skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
2 log(10^140) / 8 ~= 58.134, so it's more like 58 bytes. Irrelevant for the argument? Definitely, but I had to double-check the moment I thought '140 decimal digits in about 160 bits? That cannot be right.'

Also, the number of states that the universe has time for to compute may be a lot smaller than the number of possible states. For example, if each particle, at each step, made a two-way choice, that single particle could run through that 10^140 potential states in no time flat. Because of that, you cannot say "64 bytes ought to be enough for anybody"
Except that the ad is not funny but lame.
I think he's suggesting we give it to oxfam which would at least end this guy's problems.
To me this doesn't focus enough on why you should choose one language over the other. They all have their place depending on the type of applications you are going to be building.
If you are going to use W3Schools, you're gonna have a bad time. http://w3fools.com/
Yes, the TeX language is pretty horrible (indeed, the whole concept of TeX is a testament to the strength of cannabis available in the Bay Area in the 70s - it's not a typesetting system, it's two separate programming languages which typeset as a side effect!). LuaTeX is an attempt to remedy this situation by embedding lua in the TeX engine: http://www.luatex.org/

(It's also no coincidence that the development of BibTeX coincides with the crack epidemic, but I digress.)
I would use Talend for Data Integration to clean and load the data into MySQL. Then write some SQL for the reports that are query-able. Then build Ruby and Rails front-end for the more complicates data views.
Back of the envelope calculations, grabbing some numbers off of Wikipedia:

"In 2005, 43% of the world population (3.14 billion people) have an income of less than U.S. $2.5/day. 21.5% of the world population (1.4 billion people) have an income of less than US$1.25/day."

So the bottom 1.4 billion people live on less than $1.25/day.

1/4 of the $240 billion annual income cited is $60bn a year, spread amongst 1.4 billion people yields $0.117 a day.

Assuming that the average income of that 1.4 billion is half of $1.25, that would give us an ~18% boost to income (not necessarily livelihood).

Which is a surprisingly high figure. Why the hell wouldn't they lead with that? The title is clearly a fairytale to anyone with any sense.
That type of confiscation of legitimately earned wealth would be profoundly immoral.
So what? The annual income of the rest of the world is distributed among 7 billion people -- not 100 people.

So even if it could "end world poverty more than four times over" the amount per person gets negligible. You cannot get much from the already poor to give it to the already poor.

A better example would be the richest 10% of adults, which accounts for 85% of the world total assets (so the other 90% has just 1/5 what they have).

The thing is, just getting 1/4 of the property of the richest 100 persons could save hundreds of millions of lives and improve billions, while it would leave those 100 perfectly fine.

The reason we don't do it is because we value private property (especially of the rich) more than millions of human lives.

(We think nothing of overtaxing or working to the bone the poor on the other hand, or stealing their natural resources and land -- as centuries of colonialism has shown).
that rent is unbelievable. I pay 505 a month for a very large 1 bedroom in a gated community...
I was (re-)reading On Lisp yesterday and came across two further variations by pg:

In preface:

As well as writing their programs down toward the language, experienced Lisp programmers build the language up toward their programs.

Then later in 1.2 "Programming Bottom-up", pg rephrases that statement:

In Lisp, you don’t just write your program down toward the language, you also build the language up toward your program
>> "Does 1 cake really matter"?

All of these "100 richest people" probably give away more than 100x what you earn in a year already. Are you honestly going to call them selfish?

If you are, then you are saying everyone should give away as much of their "cakes" as possible. Can you afford to give away an extra "cake"? Probably. Then you are selfish too, by your own logic.
Well, only 19 people have given more than $1bn to charity http://www.forbes.com/sites/luisakroll/2011/05/19/the-worlds... which leaves a lot of people not giving much away. The Russian oligarchs seem to like to spend money on football teams and mansions not alleviating poverty, while the Chinese rich do not seem to give much away either.
Of course not; that is never the prescription. Because if you keep the institutions in place, gross inequality would simply reemerge.

Like if you toppled the kings while keeping a feudal system, or freed all the slaves while keeping slavery intact. You have to alter the system to one which doesn't doesn't have these outcomes.

Obviously, the powerful elites don't like this, as they correctly perceive this as "revolution": a fundamental change to the institutions. (An egalitarian society by definition means they won't have massively greater power than others.) So they will predictably respond with violence. (Note that the police and military effectively work for them.)
There was this recent security presentation about formal language-theoretic reasons why message-length prefixes are a bad idea. http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~sergey/langsec/

The problem was that it causes unnecessary complexity in validation and parsing, as <length-of-message><message>... describes a context-sensitive grammar, while a more XML-, JSON-like syntax with delimiters <delim><message></delim>... is context-free. The complexity of proper CSG validation can be exploited for resource-depletion/DOS attacks, while not validating the syntax of a message leaves part of the program that uses the data in these messages with potentially invalid data, putting it into an inconsistent state, possibly leading to DOS or worse exploits.

At least that's what I got from their presentation, which was very interesting BTW, especially the part about "weird machines"--that's basically the inconsistent state, the emergent machine that is made out of all the things an attacker can make a system do by exploiting it. It was also extremely geeky.

It just left me wondering: if I understood this right, every protocol that uses message-length prefixes is at least vulnerable to resource-depletion attacks, and there's no way of solving this short of proving P=NP. But that's quite a lot of protocols! Why isn't the Internet burning down as we speak?
Check out this: http://forum.nasaspaceflight.com/index.php?topic=2847.0
this Article is about that the richer People are getting richer and the poor people poorer...

and this is a problem!

I live in germany a "rich" country you may think...
There is a growing part of people how have a fulltime job but they are getting not payed enough and must go employment agency to get subvention from the state...
I wouldn't call it "self" inflicted, but inflicted by people, yes. The poor 3 year old child who grows up in a slum isn't the one responsible.
>Dire poverty is self-inflicted.

Self-inflicted? That is a bullshit western justification. Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die.

Not to mention that their very countries were designed and drawn on the map by colonial powers, like dividing loot, with no respect to local populations and tensions (or with full intent to exploit them, in a "divide and conquer" move).

Or that even today the governments of those countries are appointed and remotely controlled by western powers, with everything from under the table deals to open military support for their cronies.

Calling poverty in those places "self-inflicted" is like saying a raped woman "deserved it".
Everyone commenting on here wants to believe that they will become one of the top 1%.
No one here wants to contemplate what would happen if they fell to the bottom 1%.
Don't MS make it agonising. To the point that I almost can't be bothered. Have you read all the twisted workarounds that people are doing to get legitimate upgrades?

I have Vista 32 on my laptop (that is doing nothing at the moment), I want a 64bit version of windows. I'd like to go from Vista 32 to Windows 8 with an upgrade. But that isn't really supported. I can go from Vista 32 to Vista 64 -> Windows 8, but it's a hassle. Lenovo have pulled their images, I have no disk images of Vista, it goes on. I've read loads of people going through similar install/reinstalls.

Windows should just provide different arch versions of the ISO, that they update regularly. That you can download any old place, and place it on USB/DVD whatever. Then just use your paid for product key. Simple?

I'm trialing the evaluation version. I've already broken the Desktop Internet Explorer. And I've crashed the OS twice. It feels like a poor man's Unity! I've windows that I can't view in their entirety on the screen, and there's no way I can move them to get to the controls. I can't easily get an overview of what's installed (no simple menu). And there doesn't seem like any intuitive way to get to the control panel. Plus it's hard to know what's clickable and what isn't.

There are a few nice touches, but I'd personally like to turn Metro off. I've got no want for it. I was hoping it would be a little more polished than this. But it feels odd.

I'm trying to justify the hassle of the £25 upgrade. Price it over £100, no thanks, I'll be at the mercy of Ubuntu for another decade. This was a chance for MS to woo someone that hasn't really touched their OSs for thirteen years. I've tried to meet them in the middle.

It shouldn't be this hard.
Plus if you give everyone 18% more money, won't you just end up with 18% (or more) inflation as profiteering kicks in?
Yeah, my grandma died four years ago - 2009 - and I'm pretty sure she considered Jews kind of a third group, neither white nor "colored". I couldn't swear that my own contemporaries still in Indiana don't think the same, but everybody's wised up to the point that they don't actually come out and state anything explicitly. (This is a good thing; it'll slow down the transmission of that attitude to their own kids.)

America's a weird place.
A good portion of the wealth of the 100 richest people in the world was rather more "illegitimately" earned. Look up the history of Carlos Slim or the Al Sauds, say.
At http://commando.io we implement HSTS in the nginx server block:

# Enable Strict-Transport-Security for one year
add_header Strict-Transport-Security max-age=31556926;
This works until you put the definition of d into the English language version of Wikipedia
and you know ALL the 100 people and they ALL give away so much? this is a fact for you?
and you know that i don't give away my cake? this is a fact for you?
what logic? you are just guessing...

A quote from Charlie Chaplin:"
The way of life can be free and beautiful. But we have lost the way.
Greed has poisoned men's souls, has barricaded the world with hate... has goose-stepped us into misery and bloodshed."
> the total number of computable states would be only about 10^140

Related scale from the article:

> in Go, which has a 19-by-19 board and over 10^150 possible positions

Brute force really works only in small cases so reducing the problem space is incredibly important, and the human mind is frighteningly effective at this. Once you get to see the patterns and feel the "flow" of a Go game, watching high level player games is stupefying.
Well, running football teams and building mansions aren't necessarily wealth destroying activities. Football teams can be relatively big employers plus distribute lare amounts to players who then also buy expensive things putting more money back into the economy.

Many Chinese rich would be very large employers. Also their culture of saving allows the US to continue spending outside of their means, for now.
Do you have figures to back up this broad assertion about HN readers?
Nice work – Including the generating scripts in the repo would be great.
Integrate Github Repo with Travis CI For Scala Play2.0 and MongoDB Project
Travis CI is a hosted, distributed continuous integration service used to build and test projects hosted at GitHub for the open source community.

It supports building software in numerous languages, including Ruby, JavaScript, Java, Scala, PHP, Haskell and Erlang.

A Travis worker comes with a good amount of services you might depend on, including MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, CouchDB, RabbitMQ, memcached and others.
Some people are abusing "show dead" on HN
As we know HN uses hell banning to deal with trolls.

As we also know, people are not perfect, both moderators and the general public, so for that reason sometimes people get hell banned that probably don't deserve it. Sometimes for a single bad post, sometimes for a post that isn't that bad but for some reason rubs a moderator the wrong way. Mostly however people that are hell banned, deserve it.

For various reasons (mostly related to the above) I like to have my "show dead" setting on so I can see dead posts. Now some people know they are hell banned but keep on posting as normal, probably because they know that quite a few people, like myself, will see their posts, but also because they are trying to prove a point. No problem here so far.

There are a very few idiots however who know that they are hell banned but post just to annoy people that have "show dead" on. They post huge walls of completely OT, and sometimes utter nonsense, text that take up a whole page and they do it often. I won't name names and give them any recognition but perhaps the time has come to implement total bans so that these trolls cannot post at all or limit post lengths for people with only 1 karma or negative karma.

I never cease to be amazed out how some people will go out of their way to be annoying and disruptive, fortunately they are a very small minority.
A friend of mine at MS said the same thing, the IT department blocked the IP.
This still gets me every time.
I did not read the article as a critique of frameworks themselves, but as a critique of people using frameworks without knowing what's going on beyond being able to use the framework strictly as a black box.
I'll just put this here: http://plaintextoffenders.com/post/39285063264/namecheap-com...
Google and the future of search: Amit Singhal Interview
"Calling poverty in those places "self-inflicted" is like saying a raped woman "deserved it""

No, absolutely not.

And it is self-inflicted, "colonialist BS" aside (there are colonial issues, of course)

Religion and ignorance go a long way. You can't throw money to the problem

Things may seem nice and it's easy to blame 'colonial overlords' from the armchair or from the sociology departments of universities. Very Easy.

Now try teaching people about safe sex and AIDS. Try teaching people about the importance of an education.

There's one way to get a proper government and that's EARNING IT.

Oh by the way I come from one of those "milked" countries (not to extinction and certainly not much recently) so I know what "self inflicting" means.
>All of these "100 richest people" probably give away more than 100x what you earn in a year already. Are you honestly going to call them selfish?

Yes. Charity is a feel-good hypocrisy (or worse, just a tax saving measure).

Nobody made huge tons of money without other people's blood under it. And especially not the top 1%.

Even a record artist that makes money from his songs (so he doesn't hurt anyone personally) is taking advantage of a huge system of that makes possible the money his audience spends (e.g from the stealing of the native indian lands to the US invading other countries for cheap oil, to the domestic market taking advantage of sweatshop labour in third world --that the colonial powers have first razed--, etc).

>If you are, then you are saying everyone should give away as much of their "cakes" as possible. Can you afford to give away an extra "cake"? Probably. Then you are selfish too, by your own logic.

Maybe. But:

1) being selfish for your 1 extra cake and being selfish for 1,000,000 cakes is hugely different.

2) being selfish is a personal moral issue that is insignificant compared to the systemic problem of mass wealth accumulation.
It's something like 150x what Oxfam raise each year so I suspect it seems a lot more significant to them.
If giving people money solved poverty, there would be no poverty in wealthy countries.
"Those poor peoples have been milked to extinction by colonial overlords and left do die."

That's bullshit anti-Western propaganda. Those "poor peoples" as you call them are responsible for their own fates, just as all of us are, no matter the situation we're born into.

Pity won't save them, and neither will trillions in charity as has been demonstrated for decades. There has been no improvement from the trillions in redistributed wealth from first to third world. The only major improvements have come through vast system improvements, such as in China (and spill over effects, such as Chinese investment).

They have to take control of their own destiny. They have to fight for their own freedom, their own property rights, their own right to exist and pursue their own lives. The West is now very bankrupt, it will soon have no more trillions to throw at the global poverty issue, it's sink or swim time.
Actually you don't need a problem solving idea to start a startup. I wrote an essay about ideas http://www.vusal.me/essays/ideas/ which was a discussion on HN some time ago.
A bit more accurate title would be "Be A US citizen, write code, fix the not so international space station, win $10,000".
I recently spent 2 days working on a renovation project at a local slum here in Hungary. The slum is a couple hundred gipsy families, living in unfinished/abandoned houses without water, gas/heating, they steal electricity off the grid. This was during the winter, so most houses just had one heated room, using wood. The houses didn't have bathrooms, everything smelled of urine, thrash was left all over the place, inside, outside, everywhere. Since the locals steal from each other, there were very few movable/valuable objects, like tables or chairs. Interestingly though, most houses had an LCD TV, which was surreal, poeple living in quasi-homeless conditions but watching TV all day. Many families had 5-10 kids, possibly because of lack of protection and because wellfare is linear in the # of kids here. Many kids were at home all day sitting around in dirty clothes. I heard one father argue with a kid and threaten him with school as punishment. According to locals drugs are a huge problem, with most teenagers having tried out drugs or being users. Adults were also at home, obviously uneducated and unemployed, possibly without acceptable "work ethics". The experience was a bit like a post-apocalyptic movie.

One of the aid people said in an interview that to "fix" this, ie. to reintegrate this group of people into society will take 2 generations in her opinion, because the social patterns in their heads have to change (don't steal, go to school, work, keep a tidy house), and that takes time. I agree.

I don't think just money would help. After I came back the 2nd day, I tried to imagine what would happen if one of these families got a really nice house and a bunch of money to go along with it. But since they lack the social skills to handle property and a law-abiding, "civil life", I think many would gradually destroy the house, spend/lose the money, and then end back where they started.

TLDR: Ending poverty involves changing people, which takes generations.

This is the project:

http://www.bagazs.org/en/

-

An interesting (perhaps) afterthought I had after the renovation work was whether trying to change people (the gipsies in Hungary) is moral. As a group I believe gipsies have always lived a different life, navigating at the edge of society, living in their own communities. Maybe it's just us who should change and just accept that they want to live a different life? I don't know, this line of thinking reminds me of Daniel Quinn's Ishmael, where the author argues that perhaps our way of life is only special because it's aggressive, in that we annihilate or assimilate other cultures and cannot live alongside them.
I totally get it. I don't know how you originally got into programming, but imagine you were good at it during your early teens, like many of us, and like Aaron. Now imagine that when you met the outside world, people other than your parents were amazed at your ability - imagine you wangled your way onto a W3C committee at 14. Now imagine that by sheer blind following of the next interesting thing, and talking to the next interesting person, you wangled your way into Y Combinator and into the Reddit sale. You're damn good at programming, but it turns out that being great at writing and programming doesn't translate at all into being good at business.

When I was 14, I assumed that I was going to program computers and get rich, much like Gates or Jobs. Aaron got a hell of a lot further down that adolescent trajectory than I did - I had all kinds of intermediate small failures along the way to soften the blow when it turned out I wasn't good at business. Now, ten years later, I've learned to be better at business.

Aaron bounced off, apparently really hard. He longed for those days when - just by talking and thinking and coding - he was taken as a surprising genius by people he'd never met. He wanted to walk in and surprise people with the fait accompli, cut right to the chase of being admired.

Or so I imagine. Because I know that at his age I thought exactly that way. I even have depressive tendencies - never been bothered by suicidal ideation, but then I never failed so badly as he did after the Reddit sale, and I could certainly see that happening to me in that case.

I may very well be projecting. But essentially, when I look at this, I just think, there but for the grace of early failure and family commitments go I.
I didn't quite get what is being done in Javascript...? Is it the whole typesetting/rendering?
Gave me my first laugh of the day - very nice!
Is it racist to be more or less attracted to certain physical attributes including skin colour? I'm gay but I don't think that makes me sexist, I prefer certain colours of hair but I don't think that makes me.. whatever the bad thing there is... personally I've rarely been physically attracted to anybody black, does "never having dated a black person" equal "treating another person worse because of their race"?

(I do agree that everyone is capable of racism even if they aren't going round lynching people, just not that racial preference when it comes to sex is always about racism.)
you can't force them though, right? you would want them to voluntarily give the money to you. good luck with that.
Cool idea, I really like it. Too bad I have an iPhone.
Your website seems kind of laggy on my computer, maybe go a bit easy on the graphics next time.
For some reason the portrait on the left made me extremely uneasy, to the point I removed it from the DOM.
Failing fast is in my opinion also not a formula for success.
HTC 8X Quitely Brilliant
Every time someone implements something new in Brainfuck it makes me smile.

Where is your god now, high level language snobs? ;)
"The bottom 1%" is a bit of a useless demographic to contemplate, because of power-law distributions. The bottom 1% will be dead within about 1.5 years[0].

How's that for contemplation?

[0] rough estimate from current world pop and global death rate, rounded up, can't be too far off
What is the benefit of using this over simply redirecting / forcing SSL use for form handlers and other sensitive URLs on the application end.

Doesn't this just add more complexity to a problem that is not that hard to solve?