skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'd say goodness lies in how we use our technology and that in the balance it's hard to say. We have 7 billion people on the planet now compared to 1 billion in 1800. In addition to natural population biology, this growth has been influenced greatly by advances in medicine and agriculture. Yet today over 1 billion people live in extreme poverty, and only 1 billion people live in a so-called first-world country or at that approximate standard of living. I'm not sure if there was anybody living in extreme poverty in 1800.

If we could quantify an individual's suffering, then we could look at two metrics: the sum of all suffering on the planet, and the average individual suffering on the planet. While I would probably agree that for 1st-world countries these numbers have gone down, I'm just not sure if the same can be said for the global population. It's also unclear whether technology was just ineffective here or actually contributed to the problem.

Even as far as our current dreams of technotopia are concerned, it's important not to forget just how dependent they are on people working and living in what many of us consider abhorrent conditions.

If our use of technology made it so that every human on the planet had to do less work overall then I might be convinced that it was "good" as opposed to "hard to say", but it seems like we want ourselves to do as much if not more work with each new advance, as if work and production of stuff is the ultimate measure of our lives.
Tor is slow, yes, but you very quickly get used to it. I should note that latency isn't as bad on hidden services, obviously.
I believe they should’t really be compensated, because the demand for new games, films and books is created arificially, through advertisement. In fact, the older games are not less fun to play, they’re just not fashionable anymore; old films are not less fun to watch; old books are not less fun to read.

We need new software, because:
a) old software is unavailable anymore (due to copyright),
b) everyone else uses the new one (due to advertising), so we need it for interoperation,
c) old software doesn’t recieve bug fixes, and copyright prevents people from disassembling and modifying software themselves (luckily some countries like Belarus and Russia have better laws and allow this, but previous points still apply).

If the companies stopped producing new software because of lack of money, it wouldn’t stop innovations — if something is really useful, people will still impement it at least because it’s useful for themselves.

If we were allowed to copy information freely, the old software would suffice for most tasks (with occasional bugfixes that could be made by users themselves).
Minneapolis, MN: Web Developer

Fast Horse seeks a front-end web developer to lead digital production on a wide variety of projects. We need a go-getter who can offer and implement innovative web design, UX and UI ideas. Candidate must be able to code standards-compliant sites and social applications.

Responsibilities
• Create standards-compliant websites
• Help design and build custom Facebook tabs and various other social applications
• Customize and create WordPress templates
• Provide valuable input on web design, user experience and user interface for digital development projects
• Implement SEO best practices on all projects
• Communicate effectively with colleagues and clients
• Develop cost estimates for digital projects

Skills & Experience
• Proven track record of coding standards compliant sites
• Strong focus on front-end design and modern web/mobile design
• Familiarity with implementing responsive design
• Strong understanding of APIs
• Experience in building social applications interfacing with Facebook and Twitter
• Project management – including the ability to set and meet deadlines and budgets
• Problem analysis – thoroughly defining challenges and solutions
• Resourcefulness– integrating creative knowledge with business realities
• Openness to new ideas and influences
• Curiosity to seek out new techniques and innovations
Intangibles
We value initiative, a sense of humor, risk-taking and flexibility.
You also need to have a thick skin and a long fuse to thrive in a creative, open, fast-paced environment

Workplace/Compensation
Fast Horse has been named as one of Minnesota’s Best Places to Work by both The Mpls/St. Paul Business Journal and Minnesota Business Magazine, and was named to the The Mpls/St. Paul Business Journal’s “Fast 50″ list honoring the fastest-growing companies in the Twin Cities.
We offer a highly flexible workplace, where Fast Horse staffers are untethered by a designated office or desk. We call it “hotdesking.” Our building is set up to facilitate communication and collaboration, and our people are offered the flexibility work wherever they desire, whether that’s at the office, at a coffee shop, at home, or anywhere else where they feel creative and productive. We offer highly competitive salaries and benefits, including a cafeteria healthcare plan, a SIMPLE IRA, and incentive compensation opportunities.

To apply for this position, email your resume and a link to your portfolio to info@fasthorseinc.com
But if you have to explain your "art" like that then it's probably not very good to begin with.
$20k seems pretty steep for 6 months of education, or am I completely out of the loop?
Since you didn't provide details on the product, it's safe to assume you're selling seats for Mars colony as well as Martian real estate once the flight actually gets there.

Ads in Popular Mechanics and 2600 is likely to be the best bet interest-wise. But you also don't want people on tight budgets, so probably a full-page ad in Robb Report, and a small one in WSJ classifieds.
I think I can say with fair confidence that I’ve learned more and done more in the last four days than I have in the rest of my 22 years of existence.

-- Isn't this a classic display of cognitive bias?
Anecdotes like yours don't prove anything. That's why we have science.

Without a control group and test group we don't know if your conclusions are statistically valid. Maybe most people get better grades when they watch TV and play video games.
The libertarian philosophical response would be that people only have the two basic rights to life and property. And one person cannot take away those rights from another. The government then exists solely to limit behavior strictly only in cases in which one of those two rights are being taken away by another individual.

The point of that argument is that no individual has the right to do with the government what he would not be right to do by himself. This means that since he can't individually limit the rights of another, he can't use the government to do it either.

This means that there are no concessions at all to personal freedom to live in a group. Not really anyway. I mean, yes, you can't take someone else's life (unless they attempt to take yours.) But that's hardly a restriction necessary only in large groups of people. It's kind-of implied as soon as you have at least two people.
What do you mean by SSL usage? I pay $20/mo for the 'Pro' plan which is less expensive than Google AppEngine pricing (my other option).
I enjoyed this excerpt, but I was surprised that he used Orwell as one of his examples of someone whose imagination failed to predict the future.

As much as Taleb swoons over literary culture in this excerpt, and as much of cultural force as Orwell was as a writer; I'm surprised that that Taleb doesn't view Orwell's imagination as a remarkably accurate, in a literary, if not literal, sense, prognosticator.

After all, Orwell's imagination predicted the surveillance society, death of individual privacy, the use of propaganda for social engineering among other things. I may be misinterpreting Taleb's words, "The problem is that almost everything that was imagined never took place, except for a few over-exploited anecdotes...", because it strikes me that he would miss the obvious current reality of Orwell's 'literary predictions' which mostly are very much based on technological achievements such as ubiquitous networks, cheap cameras, cheap and ubiquitous data storage, and so on.
In case anyone is interested in tracking their kids, the drone software is open source: http://code.google.com/p/arducopter/
I think that regardless of tendencies, some of the most inspiring and successful people (on any path in life) have been those who are authentic and comfortable with themselves.

That said, the world seems to have a real deficit of sincere and authentic leaders.
Just in case, Spain in spanish is España.
It's actually pretty awesome how much blocking a handful of crap analytics/tracking/social providers speeds up the responsiveness of the web browser with roughly zero loss of functionality. The only side effect I've observed is that blocking twitter's slow-ass CDN ruins twitter.com's stylesheet.
The most "insensitive" banner ad targeting
D3 uses a combination of HTML, SVG and CSS. HTML5 is a broader standard than SVG, so the answer is D3 uses both. HTML5 added SVG as a new feature (replacing generic <object> tags).
Not quite everywhere. When you have enough traffic, the load spikes resulting from putting cache generation in the user path becomes seriously painful, so often a separate process is responsible instead.

(Imagine 5,000 threads all deciding they want exactly the same data at exactly the same time, then trying to write it to exactly the same location. Now imagine 50,000 more threads trying to do exactly the same thing because of the delays caused by the first set. Now imagine your web site is down and your mobile phone is ringing)
what do you think about klee.llvm.org?
You seem to be using CloudFlare and CloudFront interchangeably. From context I think your talking about the "free cdn startup", not the AWS service. Could you edit for clarity?
Added2dom a new jQuery plugin to fire a callback when added to the DOM.
I can agree with a lot of the criticisms in these comments, because the future will definitely be cool, and Taleb has selectively forgotten about a lot of the great technological advancements and focussed on things that haven't advanced.

That said, Taleb makes a good point when he is talking about the tendency for 'futurists' to get it all wrong. He is touching on one of the major problems of design which is that bad design is always additive, and constantly bolts on extra useless features in order to strive for something 'newer', whereas good design demands subtraction.

The iPhone was released in an era where most nerds still got excited about what Intel was planning to release next year, and yet the most influential computer of the decade didn't even have an Intel processor. By subtracting away the unnecessary, Jobs delivered something that was far greater than the sum of its parts. Most notably, the iOS touch interface was a huge innovation from a human-computer interaction perspective, yet viewed from another perspective all it did was bring us back to an interface that had been used for centuries (I think Taleb can realise the difference between a Phoenician tablet and an iPad, he is referring to the interface).

I think ultimately Taleb is touching on something that Steve Jobs would often repeat, which is that the best objects exist at an intersection of the arts and the sciences. Human nature does not fundamentally change as the years pass, and this is ultimately the limiting factor on successful technologies, and the driving force behind the process of disruptive innovation which continues to favour the less technologically advanced yet more customer-centric (or human-centric) technologies. This is something that is often forgotten in the technology world where it took a completely non-technical liberal arts drop-out in the form of Jobs to help technologists realise that computers ultimately have to be made for real people.

That said, Taleb is writing outside his domain and therefore this piece could have been much better written.
> Real-time bidding also makes the online marketplace less of an even playing field, allowing companies to send loyalty points or discounts — or price increases — to individuals based on their perceived spending power.

Isn't that an implementation of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" social justice ideal? I thought NYT was a little left-leaning and their authors would like that.

The idea that buyers should be treated equally, like anonymous entities and their circumstances should have no bearing on price, is something taken straight out of John Locke's thought experiments.[1]

[1] I have no idea how to link within Google Books so just search this one for "anchor" http://books.google.com/books?id=WYXB2hV1AE4C
For what purposes?
Good read. I especially enjoy the part about smart people having an "idiot mode". I've found that some of my best ideas were derived from silly ones, and the silly ones only came about because I was with friends I could trust.
I know a lot of Bloomberg reporters and a bureau chief for a pretty big market and they definitely do not work this way. For starters, the people relying on the terminals (and paying a lot of money for them) are savvier than that.
Additionally, some of the content (music) is actually completely or almost completely unavailable (even legally) outside of these sites. For example, old rare/obscure records - people rip them because they want to share, and people download because there is literally no other way to get a copy without potentially spending $100+ (not to mention the costs of a decent vinyl setup).
But this distinction is historically new. It came about because of copyright. There's no inherent difference.

Before that, authors/actors/composers etc. were compensated either through commissions for the creation of the work (with the expectation that it might be copied by others) or for performances of the works, or by benefactors.

Or, as the vast majority of authors today, who expend the effort to create works without getting their work published for profit (or at all), they were often not compensated for their work at all. In fact, like with vanity publishing today, any number of authors would have encountered substantial expensive in getting their own works spread, with no hope of recouping those expenses.

Modern copyright did not start until the Statue of Anne in 1710, and did not extend to the majority of the world until much later.

Whether or not returning to that state is desirable or not is certainly open to debate, but history does give us plenty of examples of possible ways of doing so.
If you want to work on large-scale reliable systems, get your code reviewed by top-notch engineers, and live a happy life of a grown man, go to Google. If you want to code some PHP at 2 AM in the morning and watch it hit production by noon, go to Facebook.

Facebook lives by "move fast, break things" principle, which might be appealing for software engineers who love seeing their code live quickly, but must be a hell for infrastructure engineers who get paged in the middle of the night when things break.
It is nice to see these more expensive variants of colleges spring up. At least they're more honest than most universities - but then as [intellegacy] already noted, the opportunity cost is well hidden under this startup craze. Indeed, one does make more money by selling axes to gold miners than to mine gold.
Did you not even bother to read the title of the article?
Maybe this is a better take-away when comparing the two:

This is a showcase of the progress of such inexpensive, accessible, and miniaturized (embedded) hardware over the course of a little more than a decade - back when we needed much more bulkier and expensive PC's. Yes there are better examples of things that can fit in your pocket and do the things of yester-years N times better, but I still like seeing such raw and transparent examples. Extrapolate this by another decade, it's nice to imagine about what's coming next.
That's nearly what I've been saying in this thread.

What I've been saying is that for many people it is not a rationalization. They genuinely believe, because of arguments from history and logic that sharing isn't wrong. They aren't jumping through mental hoops, this is their honest belief after considering the alternatives and arguments.

Now that isn't to say that there aren't some, maybe many people for whom it is purely rationalization, but your posts seem to entirely ignore any other possibility.
> Isn't that an implementation of "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" social justice ideal? I thought NYT was a little left-leaning and their authors would like that.

It makes little sense to me to speak about advertisement in Marxist terms. The goal is to make money for corporations, hardly a social justice-oriented endeavor.

At any rate, different pricing for serving ads to different people is the antithesis of treating everyone equally. I recognize this but hardly find it noteworthy. At the extreme, the "everyone gets the same ads" mentality causes me to be subjected to ads for diapers and dresses. Comparatively, the ads I currently get are downright fascinating.
Besides the legal and regulatory hurdles Google would have to overcome to make this work, I don't think Google wants to be in the business of making an industry more efficient when that industry doesn't need to exist in the future at all. That is to say, why scan mail when you can just convince people to use email?

Packages, on the other hand, will still need to be delivered for the foreseeable future.
On a related note, Google, Bing, and now Facebook trap us in a custom-me bubble - only showing search they think are relevant to us. This kind of information sorting is fine but it makes hard for me to search something "objectively" - have to go through Incognito or clear cookies, sign out etc...

I think this paradigm will collapse as we become globalised. My question is when and what will replace it.
A. Learning experience for a startup

B. Getting hired by a startup

C. Getting hired anywhere
Could boredom be curable?
Weird, his post is showing up as not dead for me. Looking at his comment history, all of the comments since three days ago are dead except this one (which is the most recent at the moment).
> certain classes of

As commented below, Bloomberg mentions it in his autobiography.
I'm surprised no one has tried NFC for security.
Reassessing what I want from a simple website creation tool
I'd say vaccines and antibiotics have made my life vastly better.

Let's compare: WW2 was the worst war we've ever had; it killed about 60 million people, or about 2% of the world population.

The Spanish Flu in 1918 killed 3%. Smallpox killed 3-500 million people in the 20th century, or about 5-8x as many as WW2.

Or how about the Black Death a few centuries before? Half the European population gone. It wiped out entire Asian cities too.

Vaccines and antibiotics are miracles we take for granted; our ancestors would think us mad.
It depends on what your starting salary would be, I suppose.
PayByGroup - Senior Developer/Engineer - H1B accepted

To apply email joinus@paybygroup.com.

ABOUT PAYBYGROUP

We're a team of execution-loving dreamers that are backed by prominent angels and VCs, including 500 Startups. We help people plan and pay together for activities they've always wanted to do with friends and family: from vacations to season tickets. We integrate directly with merchant websites but are in semi-stealth mode so we haven't revealed much publicly. Our traction has wildly exceeded our expectations; merchants and users alike LOVE our service. In a nutshell, we're making people's lives better by making collaborative payments a reality on the web.

THE POSITION

You would be the first full-time, on-shore member of our technical team besides our CTO, who is a badass PhD in machine learning. We're looking for someone that loves building things that improve people's lives. Do you want to build the next photo-sharing app? Move on to the next job posting please!

You will be working to architect and implement many core elements of our platform and shape the direction of the product. You also have the potential to gain status as... wait for it... a co-founder! Yup, that is how much we value this new potential team member.

YOUR SKILLS

We're looking for someone who has felt the pain we solve and understands the challenge of getting friends and family together for trips, concerts, and other meaningful life moments and adventures. We are a team of organizers ourselves and maintain a tight feedback loop between our users and how we build the product.

We want someone that loves solving challenging problems, from how to architect our merchant integrations to how to optimize the user experience. Our vision is HUGE. Like, call-me-and-let-me-tell-you-all-about-it huge. We're going for a home run and aren't looking back. YOLO!

Rails, HTML/CSS, and Javascript are must-haves.

Any mobile dev or UX experience is gravy but not required.

Speaking of gravy, you must also like cookies, pies, and other bountiful fruits of the best kitchen appliance ever: the oven. They make frequent appearances at our office.

THE GOODS

We offer $80-120K and 0.1-2.0% equity commensurate with experience and you can set your preference for salary vs. equity. We're looking for folks who are in it for the long haul as part of a close knit team. Job hoppers need not apply.

Extra Perks: What do you dream of? Work retreats in Tahoe with lunch breaks on the slopes... sweet tech / desk setup... dogs at the office... all of the above! It's all on the table or already done. Let us know what we haven't thought of.

THE TEAM

We're an experienced founding team with previous start-ups under our belts and a great balance of business and technical chops. Why waste your time with first-timers that don't know what they're doing? Come learn, grow, and share in fame and fortune with a team that is quickly putting its stamp on world.
Yep. The real thing here is the quality of instruction. Really top-notch.
> If you go to a lawyer for legal advice and then refuse to pay him saying "I haven't deprived you of a tangible product so it's not really stealing" you are missing the point, it's still theft.

That is theft because you've robbed the lawyer of his opportunity cost. For the time he was spending giving you legal advice, he could have been giving it to someone else that would pay him.

A more apt analogy would be secretly listening in on a lawyer giving legal advice to a paying client. You haven't taken anything away from him or the paying client, and all you've done is "copied" what was being heard anyway.
There is an element of 'Become great, and then just do what comes naturally' here, though. Its both insightful and somewhat problematic, in the sense that inauthenticity is a red-flag, but authentic != good, so the converse is not true (not-inauthentic is not 'good', per-se).

TLDR: you need authentic (+) goodness, together.
It's guaranteed to be at least $60K, but lots of people will likely end up at around $80K. Plus, you can defer a big chunk of the $20K into $199/mo payments.
I would expect that mixing dynamic & static typing still is an area that could lead to some language breakthroughs.

Dynamic typing is great for exploratory programming and static typing offers additional correctness guarantees.

Some work has been done in Haskell, Clojure and Racket in this direction (allowing static and dynamic types to co-exist) but I think lots more is possible.
Oh yea, when you apply, include Github and LinkedIn links and a brief description of what interests you about working with us.

- Frank (President, PayByGrou)
BASIC had plenty such warts, incompatibilities and lack of 'modern' features. Javascript is still not as immediately available and direct to use as the BASICs of old were. As a beginner, to easily make anything useful and interesting (by today's standards) in Javascript, you need to run it in a browser as a saved file, wrap it in some html, and add a bunch of boilerplate (create a canvas, make stuff move, access the DOM).