving at speed c, so you get timeless processes with qualia at the bottom of your physics: then you can build consciousness by intertwining these basic qualia into bigger and bigger experiences and fractally including their history within themselves to serve as memory and so forth." I want to start with building blocks and laws of combination and at the end come out with the solution. Searle doesn't want to make any assumptions and seems to think "it's like with QM, we basically invented the finer points of philosophy we needed once we got a chance to poke with finer and finer instruments. We just need to get the big points now, that consciousness is a system feature of the brain like the liquidity of water, and stop trying to reduce it, and we'll get there soon enough."
That's a lot of money to dump into a "fake news" (according to CNN's Jeff Zucker: http://dailycaller.com/2016/11/17/fake-news-flashback-cnn-pr...) organization.
What would you like to see happen? Which carbon-reduction policies do you support?
Much late to the convo...

Although my old Apple router is still chugging along perfectly well, I'm bummed about this change. First router I have ever felt 100% comfortable with the configuration and operation.
So if strong AI is achieved, this would prove God does not exist?
Thank you for both these comments, this is the best explanation I've ever read about Searle (Searle is usually a punchline in my conversations with my friends[1]). I'm not completely convinced, and I think an effective rebuttal is along the lines of "there's no such thing as a privileged qualia", but I'm not smart enough to make it properly, and have much to think about for a few nights! :)

[1] For instance, most recent search in my Slack for Searle returns: "There are days when all i do is purely syntactic copy-pasting into stack overflow and copy-pasting back into my terminal, with absolutely no understanding of the underlying semantics of my actions, and have such surprisingly impressive results, that i've become more and more convinced by Searle."
They are not embracing like cures like. That's just folk wisdom, which has nothing to do with the actual mechanism of actions for immunotherapy, or vaccines, or anti-venom. The way vaccines cause immunity is by stimulating the production of antibodies. What is the proposed mechanism of action for homeopathic teething gel?
One thing that I think is worth noting here -- this guy isn't from a university where he would have learned this, and likely hasn't spent a lot of time using or understanding data structures (unlike "the rest of us"). He's just out of a code camp, studying these sorts of things make sense in that situation. I'd hope someone more experienced wouldn't need to.
Running co-located servers for email & web (marketing services). We amortise the cost to $3k a month ($1k hardware, $2k colo/transit) over 5 years. Total CAPEX was $65k AUD 5 years ago including the warrenty.

That gives us 3 Nodes with (192GB of Ram, 2x Hex core Xeons) and we have 7TB of Primary Storage w/ 12TB of secondary Storage. Due to the age the storage is all hard disk, but if we were to buy today it would be SSD Cached or even pure SSD for primary storage. VMWare manages the cluster and we currently have ~ 50 vm guests.

As we have our own IP space, we have over 1500 IP address available.

Connectivity is slow as it is hosted in Brisbane, Australia, but we get 500Mbit of connectivity which we can saturate easily without taxing the hardware. Cost and business need is the only things keeping this from being higher.

Web activity is typically either highly dynamic but low frequency (custom web apps) or static, but high volume (image hosting for marketing emails). Since the payloads are high compared to most pages / APIs I really don't have numbers to compare as far as requests/second. We also tend to not be running the latest in the web stack, simply to keep maintenance down (we tend to use what ships with the base OS (Centos 7) and then add one or two packages if needed (PHP7)).
I'm surprised a software developer doesn't know basic stuff like that a typical Ethernet connection is 1Gb/s, and WiFi around 20-200, depending on conditions.

This is like an engineer not knowing the mains voltage is 230V, or a baker not knowing about standard grades of flour.
VC's want your company to quickly "Blow up" one way or another.
Are all Apple's customers one off edge cases? That's an awful lot of one offs.
Just curious to hear a little more about your choice of B2 over Glacier or S3. I haven't seen much written about it yet. Do retention policies work with B2?
Not really my area of expertise, but it strikes me as completely clear.

The canary hasn't been updated and the tweet implicitly acknowledges that they are aware of the concerns that people have about the overdue update. I can only think of two reasons to do this. 1. get some publicity or 2. for whatever reason they are unable to update the canary and are unable to say why. Personally, I doubt it's reason 1.
> "Anything that good hackers would find interesting." "anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity."

So that can literally be anything...

> If they'd cover it on TV news, it's probably off-topic.

This caveats it nicely. This is certainly off-topic for HN.
I don't see how that's convincing at all. To you and me who actually know a little bit about how science is supposed to work, sure. But to some Jane Doe who never took any science classes in college and has no idea what "peer review" is, and is taken in by the fluffy New-Age BS marketing on the product's label, that phrase isn't going to mean squat.

The fundamental problem I think is that much of society simply doesn't understand what science is, and why it's important, or why they should care about scientific studies in regard to allegedly medicinal products they may use.
Risk for loans is low(er) for material assets (because they can be repo'd), which is why interest on loans for them is so cheap. Education loans are priced 'correctly' by the market (i.e., very expensively), the 'problem' is that people consider them different from material goods because they're the best/only way for social advancement for many/most people (which I don't disagree with, I'm not making some sort of moral statement here, just explaining the mechanics.) So then 'they' (as in, some amorphous group of voters and politicians) want the government to step in, which creates disincentives all around, yadda yadda yadda and then we find ourselves in the situation we're in now.

So, to come back to your question, why don't we treat education loans the same as other loans - because 'society' doesn't think they're the same, for moral/equality/social mobility reasons. It's really as simple as that.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12998163

> The real problem with cost in the US healthcare system is that the majority of people have a third party payer that will cover almost anything, so they don't care whether prices are remotely fair or not. The "agency problem".

Yes!

The funny thing is people in the U.S. are so indoctrinated and separated from costs that even smart doctors make fun of you (and eventually lash out at you if you EVEN DARE to ask what a specific procedure is going to cost): https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12522037

Or look at the condescending post at Quora: https://www.quora.com/How-do-I-find-a-general-physician-in-S...

If the participants in the healthcare industry itself have no understanding of the issues it faces, and suffer from such apathy in realizing when told about it, I am afraid there will never be a solution

> We should stop making it advantageous for employers to provide insurance (I'm sure someone will be outraged by my supporting this opportunity for employers to lower compensation, I don't care, I paid out of pocket for 2 CT scans last year and know our healthcare prices are nonsense).

Yes!

Employers should have no say who the provider/doctor/lab for an employee should be.

Quora: https://www.quora.com/Would-the-average-person-who-gets-his-...

The U.S. has ended up with a system where every party except the patient stands to benefit.

While this is inconvenient for me (I can just fly to another state or at worst, to India for very expensive procedures, it's embarrassing to see Americans get into debt to fix a broken leg!)
Here's how the election was stolen
Programmable calculators and computers are rather close, no?

What about eCig batteries?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KvQ6K8ariWs
Anyone have a non-paywall link?
I like the idea; just a couple of points:

1. The labels on the topic divs are too far down to read them. They are half way out of the square. (Chrome on Mac)

2. It would be helpful to have names & titles for the leaders.
TEPCO doesn't have the most trustworthy track record.
This is accounted for in the original article.
Yes, I noted that in the PR. It's easy to fix it, why don't you try?
Your comment completely disregards the parents entire thrust.

And boils down to: because blochchain

Pass the kool-aid.
I don't touch raw chicken with cloth towels, because that skeeves me out (if Jacques Pepin does it, it's fine, but I don't want my cooking to be unpleasant to me personally).

All I do is pat the chicken dry with a paper towel. I also skip the bit about removing the sinew from the tenderloin, because it mangles the tenderloin (which is fine if you're doing a galantine but less so if your kids want to eat a chicken tenderloin).

On the other hand, and as someone who has spent a year or two getting his kids to get over the idea of touching raw meat: if you're grossed out by raw meat, you're handicapped if you want to do meat cookery. If you're going to eat meat --- and I eat a lot of meat --- I think an ethical bare minimum is not to allow yourself to be grossed out by it in its natural state. It's tough to get over skeeviness, but you can't cook well if you're skeeved out by your products, and I generally think you owe it to the universe to cook animals carefully. But I'm weird that way.

So anyways I would just say try to get over any concern about touching raw chicken.

Also when you get good at it you feel like The Predator. Try it on a goose when you get good. It's like turning a small person inside out. >:)
Right. So most folks here aren't following the "enterprise" space too much, but disclaimer: I work at Workday, a direct competitor to Oracle in the Business Management (ERP) software space. My background's in hosting & infrastructure.

Oracle are losing a lot of Oracle database licenses at the enterprise level and when they look around, the "cloud" is one of the main reasons why. They sell a bunch of jumped up 1990's applications which are mostly thin, crappy wrappers around a sophisticated database and their database, despite a lot of accounting and sales tactics that say otherwise, is still their main earner. You can't, unfortunately, see that anywhere, however, so I can't cite anything :-) So, enterprise customers, who are mostly the people buying their database are moving towards the "cloud" eating some of Oracle's lunch.

As a result, Oracle sees a growth opportunity in the "Cloud" arena - both on the infrastructure (AWS) and the application space (ERP). https://www.oracle.com/corporate/pressrelease/database-bench...

So they recently bought Dyn, Palerra & LogFire so you can see a pattern here. Dyn are just more "internet famous", but this is a pattern [1]

Lots and lots of talk recently from Ellison about their strategy.

http://www.networkworld.com/article/3123408/cloud-computing/...
http://www.forbes.com/sites/oracle/2016/10/17/larry-ellisons...

It'll be interesting to see the duck tape and glue they use to jam all this crap together, but I think they're fighting an uphill battle with an incumbent that's years ahead of them on the product side. However, this is Enterprise world, and best product definitely does not always win. Oracle have a long history of selling successfully to Enterprises through fairly aggressive sales tactics. I'm not surprised if they see a market opportunity given how unfriendly AWS & GCE can be from an enterprise perspective.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_acquisitions_by_Oracle
What does WOW64 have to do with WINE?
Good for news and raw info - REALLY bad at analysis.
I'm a network engineer so I have a "proper" setup at home: fiber-to-the-home, enterprise-class network devices (access points, switches, etc.), and so on. We were at Best Buy a while back and, while browsing around, I saw some of these "powerline" adapters on the shelf and, mostly out of curiosity, decided to buy a pair [0] of them to see how well they worked; I was doubtful of the "1200 Mbps" claim on the box.

For testing, I plugged them into AC outlets along the same wall in the same room, with ~14 feet separating them. After getting them linked up (very simple), I connected laptops to each unit, manually assigned IP addresses to the laptops, and used iPerf [1] to run throughput tests.

I'll spare you my rant about them but peak speeds were extremely disappointing, just shy of 50 Mbps. I honestly didn't expect anywhere near the advertised 1200 Mbps but I was expecting speeds relatively close to what I can get over my existing wireless. 50 Mbps may be quite acceptable to some, especially if one's Internet connection isn't that fast, but it was far from acceptable for me. They would also randomly "freeze" or "pause" for 20-30 seconds at a time but I didn't really investigate that issue.

[0]: https://www.netgear.com/home/products/networking/powerline/P...

[1]: https://iperf.fr
This may be obvious to everyone else, but today I learned that https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_E._Webb is not the same person as 2016 Democratic primary candidate https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jim_Webb

I feel a little better know. I was wondering why we would name a space telescope after that guy.
They have (imported) deer in NZ, but I'm not sure how widespread. The analogue of deer here in Aus are kangaroos, but they're not so deadly in a crash. Livestock are indeed our deadliest animals.

Most of our native wildlife is pretty sleepy and shy - there's only a couple of snakes that are aggressive; most run (slither?) away from humans. Apart from that, crocodiles are really only the remaining aggressive land animal, but there's not a lot of overlap between a population map of humans vs crocodiles here.
Right, which is what I'm saying. It wouldn't make sense otherwise. It would mean that the result of the computation didn't depend on consciousness in the first place.
> Certainly I could be wrong it's just that "process" sounds a lot like immunotherapy for allergies. I am not trying to lump homeopathy and immunotherapy in the same boat by any means, but looking beyond the differences in the two I think it is possible to be more open minded than labeling the like cures like doctrine pseudo science.

They do sound similar!

The items you cite work on the principle of training the immune system to react to known pathogens in ways that allow an effective immunoresponse later. Homeopathy works by diluting some compound to the point where you might have one molecule of it in a homeopathic dose and positing that this is a cure.

The former isn't "like cures like". It's more like an educational process, based on an understanding of how immune systems work. The latter isn't really "like cures like" either, because one molecule of anything in a teaspoon of water isn't enough to matter to anything or anyone.

You're absolutely right. The processes do sound similar! They're just very different in very important ways well past how similar they may superficially sound.
Links from Google aren't paywalled, so just Google the headline and click the first link. Works for all major papers.
Click on the "web" link under the link above the comment section. You can click on the article from there.