skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As far as I can tell, there's a hidden (but not unreasonable) assumption in what you're saying; that it is possible to simulate what is going on. There are many things that cannot be computed, e.g. the Busy Beaver sequence, and it's quite possible that a simulation of true physics also involves noncomputable problems which would mean that it's not possible for a turing machine to simulate it.

I like this blog's http://michaelnielsen.org/blog/interesting-problems-the-chur... take on it:

"Yet our ease with the CTD Principle is an ease brought by familiarity. One hundred years ago the statement would have been far more surprising, and, I suggest, even shocking to many people.

Viewed from the right angle, the CTD Principle still is shocking. All we have to do is look at it anew. How odd that there is a single physical system – albeit, an idealized system, with unbounded memory – which can be used to simulate any other system in the Universe!"

You say "once we figure how information is stored and processed", but how do you know that what is going on in the brain is just a matter of storing and processing information in a way that can be mimicked by a turing machine?
A "vague icky feeling" like anaphylaxis?

http://www.businessweek.com/debateroom/archives/2007/12/gmo_...

https://www.signaturemd.com/modern-poison-are-genetically-mo...

Not one person I know who is against GMO foods is uneducated about it - quite the opposite... they aren't interested until they start researching the topic.
I couldn't care less until my wife started researching it (due to severe reactions by family members). Before then, the only thing I had against GMO was fishy-tasting tomatoes.

Another problem I have with mass deployment of GMO crops is the reduction of active species. Imagine what a simple blight would do to our food supply. Example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Famine_(Ireland)
It was a while ago, but I remember one of my professors said that AMD hired all the design people from DEC when Compaq brought them. He said AMD's Opteron processor was highly influenced by DEC's Alpha processor. That little advantage led to AMD's golden years when their processors we're a better value then Intel's. It was even enough to overcome Intel's obvious fab advantage. Remember the Pentium 4 Extreme editions? It was a desperate attempt to keep AMD at bay by stuffing it with cache.
Of course one thing they don't cover is the possibility of the fact that more sperm bank kids means more of an opportunity for accidental inbreeding. I have seen news stories discussing concern over the fact that the most popular donors may have fathered 150 or more children(!). the chance of such half-siblings ending up married to eachother with kids of their own raises all kinds of questions which are omited in the article.

No thanks. I think sperm banks should be discouraged (perhaps tax them heavily).
Cyber Unit In China's PLA Behind Massive Cyber Espionage Operation
Every time this pops up, I just have to mention http://developerduck.com
What??? This article is so poorly thought out that I can't help but laugh.

It begins with a failed premise: Amazon has setup lockers to expand their current biz model to areas and customers they can't serve well due to delivery hassles, not because they want to get into retail.

Like any good sales bait and switch, the article then reminds you that it's a great deal ("RS has lost more than 80% of it's value") and that other people have been talking about it ("in the tech and dealmaking community"). Toss in a couple of reasons why it just fits in your life (Amazon doing grocery, needs warehouse space!) and you've got some terrible business analysis.

Then, like a good number of authors writing a complete speculation piece, bring in Google and Best Buy. Those companies come to mind when you think tech and retail, so why not? Complete the story with an Apple reference, a complete strawman counter-argument so you look like an advanced writer, and the contacted but no comment response and you've got a terrible piece of "tech journalism" just ready for linkspam.

Reality? Amazon is at the peak of destroying the likes of retail giants like Best Buy and Borders Books gone wrong. No one wants anything to do with Radio Shack, a retail presence that could barely keep up with its pre-Amazon contemporaries, especially not Bezos. Why would he want to revert to that antiquated business model after so much refinement of his scalable yet hyper-efficient and low cost approach? He doesn't - Kindle is an established brand and Amazon has no patience (or desire) for showrooming. The old-school electronics retail giants will continue to fail to adapt, while your Wal-Mart and Target style stores pick up the pieces. Yes, retail is changing and most consumers probably won't like it after they realize what's happening, but that doesn't mean it won't or that Amazon will buy RadioShack. Hah!
What's wrong with your typical high-school/college/work folks?

Basically all my friendships come from some affiliation with an organization I have. I've got a bunch from work - actually, I have like 4 different friend groups from work, all centered around a team I've worked with. I've got a group from my college alumni network. And I've got a few isolated friends left over from the Harry Potter fandom that happen to live in the area.
FWIW I know "doing it wrong" was a bit inflammatory, and generates this kind of reaction from people who think I'm determined to take their easy workflow away.

I've got plans to address this sort of complaint, to let folks who like the current behavior to keep working the way they always have and enable those like me who want a "keep all the state in a subshell" behavior to get my proposed workflow.

As one commenter points out, those plans haven't moved forward since mid 2012. I don't consider the issue "dropped" though. I'll get around to it.
PG isn't alone. YC do have staff, so it's not a one-man operation. If PG were running everything by himself then yes, he probably would be overwhelmed but there are a lot of people PG can call upon to help him out.
I tried watching the video, but it had no information. Not a drop of code or an ounce of strategy. It was just a status report.
Also, You can install plugins, called "raindrops" to add a few neat features, or make your own plugins since they have a raindrops API.

And the free package covers almost everything that 'Glui' does, for free.
I agree with you. In addition, they forgot to consider Twitter's use as a marketing tool for small businesses. Typically, small businesses tend to use happy words and phrases to describe their products. In addition, social networks are "generally" happy places. I don't think I have come across individuals using social networks as places to vent their sadness for long....
There are around 20 people working full or part time for YC now, including 5 of us doing what I used to do alone in the old days. There are 47 startups in the current batch, which works out to less than 10 apiece. So things are actually pretty easy right now.

Last night's server troubles took more out of me than anything I've had to deal with in YC proper.
No, just busy with other things. I'll get around to it if nobody else does first. ;) Hopefully before PyCon 2013.
I think the easiest attack on SR would not be one of the attacks mentioned in the article (although similar to their second attack, but focused on legal implications instead of fraud), but rather:

a. Law enforcement creates a large number of vendor and customer accounts. Due to the pseudonymity, they can create as many as they like and they can't be linked (they may need to create them over time to avoid making the pattern too obvious).

b. The fake customer accounts buy from the fake vendor accounts and leave positive comments, building up a reputation for the fake vendors. This would give money to the operators of SR for fees, but aside from fees there would be no loss for the operators.

c. Eventually, the number of fake vendors could be sufficient that it makes up most of the volume of SR.

d. The fake customers buy from some real vendors and claim that the goods never arrived or that they got arrested and it looks like the vendor tipped the police off.

e. Any real customer who buys from a fake vendor gets their details sent to their local police.

f. Most vendors, real and fake, accumulate comments saying that they tipped people off to the police, with no way to tell which vendors are real vendors with mostly genuine good feedback and a few forged complaints of being police run, and which have a few real complaints of being police run and mostly forged good feedback.

g. Police forces issue press releases announcing how many people they have caught buying things on SR, and buying becomes a highly risky proposition.
The Milgram Experiment does happen to shine a bright light on collectivism (it only takes one person to do the right thing, for everyone else to follow their example), while the Stanford Prison Experiment shines a darker light (or violet i guess?) on collectivism.

Maybe it could have been omitted due to a bias, or the editors just didn't think to add it?
I would imagine if your income was high enough you could spread the bandwidth around enough to stay under the radar for a long time.

I would think tracing the flow of bitcoins to them might be more productive, though that could be spread around quite a bit too.

You're right, though. There's some level at which they'd get nailed.
>What is the difference between a convicted felon and an illegal immigrant?

One has a felony show up on their background check, and the other has no record to speak of?
What exactly is there not to get? It's more that I'm not sure I believe the claims and that it seems like putting lipstick on a pig.
With the disclaimer that I very much have a dog in the fight, you might want to look at illumos[1] and its distributions like SmartOS[2] and OmniOS[3]. It has a secure, robust container model (with a hat tip to FreeBSD jails for providing inspiration over a decade ago) and a mature least-privilege model that minimizes attack surface -- not to mention ZFS, DTrace, KVM and other goodies. At the very least, you can take solace in knowing that others share your desire for cleaner alternatives...

[1] http://smartos.org/2011/12/15/fork-yeah-the-rise-and-develop...

[2] http://smartos.org/

[3] http://omnios.omniti.com/
Almost every language has a book titled "Expert $LANGUAGE". If a language doesn't have one of those, it's probably either very new, or nobody actually uses it, or both.

C and C++ are good for doing low-level stuff. If you don't want to do low-level stuff, then you should not worry about them. But in that case, you might also want to avoid commenting about them :)

clang is copying gcc's features because most of them are good features, and standards bodies move slowly. This is kind of an odd thing to criticize C++ for, since a lot of newer languages don't even have a standard, but just a reference implementation. It's hard to criticize your neighbor for living in a tent when you live in a sleeping bag.
> and it will be trivial to trace the location of their servers and of their offices

You're very naive if you think that SilkRoad is not running on servers rented anonymously with bitcoins, in a country outside of US/European jurisdiction.
If I was going to do this kind of thing, which I'm not since none of these grey market items has much appeal to me, I would go online and find a listing of houses which are vacant (foreclosures, or for-sale houses) and use their address. You would not be able to use USPS, though, since those places have their mail stopped. I don't believe this directly violates any laws but IANAL.

Alternately, if you were alert enough at your mail fraud you could find a neighbor who is out of the house during the day and use their name and address, and intercept the package from their mailbox. This is, of course, a felony.
Interestingly PostgreSQL's pl/pgsql does that.

There are two operators, equality = and assignment :=

But where it is clear that assignment was meant, = is treated as assignment. this means you can:

a = 5; -- exactly equivalent to a := 5 here
if a = 6 then
raise exception 'this should never happen';
end if;

Interestingly this is entirely a Postgres-ism. Oracle's PL/SQL offers no such "feature."
Sergey Brin, Please Pick up your Paychecks
> Keeping him away from law-abiding citizens for two decades was accomplished.

Why not execute him and that will keep him permanently away from "law abiding" citizens? We could fast track that China style and just send a speedy execution bus to county jails and voila, problem fixed. Would you agree with that?
$92,000 per month per the study. Not to be sneezed at, but not a gigantic sum.
> For the most part, Lenovo's Thinkpads have a BIOS setting that allows you to switch the Fn and Ctrl keys. This has been around for a while now and is still an option on newer Thinkpads (although, I can't confirm that this option exists in the X1).

I have both a Dell and a Thinkpad, and it's definitely much more convenient to have Ctl readily accessible with the left pinky than Fn, which you get on the Thinkpad.
Private PO Boxes exist already.

NZ: https://www.privatebox.co.nz

Canada: https://www.bufferbox.com/
Chrome and Firefox: Use Javascript to Send Desktop Notifications
I was in the same boat as you; reading this shed some light:

http://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/14y6fj/el...
Quickly create GUI for javascript variables with dat.GUI
I'm reminded of when I first started following the PyPy project, and I thought it would be impressive if they could ever get close to CPython's speed. They've done something truly amazing.

I hope the python community someday coalesces around a single version. I generally can't take advantage of all their awesome work because the libraries I depend on (e.g. pandas) won't run in pypy.
The Chinese government?
Cinavia has been in my sights for a while. Every once in a while, I end up rereading the main patent and doing research, and it looks like a formidable challenger. I'd really like to take it on, if I ever had free time; it's been a while since I've done DRM reversing, and it's ridiculously well designed, thus fun.
I don't think you know what saber rattling actually means.
This is very useful, as the article describes in detail.

I've found it useful to be able do diffs of diffs in my work, hence I'm planning to add the ability to do that to my toolset. Combined with live editing, I think it's going to be quite neat.
Here's one of the 25-min shows
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=__MGYrcapdk
I thought satori was the Japanese Zen term for what is commonly called "enlightenment" or "awakening" in most forms of Buddhism in America. Is it meaningfully distinct besides being primarily used in a Zen context?
Yes, the TrackPoint is a serious problem. Once you're addicted, there is no going back to a lesser solution.
Well no, there is no gravy train. And there will not be as long as technical people internalize the low value that people like you put on them. Instead they should ignore people like you.

It's not like your sales "superstars" are a rare breed. Every unemployable schlub from humanities can apply for a sales position. But a dev is a rare breed: you have to suffer through years of math and C++ to become a dev. The ROI isn't worth it if devs play and get treated like glorified janitors.

They can get a job for somebody who will pay, like a hedge fund, or they can start their own businesses, or they can change field to something where they are rewarded for their talents - financial engineering is an example, IP law is another.

But playing by your rules is a losing game. The only way to win is to walk away.
Reading the comments in this thread one can only wonder why more manufacturers aren't targeting the Linux user market. They're missing out on so many cleverly snarky comments and discerning I-actually-prefer-ctrl-in-light-grey users that must be such a joy to work with.
Illinois Senate District 8 actually doesn't look all that weird:

http://www.elections.il.gov/Downloads/VotingInformation/PDF/...

At least it doesn't in comparison to the Congressional districts like, say District 4:

http://www.elections.il.gov/Downloads/VotingInformation/PDF/...

That narrow bit on the far west is just I-294. No residences.
Ok, but the question remains: If Monsanto's policy was to only sue farmers who have contaminated crops AND who use a herbicide designed to kill everything except Monsanto crops, would you consider Monsanto to be evil?
> * Keyboard feel. Even the chiclet ThinkPad keypads still have "IT" for me.

Having both a standalone, "classic" Thinkpad keyboard and a Thinkpad with the chiclet keyboard, I find the resistance on the chiclet much more satisfying. Best keyboard I have used so far.
A good example of LW going off the deep end is "Roko's basilisk" and Yudkowsky's response

http://kruel.co/2013/01/12/rokos-basilisk-everything-you-nee...

http://rationalwiki.org/wiki/Roko%27s_basilisk
That's a pretty nice playbook, but it fails for the reason every attack against SR fails: It doesn't get you the vendors, and they're the only big fish there to catch. At best, you can spend time and money just treading water to keep them in check, but it will never shut them down.
Why is installing programs in OS X sometimes unfriendly to newbies?
I often see new OS X users struggle with a simple task such as installing an application. Why doesn't Apple just make it simpler (or at least set some guidelines for 3rd party devs) to use an OS that's supposed to be the most user friendly OS there is?

Confusion #1: When they download a regular DMG file, and Finder.app pops up with the application that's supposed to be dragged to Applications. However, Applications is nowhere to be found, and clicking on "Finder" again does nothing.

Confusion #2: An application is downloaded, he/she clicks on the file since the Downloads icon was bouncing. But that this point the actual Finder window sometimes pops up in the background, behind the browser. A lot of newbies just sit around waiting for minutes, expecting something to show up.
Shoutcast Internet radio in 13 lines of C code
3D FPS in bash
Deploy to Heroku automatically from Github
How Major Brands Are Now Leveraging The Social Media Influencers
Felons, even if they are looked down upon by a great part of society, still enjoy many protections.

Illegal immigrants ... not so much.

Any job an illegal immigrant can get, a felon can as well.

If you're a felon, guess what? You fucked up. Time to cowboy up and start from the bottom.
I agree with this and moreover I would also think that environments where you are on the same formal level and gain from sincere relationships, in both school and work also facilitate friendship.
If you look in the sidebar of the article, its summary was:

> Is sperm donating a worthwhile form of positive eugenics?

So yes, the author is well aware that he's talking about eugenics, and plainly isn't bothered by it. The problem with eugenics has never been the concept per se, but rather, the methods used to achieve it. Sperm donation is wholly voluntary.
What I assume is your user bio is in the wrong place. Because it's placed under the logo, I assumed it was the general description of the site and led to me asking 'who are you?'. It should be placed under your username.

Also, why do you hate religion?
But with a quick perusal of the man page, you learn how the software works, and you don't have to make assumption based on interpretations of natural languages.
My town (San Luis Obispo) was rated "happiest city in the USA" by author Dan Buettner and was featured on Oprah in 2011.

I didn't see it on the list here, I'm assuming because the population was too small.

http://travel.usatoday.com/destinations/story/2011/04/San-Lu...
This is solvable by running a cheap DNA test for both parties.
Now that's funny. British?
Its nice to know other guys learned from this as well. Makes me feel that what I learned back in college was legit.
I have not used the site either, but from what I've read, the best idea is to use the name of a previous tenant, and to stick with domestic. If the parcel is sent via USPS First-Class or Priority, it cannot be searched without a warrant.
I'm just gonna throw this slight grenade in. Opera is closed source. Does that in practice mean that it is unforkable (as is - with Presto)? On the desktop or mobile versions?
Sometimes the distinction is blurred. Some mom and pop businesses would hire convicted felons and give them jobs to help them build a work history. Sometimes illegal immigrants also come to commit crimes (this is what the anti-immigration crowds will tell you).

There is a cultural perception that illegal immigrants will work hard (possibly read as "are desperate enough to accept more abuse") while a convicted felon (being an American) will be too proud to do menial hard work and also will be highly likely to damage property or steal or assault a customer. [I am talking about crude cultural perceptions, not my personal views].

A whole new aspect is the prison industrial complex. Due to the Drug War, PIC has amassed a significant work force (read slaves) and they will do everything they can (lobbying, media, campaign contributions) to make sure prisons stay full. If prisons are full, they get paid. So there was a case in Georgia when they thought they should punish those that hire illegal immigrants. So they has passed some law. Then PIC stepped in and offered "replacements". They unleashed the new workforce and it turned out pretty horrible. Inmates did not want to pick strawberries in 100'F heat for a couple of dollars a day.
I actually saw this as a strike against git usability -- this should happen transparently imo, why should I have to git stash save; git pull --rebase; git stash pop for things to apply cleanly? Just do it automatically and fail if the stash application fails.
Government, free markets, and healthcare
Could try talking to an actual bug.
There is little correlation between onehappybird's happiness map and maps of suicide rates in the US.
It's also solvable by simply having more donors, which is exactly what the article is advocating for
Yes, PDAs existed and you could see an evolution of phone to smartphone which included PDA like features.

However, in the early 00s the money was in dumbphones simply because the BOM cost of the RAM/ROM, AP and modem was pretty high.

The real migration path was from phones, either in terms of incorporating PDA like features in to existing platforms like Series 40, or using an OS capable of running in low memory, execute in place environments.

IMO Symbian was much more capable of achieving that need than either Palm or MS, at least because of it's low memory requirements and it's OS architecture was more advanced so it didn't have pseudo-arbitrary limits such as the 32 process limit that W/E had:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Windows_Embedded_CE_6.0

Also obviously the Symbian heritage was from PDAs (EPOC32 from PSION). I'm not saying that Symbian was a great OS, however, it really had the measure of MS technically in those times and Palm OS at that time was well known to be in the stone-age OS wise.
I find this just as interesting and relevant:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Seed_saving

This process is certainly not extinct.

The Legality section has some tidbits that might actually be useful in this case.
Those are easily the most adorable debugging methods I have ever heard.