skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do you need to be versed in econ? Do you really think economists know what's best for society? That's scary. What you should be versed in is the flaws in the models that are taught in the standard econ curriculum and the ones that are accepted among the majority of economists.

pg's essay is interesting in that it's one of the few I've read that did not have a note indicating he received comments from others before publishing it.

Everyone has their own ideas about fairness, whether they are rich or poor.

The article does seem to suggest that the wealthy have some sort of conscience. They do think about the lower classes.

Here's a thought to ponder: What if we took all the poor folks out of America and put them in another country. Then the wealthy would not have to think about them. It might ease their conscience. A question for the economists: Would anyone's wealth be affected if we removed the poor?
Amazon.com was famously put together by mostly Lisp engineers. They more recently switched to C++ and apparently experienced a lot of growing pains as they had to learn how to scale up C++ to match what they had been doing in Lisp for years.
Does anyone know if there is some kind of possibility to copy facebook contacts to my phone? I'm using Android+Facbook sync. Phone is rooted... I have at least 100 people who are facebook contacts and the ones I don't want to loose, but I'm not even able to copy paste their number not to mention copying them to phone/sim card...

I know facebook doesn't want you to do it, but there has to be a way....
> Because the new approach makes more money, its triumph is inevitable.

If only this were true, then the current problems would never have arisen. This new approach isn't wholly new. He quotes Peter Drucker and mentions Toyota, after all. Otherwise the observations seem largely correct, and I can believe in a shift where people again begin to believe in this sort of approach.
Was excited to read the article for the history on Centipede, then had to filter through a tired rant on gender in order to get to it.

In contract, this interview with PacMan inventor Toru Iwatani in Programmers at Work is absolutely fantastic. http://programmersatwork.wordpress.com/toru-iwatani-1986-pac...
Review: Quantum Conundrum builds complex puzzles from simple mechanics
A few British universities did have candidacy. There was a financial penalty from the research council if a certain percentage of your students didn't finish in 3 or 4 years - so the university would make everyone a candidate and only count them as a PhD student for the stats once it looked like they would do OK. Eventually this evolved to being a candidate right up to when you submitted so there was a 100% completion rate but the research councils wised up to the scam.
coughs first world problem coughs
IBM didn't get the PC, so they lost relevance. Microsoft didn't get the web, so they lost relevance. Both are still huge companies, grossing billions a year (but hit on their valuation by the public market). Maybe in 10 years we'll be saying "google didn't get social", so they lost their relevance. Would that be the case? Only time will tell.
If a single region is a single point of failure, isn't that "doing it wrong"?
Brutally honest presidential speech (video)
Why would anyone on God's green earth sync their Address book to facebook!?! It's a social network for crying out loud, not a work place! WT..!!

This is what happen's when you mix work and pleasure ha ha, it's a stupid kid's playground to post stupid thing's and do nothing all day! I just can't get past it, why would anyone sync their address book to FB!? ha ha ha
Chad Turner Is Creating A Student Workforce With Blissipline
I can confirm it too, but didn't catch it in time. A reboot however and everything is back to normal.
What I never understood is why an attacker couldn't just mirror the user's actions to the real site and scrape the confidence image or word from there to show on the phishing site. What am I missing?
I didn't realize Chrome was being preloaded by OEMs. It's nice to see that OEMs are actually using their freedom to customize Windows installs to do something socially valuable for a change.
like, i understand why he's frustrated but.. really? is that all it takes for scoble to get that upset?
How Google handle leap seconds
Yes, both are in one "Safari" category.

Here's split by OS:

1.	Windows	- 78.77%

2.	Macintosh	- 8.39%

3.	iOS	- 6.10%

4.	Android	- 3.88%

5.	(not set)	- 1.50%

6.	Linux	- 0.69%

7.	BlackBerry	- 0.30%

8.	Nokia	- 0.12%

9.	SymbianOS	- 0.09%

10.	Windows Phone	- 0.08%
Or GitHub pages/Amazon S3/etc.
You can play it here

http://atari.com/arcade/arcade/centipede

It's really difficult, and I think that it might have been partially designed to suck down quarters. The best Atari game is this:

http://atari.com/adventure

...yeah it looks like crap, but he crammed it into 4K, and at the time there was literally nothing like it in the world.

Most people say this is the best Atari game:

http://www.atari.com/arcade/arcade/yars-revenge

...I still remember the rather lengthy comic book that came with the cartridge explaining the plight of the yars in their struggle against the armored cannon, or whatever.

ED: found the comic. I guess it's not that long:

http://www.atariage.com/comics/comic_thumbs.html?MagazineID=...
You don't mean it works for Linus Torvalds. You mean it works for you when Linus Torvalds does this. But you're just some guy on the Internet, so why should I care? Indeed, even if you were Linus Torvalds, why should I care, given the fact that you're flat out wrong?
I have no clue whether this violates CFAA, but arguably they usurped address books and intercepted user's communication.

This was obviously intentional, and the timing makes sense -- Apple is rolling out address book synchronization with Facebook.

I hope this forces Apple to reconsider.
Very unlikely according to what Elon said in an interview:
Source: http://www.gq.com/news-politics/newsmakers/200901/elon-musk-...

----------------------------------------------------

Elon: "It's important enough to be on the scale of life itself, and therefore goes beyond the parochial concerns of humanity," Musk says of our interplanetary destiny. "We're all focused on our little things that are of concern to humanity itself. People think of curing AIDS or cancer as being very important, and they are—within the context of humanity. But curing all forms of cancer would improve the average life span by only two to three years. That's it."

"In other words, while eradicating disease is a worthy pursuit, and would extend the lives of individual human beings, my life's work is extending the life span of life itself."

----------------------------------------------------

Elon did talk about some projects he would like to do if he had the time. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5FESP1h7IZM

1. VTOL supersonic electric jet: fast, quiet, low-cost to operate (what he jokingly referred to in Iron Man 2, IIRC)

2. Prefabricated metal sections for creating a double-decker/box highway, that could be﻿ dropped in place like a lego system with minimal disruption to traffic.

3. Fusion problem, magnetically-confined fusion, gets easier as you scale it up.
Do not miss the link to Denning's prior review of Roger Martin's "Fixing the Game",

http://www.forbes.com/sites/stevedenning/2011/11/28/maximizi...

where he explains why maximizing shareholder value is misguided.
Top comment on Youtube:

"Robert Scoble, you asked for it.
Under Calendar Settings>General
Automatically add invitations to my calendar:
- Yes
-﻿ Yes, but don't send event reminders unless I have responded "Yes" or "Maybe"
- No, only show invitations to which I have responded
Check the settings, dumbfuck.
"
"In spite of all press that Y2K was just a silly waste of money, its events like these that makes me suspect it would have been a much bigger deal if everyone had ignored it and fixed it after things where shown to break."

Did you read the parent's post?
"There are only two hard things in Computer Science: cache invalidation and naming things."

Static files on S3 are far simpler than setting up Varnish and coming up with a reasonable strategy for cache invalidation. Varnish is great, but I don't know anyone who would describe setting it up as "simple." This solution, on the other hand, looks quite simple.
I dono. The times I've played along were always really awkward. It's usually easier if I say something like "who the hell are you?" (I mean, in a joking way; and with a "I'm horrible at faces" and story about how I was calling the new guy at one of my jobs "David" for 6 months before someone else pulled me aside and told me he was really "dennis" - see, our email standard was first initial lastname, and I remembered people by email aliases. I then mention my desire for some kind of wearable facial recognition rig.) I mean, I cultivate something of a coarse image, and I think I can usually pull that off in a friendly and self-deprecating kinda way.

In general, the sooner I get it out there, the better off the conversation goes. The worst is when I get their name and I still don't remember context. I mean, an ordinary wearable rig with a twiddler and an email lookup would take care of that.
My Friday Night With AWS
Brain dump of my thoughts about how we handled/recovered from the AWS outage last night.
Where Facebook and Google+ fail
China hasn't agreed to any arms inspections, so the size of their nuclear arsenal is pretty vague. (Inspections are typically the result of bilateral arms reductions-- China doesn't have enough nukes to require reducing them, so there's no reason for them to let foreigners into their ICBM silos)
yikes -- i never meant for anyone to read the epilogue without context (or see it posted standalone to HN). the rest of the book talks about how i cultivated all of those traits throughout the past six years.

also, that's sort of why i had the parenthetical following that statement ...

(Two obvious caveats: Not every Ph.D. student received these benefits—many grew jaded and burned-out from their struggles. Also, lots of people cultivate these positive traits without going through a Ph.D. program.)
In case anyone is looking for the actual link to marco's posts on ntp:

http://my.opera.com/marcomarongiu/blog/index.dml/tag/ntp
Environment. Working to contribute to human knowledge in a place focused on research first, commercialization second sounds very rewarding and effective.
Eastern Storms Disrupt Amazon.com Data Centers
Possibly, but just for the sake of an interesting discussion, what is there about this particular blatant “It screws users over but it's good for Facebook” move that is different than all the other moves they’ve pulled?
No. China has a defense. A last resort defense. Because
they have this defense, the US will not attack China.
That's just how it is. Attacking China is suicide because
of China's nuclear capabilities.

Technically, China's agreed to never use their nukes in a first-strike scenario. They're supposed to only be used in response to nuclear attack.

That agreement's laughably unenforceable in a full-bird US/China shooting war; but it's there.
The part that really bothers me - The address books on iOS 6 changed without the user noticing.
You're right about 747 pilots. That was a singularly ill-chosen example.
wow didn't expect to see this on here, especially with that particular post title!

just to provide some context, this page is the epilogue of a ~100-page memoir of my Ph.D. experiences [1], so parts of it might not make any sense as a standalone article.

[1] http://pgbovine.net/PhD-memoir.htm
Not necessarily. For example, if someone made that from municipal bonds, as a lot of rich people do, additional tax has in effect already been deducted in the form of the lower interest rates that such bonds pay.
I know pylint and pychecker do this, but not pep8. Opinions on those?
"Pray I don't alter it any further."
An excellent reason not to give apps write access to your address book willy-nilly. You can't trust them not to screw up.
This isn't "yet" as much as "at all". They're all tools, use the best one(s) for the job.
I don't know that that works - the south pole at least has ground, and a LOT of permafrost that isn't displacing any water.
I live in Europe. I was aware of some aspects of US healthcare: expensive overall, a tendency to bankrupt people, failing to prevent easily avoidable harm, it's just that the first item was a statistic to me. 21% of income for someone who has a median income drove it home. The trend also escaped me, I didn't follow the US social climate until recently.

I assumed cash as well, especially since the employer is shady; our cards also have chips and would easily be tied to an ID, so I was a bit thrown off. We do share the problem of catering relying on undocumented labour.
I like RSS, and my usage has gradually expanded over the years. But I can see several reasons for slowed uptake: I haven't seen new coverage of RSS such as "It's fun and easy to use RSS to collect your favorite blogs and episodic media in one place" articles for years, so it's likely very much out of the non-technical public's eye. It has become a set-and-forget commodity for media consumers who do know about it (but who don't proselytize). Getting started requires a bit of tedium - finding a decent client, copy/pasting URLs, or getting a browser to properly fire up that client to subscribe. Even finding the RSS icon/link on many content websites has become annoyingly difficult. And no blogs, podcasts or vlogs even mention "Subscribe to our RSS feed" anymore, only facebook, twitter, and maybe their website URL.

(Though I see its value for text, Google Reader (web) is weak for non-text media: it's off the main Google menubar, has no auto download, and so acts merely as a hidden, online-only index to updated content. I highly value downloading for reading/playback offline (or frequent 0-bars situations).)

A chunk of RSS's potential userbase just gravitates to what they use every day: Twitter, since "feeds" work much the same, with the addition of comments and a promotion mechanism (retweet or not).

Just thinking aloud.
For the cost that Rackspace charges (and what they claim to provide for said cost) I want both.
The default was set to the first option, which (as much as I hate to say it), still gives his argument some grounds. Google should've set it as opt-in instead of opt-out.

But, man, talk about being over the top. It's Google's products that he's using for free. They don't owe anything to him. His rant does more damage to his character than to Google's profits, IMO.

EDIT: It goes without saying that I prefer Will Wheaton's post much more than Scoble's. And he's not 'freaking out' as Scoble claims.
It seems flash drives go for about $1 a gigabyte or less. If the prices drop in half twice more they will be down to the $0.25/gigabyte I was paying for hard drives when I first started tracking prices in 2008. At that time, SSDs were $9.38 per gigabyte.
Actually, in conventional war, as Millennium Challenge 2002 clearly showed [1], using smart tactics a technologically inferior army can effectively defeat the US military.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Millennium_Challenge_2002
I just deleted the Facebook app from my iPhone. I have no idea if it altered any of my contacts, but this certainly does scare me enough to warrant deletion.
You get free unlimited photo storage, free groups, events, messaging, status updates, and more. All your friends are on it and using it. You use it to keep in touch with people around the block and around the globe in real time.

All we ask is that your private communications never again leave this application. Perhaps you think you’re being treated unfairly?
I'm getting a whole mess of "You can't play that game!" errors on legitimate moves.
Here's a nice table of SSD prices on Newegg: http://edwardbetts.com/price_per_tb/ssd/

SSD is definitely one of the best upgrades I've ever purchased for a computer.
I invited him to come watch the sunset in Bernal Heights. My bad Robert!
The first indicator that it was going to be a long Friday night was our EC2 hosted Minecraft server tipping over. Nagios alerts followed. This is a brain dump of some of my thoughts about AWS, and a discussion of how we got back on-line quickly.
This is actually a very old idea, but seemingly still quite new to many American companies and US MBA programmes.

Several non-Anglo American corporate cultures and capitalist systems have always worked like this or done so for a long time. For example, the Swiss, German and Japanese home-grown companies.

The failure of the SVM model was made high profile due to two quotes from General Electric's former CEO, Jack Welch across a time-span of approx. 30 years.

It is only now, perhaps also as a result of the financial crisis, that the negative synergy inherent to the "Unholy Trinity" of:

1. Debt as a vehicle for growth (applies to economies too),

2. Excessive executive total compensation (including growth of professional shareholder class),

3. Shareholder Value Maximisation,

is becoming clear.

As hinted above, other systems focus on, e.g. generating customer value and cash first, executive compensation tightly linked to both company performance and compensation levels within the firm, shareholders take a backseat or are strongly tempered by long-term stakeholder interests, etc.

Oddly enough, some of the most successful US companies generally already follow or followed these customer value and cash-flow oriented principles from the start. For example, the tech companies, Apple, Microsoft and Google.
Playboy Model Genius Status to Earn Visa
Scoble is one of those people who sound really funny when they swear. He sounds really out a character and despite his point having merit, he sounds like a whiny little nerd.
I agree on the last point, but I'd say it's more like it works "acceptably", as in you do more or less get healthcare in some fashion. If you're a salaried professional and have good health, it's more or less ok, with some weirdness around changing jobs (which is getting more common). It does become a huge problem still if you end up unlucky enough to have a major health problem earlyish in life, e.g. a congenital heart problem or cancer in remission. Then you in effect have to work for large companies to get into their group plans, be very careful about coverage gaps, and don't even think about doing freelance or a startup. It also produces weird moral dilemmas; for example, if you have a major preexisting condition and join a small company that offers health insurance, you may inadvertently be punching a big hole in their budget by massively worsening their employee risk pool from the perspective of the insurer (and the business isn't allowed to ask you about things like that before hiring).

The other big anger-relieving valve is Medicare, which removes a large proportion of major illnesses (anything with onset age 65+) from the problem space that private-sector health insurance has to address. If the elderly had to buy health insurance on the private market, or alternatively have their insurance covered via employer pension plans, I don't think the system would work at all, and there would be a lot more angry people (who vote at high rates).
That's not consistent w/ my testing:

- email from address associated w/ facebook account goes directly to facebook messages

- email from address not associated w/ facebook account does not arrive, in neither messages nor 'other'
They actually do owe him something, like being the evangelist for their platform. Scoble did do free marketing for G+ (on every place he is/was - I know this from Quora, for example).

At least Google could have asked the top users on G+ before releasing this. Is that hard to do? You suppose not to alienate your users, especially when something you are competing against (Facebook) is already established and you want those users.
> But, man, talk about being over the top. It's Google's products that he's using for free. They don't owe anything to him.

So how do you feel about Facebook's email fuckup?
Congratulations on your amazing first post. By waiting a year, you've really managed to get a feel for what's acceptable here.
Interesting comment about the minimum size of flash storage being 18nm here: http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2012/06/why-ssds-cost-half-of...

Can anyone provide more information on the nature of that limitation?

I did find reference to this article from 2 years ago: http://features.techworld.com/storage/3211959/is-nand-flash-...

It just seems like it's talking about the usual ongoing issue of, "we're near the cutting edge of lithography techniques", but that's kind of a given (you always build on the best lithography method that can scale, which tends to be fairly close to the best lithography method period). We've been in a similar state for CPU's and RAM for decades now. Is there something different about SSD's?
Delete facebook from your life. Lawyer up. Hit the gym.

Words to live by.
Awesome. That was funny as....

Thanks for the share.
Again, you refuse to acknowledge that Grads are used.

You put words into my mouth.

You fail to engage in minimally-honest debate.

This does not belong on Hacker News, and we probably both have better things to do.
There's a difference between complaining about features within Facebook (timeline, etc) and changes Facebook tries to make outside of it's app. Changing your personal contact details is way outside.
> However, C++ is all about object-oriented programming!

That really depends on how you use the language. Looking at the code I normally see there's almost no inheritance, but lots of static polymorphism through templates. Data tends to be stored in structs, tuples and the default data structures (vectors, mostly), and a lot of use is made of the new lambdas and the functional bits of the STL.

I know that you can write Java in C++ (and that many people do), but it's not really the language's raison d'être.
In most (all?) science fields, without a PhD you're stuck pretty close to the bottom. Its impossible to be anything much above lab tech/lab manager without a PhD in biological sciences. Some people want to work in the private sector for pharma companies for example...
Facebook is serving shareholders now. I'm hoping there are some serious repercussions internally at FB for this, because as a shareholder, I'm pissed they messed this up because the user base is upset and will continue to stop trusting Facebook.

How's the stock supposed to get back to 38 now?
I think the difference here is that everything they've done before now has been more or less bounded by my own actions. If they screw my privacy, it's my own damned fault for posting sensitive stuff to their site. Hell, even if they track me around the web, I should've been more careful about blocking their cookies.

But this is another ballgame. What they've done here is effectively hijack a completely unrelated and ubiquitous communication channel — without any action on my part, and without giving any indication of doing so!

I don't even use Facebook, but since I created a Facebook account at some point in the past, they potentially have access to my inbound email traffic. That's just absurd and stupid.
It appears to be fixed in Linux 3.4 [1]. According to the original commit [2] it's been broken since 7dffa3c673fbcf835cd7be80bb4aec8ad3f51168 [3], which appeared in 2.6.26.

So, kernels between 2.6.26 and 3.3 (inclusive) are vulnerable.

[1] https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2....

[2] https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2....

[3] https://git.kernel.org/?p=linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux-2....
Has this been contributed back to the community?
Ntpd leap seocnd update may crash Linux