skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Public education in modern capitalist society is a step up over what we had before. When capitalism first emerged in England there were no child labor laws so millions of children were denied an education and put into working in slave like conditions in factories with minimal if any safety equipment.

Capitalism is based upon uneven and unequal development so much of the global population is still denied an education and even a basic level of literacy. Those people would love to have any education at all to complain about in the first place.

I feel it is important to put this person's complaints into the context. Nonetheless, I will be the last person in the world to actually defend the education system in first world because it is just based on turning the first world citizens into obedient service sector workers and consumers of products mainly produced in China and extracted from the third world.

> Our system should be producing more adults with this same fearlessness, who go after what they really want from the start in rational, systematic ways. Right now, we tend to produce ‘answer-centred’ people who are terrified of doing things wrong.

Capitalism is not based upon letting people go after what they really want. Capitalism is based upon having a class of people (the proletariat) who are alienated from their own work and for whom doing things wrong means getting fired.

> We need to find a better way to teach children, one that doesn’t kill their innate sense of curiosity and play.

We need a system that teaches children to be alienated from the things around them, their productive activities, their own lives, and their peers. This is demanded by the capitalist mode of production itself and there is no way of getting around this without revolutionizing society.
I see lots of Assange dislike from people, and i'm constantly reminded of misappropriated quote: "You want someone who does what i do, but you want him to behave like you."

It takes a certain type of personality (and a certain type of mania/insanity) to run against the odds/world like he did.. We should accept that if it comes with some rough edges, thats kinda the price for it.

Even if there are arguments over wether or not he is "a great man", it is clear that he has achieved great things, and sometimes the people who do also have great flaws..
http://mathematica.stackexchange.com is a good place to look if you need mathematica-related help
Last time I calculated, the odds were about 1/5 what they'd be with 2 or more founders.

But talking about the odds is misleading, because this pool is a mix of a large number of people for whom the chance is zero and a small number for whom it's quite high. So if you're another Drew Houston (who was a single founder when he applied), the odds are very good.
Many interesting points, but I have no sympathy for Daniel Domscheit-Berg who's action destroyed document given to Wikileaks for publications. Who know what dangers and effort the source went through to get the documents, only to have everything destroyed by one individual who was trusted with the files.
Ask HN: What Would Programming Look Like If Machines Programmed
This just came to me earlier but I thought it worthy of a post here. What would programming look like done by machines instead of humans? Would oop even exist or would functional take all?
Not sure why that happens, I think is an issue with page itself since the link points to the general article.
Is it still there / how long did it last?
Do you think that in an article aimed at students that's the right place to start? Side-channel attacks, timing attacks, differential analysis, weaknesses in key exchange, why padding is necessary, biases in pseudo-random number generation, etc, etc, etc ...

Or is it better to start with what crypto is, with key generation, encryption, decryption, then move on into the first level of complexity?
Construct — a powerful declarative parser (and builder) for binary data.
Pirate Bay Documentary on YouTube : "The Pirate Bay Away From Keyboard"
It does now - it's been fixed. It did have the "#" and comment number at the end. If you check it out here you'll find the original submission pointed at the comment:

http://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/all&q=title%3Aunb...
For one, Mathematica tries hard to keep its syntax consistent, even if it has to break backward compatibility sometimes. Naming convention in Matlab is often inconsistent (even though Matlab also at times changes things to break backward compatibility).

Also Matlab's documentation is often not complete, frequently requiring Google searches. I have rarely needed that with Mathematica.

My core reasons to use Matlab at times are:

1. More toolboxes, including those from third-parties
2. More team members familiar with Matlab than Mathematica
You're right, science shouldn't just be reserved for the PhDs. But the PhD is likely to have insight and experience that will make a lot of assertions false, avenues of research redundant and generally be able to tell the different between science and not science.

There's no restriction on laymen studying, researching and trying to understand new frontiers of science, however just as the PhDs don't have a monopoly on science (and as you point out, they're far from perfect), neither do lay people have a monopoly on reinterpreting reality through the misinterpretation of facts.

tl;dr: You're entitled to examination of facts and to be examined for your own research. You're, however, not entitled to your own reality. Which is what happened in the article.
Working times/practices will vary across industries. So things like part time shifts, split shifts etc will seem normal to people working in food service in the same way that weird irregular hours might not seem strange to people working in startups.

I think though that once a particular industry has an expectation around certain working hours they will tend to try and apply that across the board in order to seem fair.

I worked in IT for a bank, for example which had a very strict 9-5 culture. Things like taking breaks for coffee/lunch etc were to very strict times and taking 30 seconds longer than allowed was a serious business.

I think they had these rules in place for the callcenter employees, where they needed to ensure adequate levels of availability throughout the day. In order to seem fair they made this a rule across all departments.

When I work on my own , if I have a hard problem I will sometimes prefer to go and walk for an hour rather than sit in front of the computer as this can help me think more clearly. However a bank employee would never be able to do this.
The pirate bay founders are a good example of how things work.

There will always be leaders. Its a key part of how society work. TPB is no exception and the founders are very well known in the world. The interesting part through is that after all the problems, TPB turn into a complete anonymous organization where leader roles are now days gone from the public.
This is a good example of why patenting a process is acceptable, but patenting the end result is bad.

If Monsanto patented the process itself to create these dna sequences, the German farmers would not be infringing on their patent because they use completely different processes to produce the DNA: one is generated in a lab, the other is consummated in a sty.

If Monsanto found this strain of DNA and managed to reproduce it in a lab and developed a process of mass production, there is no reason they should not be able to profit from the endeavor. There is also no reason why they should be able to sue the farmers. The farmers aren't using their process for producing the dna sequences.

The fact that they could patent the sequences and sue the farmers speaks volumes about the broken state of patents. (As most everyone in tech already knew)
I realize that last sentence is a mouthful, but yes, that's what I'm saying :)
SimpleDaemon: A Daemon class for easy forking of a python applications
I personally know and have seen the logs from an activist who has CSIS host-names show up in his blog for the past few years.

So? I have the CIA appear in my blog logs and have for years. People work there, and some of them like blogs. Is that, apparently, "harassment"?
It would violate the ECHR, and the UK's treaty with Sweden.
I consider "n < 2" to be an expression evaluating to either true (1) or false (0). You can do basic if-else branching by considering true/false statements as conditions to if/elseif/else branching, but true/false cannot be used to evaluate only parts of a function by itself. That's what I intended to express, sorry if it's not evident.
Like Satoshi Nakamoto and Bitcoin?
agree about the conditional, I was expecting some sort of functional alternative and was interested by the title, but on reading and realizing that the OP is proposing that "(n < 2)" evaluation and calling a func ptr as non-conditional programming is simply not true, that's conditional programming.
A good example is anonymous. Are their leaks working as effective for change as Wikileaks was?
For Startups, Culture Shouldn't Be Overlooked
> Rent seeking means to try and extract rents from a process that would have happened without you.

So, we agree it seems.

Seeds -> procreation -> more seeds.

You missed the bit about splitting legal hairs. I know that lawyers love to do just that but this is food we're talking about, not words on paper.
Local stock exchanges and national stimulus
I just thought I would share the origins of the US public education system for anyone who wanted to know more or was not aware of how it came to be. Much of it was derived from the German (Prussian) public education system by Horace Mann. I'm not sure if it was tailored towards factory work in the beginning, due to the time period (first half of the 1800s for the US), so that must have come later in the second half of 19th century America. However, I'm guessing it never thought overly high of creativity and free thinking when at the time, many who were going through the education system were still working on farms.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Horace_Mann

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
I think CLOS doesn't suffer from the expression problem. Both alterations to the data model can be implemented as a "patch" to the program without editing any of the original code.
"Its great to see people recognising the importance of local businesses! They're the core of most communities..."

It makes sense.

Most people also don't realize that SMEs both in Europe and in U.S. represent more than 50% of the GDP. SMEs are the real backbone of the economy but they don't get as much spotlights as big corporation do.
XRDS Crossroads is a magazine blog for students, the article presents an actual topic explained for those interested, I think it targets an important part of Hacker News demography and it makes an excellent job in encouraging students to go ahead and develop their own crytographic solution, so I don't know what are you so angry about the article
Because it isn't theirs.
Can conservatives break the copyright stalemate?
What project has one person working on it part-time years after its start and ends up succeeding?

The GNU Hurd.

FSVO "succeeding".
> Monsanto has systematically worked to destroy access to seeding machines (which take mature crop and harvest the seeds from them)

Wait, you mean the combine? They are not hard to come by at all. You will find one on most grain farms.

> Farmers are basically bullied away from approaching another source for their seeds.

Monsanto already licenses the technology to anyone you might buy seeds from.

> Lastly, Monsanto is only able to effectively enforce these patents in the US.

I believe Canada was the first location for the successful test of the validity of the patent.
At what time do you work on your side projects? I found out that if I wake up early and work on them before going to my day job I tend to be much more focused. That might be just because of the effort it requires to do so :)
The Secret to Fixing Bad Schools
It's been many years since I've read "The Millionaire Next Door," but one thing about the millionaires is they surprisingly often don't have college degrees, sometimes not even high school.

HOWEVER, just about universally they highly highly value their own kids getting college degrees. It is one of the most important things they believe they can give their kids. So while they skipped parts of the traditional educational system, their experience after 30 years of life has convinced them that their own kids ought to have it.
Good to hear. Might I suggest linking to the HN discussion in the mean time (and/or wherever else it's discussed)? Your essay/blog is well-written and valuable, but comments can add at least as much value, and not everyone who visits your site will know to come here.
For what it's worth, practical secure cryptosystems only exist under a number of assumptions that, thus far, have no proof. Commonly used public-key systems are in an even more precarious position: even if P!=NP, the RSA and discrete logarithm problems may still be computationally feasible (and thus RSA, Diffie-Hellman, and ElGamal would be insecure). Cryptography based on NP-hard problems is possible (e.g. Atjai's lattice system), but these remain research topics and have seen little real-world use.

The point is this: there is a lot we do not know about cryptography.
Yeah, I would suggest you make sure to read the top answer at www.quora.com/Life-Advice/How-do-I-get-over-my-bad-habit-of-procrastinating

I found that to be quite helpful in maximizing your happiness by getting done what you most care about in the long term.
Steve Jobs talk from 1983 that alludes to the web, iTunes, Google Maps, etc
Manufactures do it because bigger numbers sell better than smaller ones.

Which works fine until people create or download a few files and find they have been conned: they don't have as much usable space as they thought they'd paid for.
Your analysis is spot on. Schools are part of a larger economic system that is based upon alienation. How can I be curious about the things around me if they are based upon closed designs? For example, how can I be curious about the operations of my own computer if it is based upon proprietary software? Our entire society alienates people from the production and design processes and it alienates people from themselves and one another.
Suggestmyquote.com is now released
It should be a gif animation of a hand doing the bunny ears on both sides of the word/term.
That article doesn't seem contain much meat besides Assange not liking the film the author of the article made, and a list of people who fell out with him. Bad article...
Working with Steve Jobs
256 Shades of Gray [pdf]
Its strange, I've never heard anybody off the internet say that Android broswers aren't as good as iOS.

On the internet, when people complain they are usually told to try Dolphin, so I'm surprised it wasn't included in the article.
Web Typography Trends in 2013
A little bit wordy but I couldn’t explain any better what typography is about. Only in the recent years has typography been a big part of web design.
State of Tech #92
I'm a student myself. Funny enough, some of us are actually intelligent and can handle complexity. To me, this is the equivalent of teaching military science by telling someone how to shoot a gun. Instead of trying to introduce someone into the field by showing them what questions the field is actually trying solve, you're introducing them into the field by showing them the small subset which those who have no interest in it assume constitutes the entirety of it.

How many mathematicians do you thing have read an article on cryptography, gotten really interested in it, and then realized the most important open question in it revolves around the computer equivalent of spotting a fake ID?
Pedantic: "n>2" is a comparison operator, and doesn't incur a branch. if statements, ternary operators, etc are conditionals. The effect in the article is the same though, without the potential for a mispredict penalty.

Whether that's actually faster is debatable though. If you're writing in C, you're probably concerned about performance, and the function pointer invocation is going to be a lot slower than a branch mispredict. A sufficiently complex array dereference will slow it down too, but I wouldn't be surprised if the compiler can turn simple cases like this into an equivalent switch/jumptable.

Thus conditional-free programming (as presented here, in C) is mostly academic. Debug tracing is an interesting application, but readability and performance both suffer.

If a language could internalize conditional-free constructs natively, however, it could be an interesting study.
mass insulin production is a great feat, but how much of that is used to fix diabetes caused by overconsumption of bad food?

wow, this is a stretch. You realize that there is also Type I (juvenile) diabetes that is an auto-immune/genetic disorder that has nothing to do with unhealthy eating? GMO-produced human insulin (and subsequent engineered insulin analogs that are faster-acting) were major milestone for making that disease into a lifelong treatable condition. As someone with a father who is a juvenile diabetic now pushing into his 60s I'm pretty glad we're OK making capital investments in hard sciences.
How to master your life (using the Sims 3)
I want the opposite. I'd love to be able to run android apps on standard Linux without using an emulator. I can't seem to find anything like this, not even an abandoned school project. It must be more complicated than I realize.
Yes, but for any other purpose, she will not have a degree that proves her own qualifications.
You are barking up the wrong tree. My father and ex husband were both career military. They are both extremely intelligent men. The military needs people who can do some of both, which is an even bigger challenge than promoting one or the other. The military has manuals for things like your uniform which are to be followed to the letter. But it has guidelines (not rules) for battle -- in other words, widom to help you make it up effectively as you go because no plan survives contact with the enemy.

Historically, river-based agricultural systems thrived as long as you had an effectively educated populace for running the large bureaucracy necessary to make the water distribution system work. Historically, they tend to break down periodically. Given that we currently have several billion people alive today, we need to master the need to get good at both things: at dealing with systems which serve a large scale population without killing independent thinking and new ideas. Claiming one is inherently superior to the other is foolish. They each have valuable uses, in appropriate situations.

I will also assume that you are some peacenik and your example is rooted in the assumption that the military is inherently evil. Again: you will get zero sympathy from me. Without a nation and its ability to defend its people, you tend to have anarchy and gang rule, essentially.

If you want to live in some idyllic paradise where large bureaucracies do no exist, you first need to exterminate a few billion people. Good luck with convincing people this is a loving, kind thing to do to improve the lot of your fellow man.
Honestly, I'm not a fan of the whole thing. Why would I want to remember every single day? I'd much rather spend the time required to compose these 1 second bits on building up and moving towards a much more significant moment.
> Most people aren't tinkerers. Lots of people aren't curious, and many people respond to freeform environments with indecision and frustration that's self-defeating.

They weren't born they way, these people lost their curiosity because they were put into a society that alienates them from the design process. Proprietary software alienates its users from the software design process and it thereby destroys the curiosity people have about the inner workings of computers. Nonetheless, proprietary software is heavily present in schools because companies like Microsoft give out free licenses to them.
You just moved the goalposts. In the comment Rayiner replied to, you invoked us-vs-them, but when challenged, you retreat to a substantive claim. Why not just concede his point and move on with your broader argument?
good suggestion. done.
Fair enough. The (metaphorical) point I was trying to communicate was that, in discussions like these, you constantly get this image of a child as a boundlessly curious creature who would learn all they need to know if we just give them space and time and whatever else they need.

I find this trope to be self-serving in the extreme, and deeply ignorant of the practical realities of education, poverty, and parenting.
In this post, we don't use conditionals but instead constructs that compilers use to compile conditionals.
You know that Ireland was a net exporter of food during the great famine, right?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_%28Ireland%29#Food...

Famines these days tend to be more economic than agricultural.
It is possible that someone is playing a bad prank on Nadim, or that Nadim made the story up to gain attention.

Please read on. If this is real, then I'm sorry and recommend you to consider all suggestions before deciding illogical.

DON'T COMMIT SUICIDE!

If you watched the movie "Enemy of the State", I'd become paranoid, but not afraid. Stay calm and act logical.

I've looked at cryptocat two days ago, what's special about it? I don't see any reason for the Government to observe you, except that you would be a good fit into their Cyberwar Team. And that you have the wrong connections in the internet. I mean your friends are all hackers. It makes you appear dangerous too. Anyway, the government observes everyone, but with different priority and detail. I think only you might know why they observe you. No need to share the info.

Just as in the Movie: I'd replace all clothes, shoes and hardware with new ones and move to a different place. Acquire encryption software from a trusted source or compile it myself on a newly obtained Netbook and encrypt the hardrive+swap with a password and keyfile. Hide the keyfile. Put your hardware and new phone into a cool faradaybag.com. Stay in public, but personally invincible. Leak everything that isn't harmful for you using delayed transmissions with ifttt.com. Always have multiple copies of important documents, just for the case it's necessary.

Oh and I'd get a weapon and buy a bulletproof jacket (not vest). Avoid any contact to officials should be priority.
Use Tor and VPNs like spotflux, hide.io, ovpn.to etc. and inform close friends to guard you.

+Trust no one.
It's partly a problem of optimizing metrics that are easy to measure, like ass-in-chair time.