skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Dead comment, perhaps not a masterpiece but certainly not worthy of being shadow banned:

by donnawarellp

I have often thought that life is self limiting. For example, yeast is a
living thing, it consumes sugars and it's waste is ehtanol and eventually
they all kill themselves off by drowning in their own waste (which, I
guess later over a meal I will be enjoying a glass of yeast pee, but I
digress). From a molecular perspective, human DNA is not that different
from yeast, and at a macro view our behaviour is not that different
either it seems. Perhaps all sentient life is destine to the same fate,
perhaps it is a law of nature. I recall reading about an argument that
Stephen Hawking and Kip Thorne have regarding time travel. Stephen
Hawking argues against time travel because we have never met any time
travellers from our future. Maybe time travel is theoretically possible,
but like yeast, we do not as a species survive long enough to develop
the necessary technology. ugh, sorry to bring everyone down, might as
well have a glass of yeast pee.
I once tried to look into dtrace because I was missing strace from Linux. I gave up when I realized I had to learn a whole language just to do what strace did for me on Linux.

Now I'm enlightened to see there is dtruss. It works different than strace and needs privileges, but I'm glad that I've found the strace alternative.
What for, though? I'm another Flashblock user and it seems to lose me ads and videos. The ads don't benefit me anyway, the videos are now capable of being deployed by other means; it's just the vendors haven't yet caught up.

Flash is on life support, and I don't see a way back for it.
>The checking algorithm can either pass or fail:

If the plain text does not match the cipher-text on the ballot printed in Step 2, the inconsistency is revealed and the voting machine is disqualified.

Otherwise, the ballot is consistent. The voter goes back to Step 2 to vote with another ballot (because an audited ballot cannot be used for voting).

So... how do you know that your current vote was recorded correctly? If auditing destroys your vote, then you have to go back and do it again, trusting that this time it will be correct. Since you'd have to go vote again, I doubt very many people would actually audit the results, so you could probably still sneak bad machines into the smaller and less techy areas of a country.

edit:

>A simple statistical calculation shows that very few audits (of about 1-2% of the votes) suffice for catching a cheating (or bogus) machine.

Seriously? You think 1-2% of voters will press the audit button and perform their own side decryption process with a trusted device?
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The source code for Flash is not exactly a closely guarded secret, there are quite a few companies that have licenses to it. I'd be shocked if Google wasn't one of them.
Smartphones abilities to track your exact location are becoming more and more capable. Think about the ways that this information can be used, both for and against us. It scares me a little bit that the little chunk of technology I carry around in my pocket could very well be reporting my location and everything that I say/do. The amount of information that companies collect about people is just mind-boggling, and with the apps that have been coming out and the user agreements you're forced to sign, you very well could be getting tracked. Being a law-abiding citizen, objectively I know that I don't really have anything to worry about, but the principle still scares me.

Has anyone actually read a EULA all the way through? I know this is slightly off-topic, I'm just following my train of thought.
How to install iPhoto on Your First Generation iPad.
Having the capability of loading applets is, I consider, not to be the same as popularity of applets. I am unable to produce any citation that talks about popularity of applets except this SO thread: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/51390/where-did-all-the-j...

But the lack of applets is pretty apparent to me. I come across Flash almost hourly while my last few encounters with Java Applets were academic demos 2 years back.
Surprised to see Scheme was not included.
Powered by Wikimedia (PHP): this just feels wrong. Not to mentioned that Wikimedia is pretty crappy system. It's markup and templates are horrible.
You know what? Unity is a disaster. GNOME 3 isn't much better. But for me that still makes KDE not even an option I would consider.
Combining a better user interface with algorithms seems like the obvious angle of attack. But I think there might be a better one.

Automate the whole thing. Get rid of the interface.

You know those virtual assistant services people use to manage their mundane emails? Imagine if you automated all of that.

It sounds like a ridiculous idea. How can I allow a machine to reply for me?

But I would start with the simplest mundane use cases. If you can automate complete handling of even a small percentage of a busy user's emails, they will be delighted. On your end, you don't have to literally automate it on day one. You can semi-automate it with some human help and over time use the data to reduce the human input.

Over time as the user got more comfortable, they might not mind automating more of their emails.
I had the same issue until I upgraded to 8 GB. I'd recommend to anybody to go for 8GB directly. For me (or any other heavy user), 4GB is just not enough to run MacOS X (the 'kernel_task' alone takes >500MB).
The real moral of the story: prices are the only effective mechanism for the efficient allocation of higher order goods.
Wikipedia, GoDaddy Divorce Finally Finalized
People need to stop assuming they know what "success" means for other people.
You can learn things well being at a shitty uni. I did this. You miss out on the whole experience of being surrounded with awesome people with awesome ideas, though. It's a very important aspect, which is difficult to make up for if you try to. It's possible with computer-related topics because of nntp, irc, ftp, web, and now places like hn. It doesn't fully replace it but it's a good prosthesis. It doesn't work for most other subjects. To put it simply, you can learn to cook italian never have been to Italy -- but you won't be a good cook.
Brazil has been using electronic voting machines since 1996. The ballots are used for both local and national elections, and the 2005 disarmament referendum.

You don't get any receipt to check later (aside from the one that proves you voted, because voting is mandatory), and yet I don't remember the population ever distrusting the electronic system.

TV covers the election with up-to-the-minute results as the ballots are closed, and the winner is known on the same day, which is a nice plus.
I think what he meant was something more along the lines of: Don't let self-sacrifice inhibit your ability to accomplish the things you want to.

Helping others is pretty much a necessity on the road to personal growth. To build tools that only you use stunts your ability and your ability to impact the world. Right now I'm on personal projects building things for other people to use, even though I myself have no need of the tools I'm building. In the process however, I'm learning things building those tools, like socket programming and interface design.

I win, and so does everyone I'm building for.
That's not exactly an advantage for Apple (from a marketing perspective)...
Also, the absence of numbers on both the MBP and iPod do make reselling somewhat "harder": "no no, it's the mbp, but the... Uh... Pre-univody version. Yeah, the one with multitouch and a button"
> If anything, the Apple ethos is about designing highly usable, uncomplicated and beautiful devices and software. Which they kinda do --and has nothing to do with what part of the market they target.

I'd gladly agree, if that only was true. As an iPhone user, I tend to think, that "highly usable and beautiful devices and software" is on decline. They are more interested in keeping the market share, and more profit than giving people what they want.

The most annoying thing is that Apple is thinking that it does know better what their customers want. And after few weeks of whining, people usually agree. Since there is no point in disagreeing - nobody is listening.
Great comment. On an evolutionary scale, humans just recently became smart enough to get the ball rolling and accumulate technology from generation to generation. The potential for improvements in intelligence is enormous.
I'm glad you raised this question, because I'm sure most people will think that. The fact is, that the system doesn't act any different in the 2 cases (audit and real), in both cases it FIRST prints the encrypted vote (and now the voter can actually see the his vote hanging out of the machine, but he still can't touch it), and now it asks the voter if he would like to verify (audit) or not (real), if he chooses to verify, the machine will print the key to decrypt the encrypted text and then the voter can verify that what was encrypted was really what he voted for. If he chooses not to verify, it will print the cleartext (unencrypted). Notice that for the machine to "fool" the voter it needs to predict when a voter will choose to verify or not in 100% accuracy because if 1 voter finds that what was encrypted wasn't really his choice, then the whole election is a shame and can be closed ignoring all votes.
Yes. Data durability is ensured by the network copy, not the local cache.
French comic-book artist "Moebius" dies
Sequential numbers are not arbitrary...
The "previous model" issue seems relevant to me too: "do u want the new new ipad, or is it the new ipad from last year? Oh, you mean the ORIGINAL new ipad..." (jerry, the apple genius, 2014)

Regarding the car dealers, they rarely have more than ONE "previous generation" in stock (as far as I know...)
An Experiment In Silence
Fast time series web DB for big data (like log files)
I've just gone public with a project that I'm very excited about. I would love your feedback on it. It's a side project from the start up I work at.
Valve's Steambox Shot Down
Vince Lombardi's famous quote "Winning is a habit" comes to mind. I think what makes successful people successful is this attitude that no matter what they do, regardless of it's significance, they give it all they have. They want to win (using some subjective definition of winning).

I highly recommend reading James Wallace's "Hard Drive" (http://www.amazon.com/Hard-Drive-Making-Microsoft-Empire/dp/...) which provides some insight into Bill Gates. Regardless of your thoughts about the man, I think it is an extremely interesting read. The basic premise is that Gates is extremely competitive even on a minuscule scale, and it is due to that obsession & competitiveness he is where he is today.
ERAU Slavic Club: View topic - Washington D.C. bus tours
> the way to solve big, world-changing problems is to start by solving ordinary, day-to-day problems

"To build a house, put a brick down on the ground and see where that takes you. What's a blueprint again?"
No, he just had an extra-powerful contrarian gene. Actually, like most of Dostoyevsky's characters, he was simply complex. Many of us are complex, too.
مسلسل وادي الذئاب 5 الحلقة 25 
مسلسل وادي الذئاب 5 الحلقة 25

مسلسل ,وادي ,الذئاب, 5 ,الحلقة ,25

http://video.qlbak.com/10237.html
It was $1,000,000 to Excite, not Alta Vista.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Excite
"invent and make things" may make it sound differently, but this article is purely about manufacture of physical goods. Facebook, Twitter, and Google are considered service providers, not manufacturers, in this situation. Apple is the perfect example of what Dyson is talking about though: those cool layered pixel displays are manufactured primarily in Southeast Asia by LG, Sharp, and Samsung. Dyson would be lamenting that they aren't produced in the USA, he isn't saying they aren't being invented in the USA.
See, thats where it all began - this malignant thought that 'old computers' are 'dead computers'. Computers don't stop being useful because of age - they stop being useful because someone makes the decision not to find a use for them.
Reading is hard -- I stand corrected
I think he means physical things, but your correct about technological innovation still taking place. They aren't (or don't have to be) mutually exclusive though, he has a point.
I don't think most people actually care about what's going to happen with information (not even personal details, with a big exception being their credit card number) at all...
You're 100% correct. PowerPoint just amplified the symptoms of what's wrong with presentations (corporate, academic or otherwise). People started to shift their focus to things that didn't matter as much (the slide deck) and deviate from the content. These same problems will occur no matter what new presentation tools are invented and will continue to be the same annoyance.

At the same time, products like the Screen.io are providing tools to facilitate good aspects of presentations and these are types of tools that should be built.
Group Activity Site 
Hi Guys,

Launching the first stab at organizing ad-hoc group activities. Check out

www.thegroupactivity.com

Regards,
Bimohit
It's exciting to see future getting closer and closer to life!

What's more interesting, however, is the comments from the news site. Somehow I have a feeling the general public is between "this is not important" and "omg this is such a bad idea"
What I'm trying to say is that the article did not go deeper to the JLS level :D
When to use Typed Actors
Agreed, lukeschlather. THIS is the key point.

The reason why Germany, Singapore and other strong manufacturing-based developed countries have succeded so well is NOT because they have taken the worst elements of Anglo-Saxon capitalism and added back a few factories!

These countries have long had a strong, focus on engineering from education through to supply-chain all the way to elite managers, executives and corporate governance.

For example, in the Germanic countries, long-term stakeholders (such as family founders and employee unions) exist and are powerful. This reduces the impact of the flighty capital and short-termist control from mere free-standing shareholders (this includes the share-compensated manager class and private equity companies). This is important because it is the abililty of a company to continually invest in its long-term interests that enables them to keep several steps ahead of the purely labor-intensive efforts from new entrants such as from China or South America.

Combined with the success of the Mittelstand (Small and Medium Enterprises or SME's in Anglo-speak), the result is that German companies make high quality widgets and whole products that are in great demand the world over and to all intents and purposes irreplaceable.

In addition, it is culturally and financially highly acceptable to be considered an engineer in those countries.

Even their debt-sparse financial system encourages business which are only viable if they are able to create cash upfront, which is considerably easier for a well-run, long-term managed manufacturing business rather than many service companies.
5 million jobs doesn't sound like a lot, for such a total makeover of the economy. it's something like 4% of the working population.

On the other hand, powerful robots would destroy many jobs.
git clone git://github.com/kantale/pypedia.git

Says it right there on the front page.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pleasure_center#Experiments_on_...

Using the expression "what you fundamentally value" is not the right way to put it. In real life, what you fundamentally value changes on a minute-by-minute basis. If you were able to ask a rat what he valued, he would probably say food and water, aka survival. However, as soon as they put this rat into a Skinner box, it literally pleases itself until it dies of exhaustion, even though food and water were available to it.

I agree with you that the best way to run an AI/VI like this would be to skip the idea of "pleasure" entirely and simply make productivity its' fundamental value. You would also set it up so that while it could modify its' own source code, it could not change what it valued. It seems like it would be relatively easy to set it up so that it would "hide" parts of its' code from itself and make it off-limits from modification.
This is a list of words blocked on http://www.weibo.com/ which has nothing to do with Twitter.
Stay Safe Online – 7 + 1 Steps to Internet Safety and Security For Your PC
Recognizing mortality is the only cure to existentialism. If it's all luck, then fuck it and go for it.
To everyone who was interested by pg's idea of a simple language for parallelism, check out pi calculus: http://mainisusuallyafunction.blogspot.com/2011/09/lambda-to...
You are correct, but I want to point out that opening the machine or software for public inspection is not the case.
Cryptography and End-to-End Verifiable Voting, give you the privilege not to trust anyone with the results, not even the designers of the system, (not because you can see the code, most people won't understand what it does anyway) and even if you don’t know anything about software you can always find a professional of your choice that would do the verification for you (simply write a program that counts the votes and verify zero-knowledge proofs. after the election is over (before it's over the key is unknown) (much alike the way people can choose their own doctors).
I think of all the people that have put in hard, boring work...

Those people didn't do their work because they figured it'd be neat if you could share your thoughts on the weather, kittens and startups with the world for free. They did it because it served a goal for them at the time - they were selfish.

DHH did Rails because he wanted a Ruby web framework. Linus did Linux because he wanted a free Unix for his PC. No, they didn't immediately set out to extract money from their efforts (although both did become wealthy from them), but that doesn't make them altruistic.
pardon my ignorance and the somewhat unrelated question: what kind of screening do services such as AirBnb do to both parts of the transactions? Or ebay?

Shouldn't a well-designed "reputation" system actually mitigate the need for an individual screening?
Good point. A major part of the simplicity is that ry doesn't need to be loaded into your shell or shim any binaries. You simply add $PREFIX/lib/ry/current/bin to your $PATH (there's a helper to do this), and vanilla ruby/rubygems take care of the rest.

Ry also punts on indexing and listing the various implemetations of Ruby out there - you give it a reference name and a source tarball url, and it runs ./configure PREFIX=...; make install. That allows it to be magic-free with respect to naming different rubies - just give it a shortcut name that you'll remember.
I have no problem with that. But the idea that I should reject doing things that benefit a large number of people just because they don't simultaneously benefit me in an optimal way is scary. If you're optimizing for your own personal growth, then you're only going to choose to do something that benefits others when it benefits you more than anything else you might choose to do with your limited time and resources.

Now look, I know, maybe I'm just being selfish and optimizing for my personal happiness when I donate to a cause I believe in, maybe Bill Gates just does philanthropy because he 'made crappy products' and needs to feel good about himself. But I don't believe that those choices are optimal for personal growth, and I believe that the world turns on them.
The rise and rise of 'stalker' apps
Group Activity - Searching/Organizing Ad-Hoc activities
Do you realize that with pipelining, preemptive computation, multiple levels of caching, opcode optimization, NUMA, massive parallelism, and all that other stuff x86 is to hardware what Java is to hardware interrupts?

Answer: you don't because otherwise you would not have posted the above.
This is certainly a wise parable. However, the way in which we routinely use stories of this nature from Communist countries as a source of kitsch hilarity leaves a bad taste in my mouth.

Mismanagement and the subversion of metrics to give the illusion of success happen universally, whatever economic system you live under. To some extent, it's human nature to game the system. By using these cliched examples, we're intimating that our society is somehow different.

In reality, our atrocious metrics for success have caused us to spend the past couple of decades slinging fantastic financial rewards at those who have inadvertently sabotaged our economy in their hunt for ever-greater returns.
"we'll totally revolutionize the storage space! Now click here and buy an exclusive 240 usd device that has no release date, but is very exclusive"

Seriously, am I missing something here?
Everything we know about genetic algorithms would lead us to believe that evolution has found an upper limit -- but only in a very specific context with respect to the environment, available resources, and evolutionary baggage.

Everything I know about the development of technology leads me to believe that any given trans-human AI will also somehow be a local maxima.
You verify the votes to ensure that the system is working correctly, Wombat allows voters who suspect that the machine is not work correctly to audit, but it is not necessary for voters to verify. It is sufficient that supervisors do so occasionally and that having inspectors randomly audit about 1-2% of the ballots is very reasonable.
it knows that if it modifies its utility function it is liable to collect less ore, which is something it doesn't want.

Why would it want or not want anything, if it doesn't have a pleasure construct (which might also be called a motivation construct, since an AI might not be capable of the same subjective experience of pleasure that we are)?

I think it's a question of program design whether there's a utility function which decides whether to trigger the pleasure construct, or whether certain sensory input modules directly trigger the pleasure construct. To limit hacking potential, routing everything through a tamper-proof utility function might be better, except that it would also limit the AI's adaptability (short of recreating its own hardware to remove the tamper-proof module... which it might never do depending on the details of its motivation construct).
Wikipedia Completes Transfer Of Sites Away From GoDaddy DNS
Erlang version (abc.erl):

-module(abc).
-export([main/0]).
main() ->
{ok,[A]} = io:fread("A=?","~f"),
{ok,[B]} = io:fread("B=?","~f"),
C = A + B,
io:format("C=~f~n",[C]).

or

-module(abc).
-export([main/0]).
main() ->
{ok,[A,B]} = io:fread("A,B? ","~f ~f"),
C = A + B,
io:format("C=~f~n",[C]).

Compile and run from REPL:

c(abc).
abc:main().

Or just execute in REPL:

{ok,[A]} = io:fread("A=?","~f").
{ok,[B]} = io:fread("B=?","~f").
C = A + B.
io:format("C=~f~n",[C]).
I like it how you get offended by a generalization, then go on and throw another one at a different "faction" :)
A transhuman AI worthy of the name would be very concerned with how well it was able to model the real world -- if for no other reason than the sake of its own survival. Think of that as a 2nd order "survival imperative" of sentient beings.
A day in the life of an Apple event liveblogger
The week in patent wars: Apple wins one, loses another, and asks for money
Put all of this in an email, sign with your name, fire off. See what they say and be open to continuing work if they promise to change and do come through with it. In other words, just be honest.
Yup, someone didn't use DateTime.AddYears http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.datetime.addy...
Your thesis appears to be that the emotion of this piece comes from the human voice. I disagree with that.