skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've written a lot about this in my blog series on the Gervais Principle (21 posts, and 0.8 being worked on).

First, you have the MacLeod hierarchy:

"Sociopaths" (upper management): strategic + dedicated + NOT subordinate
"Clueless" (middle management): dedicated + subordinate + NOT strategic
"Losers" (workers): strategic + subordinate + NOT dedicated

MacLeod Sociopaths aren't all bad people, and Losers are not losers in the sense of being undesirable or unpopular people (in fact, it's often the opposite) but because low-end employment is a losing deal.

Someone who has all 3 is a Protege, but that's rare and conditional. If you don't invest in someone's career, a strategic person will never be subordinate and dedicated both. He'll either optimize for comfort (Loser route) or personal yield/glory (Sociopath route).

Work cultures tend to be defined based on what they value most.

Subordinacy uber alles: Rank culture (typical corp. environment)
Dedication uber alles: Tough culture (e.g. Enron, Microsoft's stack-ranking)
Strategy uber alles: Self-executive culture (e.g. Valve)
Balance of the 3: Guild culture (rare, not seen in startups)

VC-funded startups tend to be all-Clueless. The Sociopaths are VCs and executive implants who aren't really part of the company. Startups can't stand to have Losers, since they tend to require explicit management and the rules are too ill-defined at that point. So they often end up with the tough culture, which is the opposite of how startups wish to market themselves.

In rank culture, all you need to do to remain employable is get along with your manager; but in tough culture, there's an unwritten rule that everyone must be 100% dedicated to work. Total submission of effort replaces subordination. It's not actually that way-- people aren't actually willing to work 80+ hours without personal benefit-- but people who flagrantly break the rules get shown out.
I find it interesting that many of the claims to progress cite percentage deltas, but presumably those statistics don't factor in population growth. Could it be, for instance, that just as many people are in extreme poverty as in the 70's, but that there are simply more well-off people now?
Chem Eng is one of the harder degrees to actually get, and as fun as computers are, I sometimes contemplate going back and getting the Chem Eng degree (I did Comp Eng/Chemistry double) to play with big chemistry.
You probably meant to link to this Java code: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/benchmark.php?te...
Yeah, it's way better now. Voltage and Tatte are very friendly for hackers, and Starbucks, Cosi, or ABP aren't bad either. The entire ground floor of the MIT Stata Center is open to the public (literally 24/7) with ultra fast WiFi. If you need dedicated desks, Dogpatch or the Cambridge Innovation Center have you covered.

Unfortunately Google has invaded much of the roof garden with a recent renovation.

My favorite is Dwelltime on Broadway. Close enough to Central to get to quickly, yet away from much of the hustle+bustle and suits. They shut off the internet from 11-3p, which is great for a productive boost in the middle of the day. :)
Just to note that the AI has complete access to the NES's RAM (and also backtracks whenever it gets into trouble), which is not quite fair to compare to other approaches to AI or playing against a human. I'd be pretty damned good at battleship if I could see your board and rewind whenever I missed.
It actually works in IE 8 and up (via shim): https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/DOM/element.classLi...
> I think that fiat money which is just backed by the word of the government that it's solid somehow works. Why and how I cannot explain nor do I seek to.

Because of fiat, of course.

To be precise, US Dollars are valuable because the US Government only accepts tax in US Dollars. Since taxes are levied on a proportion of economic activity by definition, that percentage of economic activity is instantly converted into demand for US Dollars. Additionally, thanks to legal tender laws, it's obligatory in the United States to accept US Dollars as payment for a debt. Thus, there is a large quantity of legally generated demand for US Dollars--enough to keep the currency valuable enough for other economic activities.

It is also no mistake or coincidence, for instance, that wages and salaries are paid in US Dollars. When you combine laws saying both "income taxes must be paid in US Dollars" and "income taxes must constitute a proportion of total earned income", it saves a lot of effort for the earned income to be denominated and paid in US Dollars. If you got paid in bitcoins, someone would have to calculate the value of bitcoins in USD, sell some bitcoins for USD, and pay the taxes in USD. Actually, this is exactly what happens with stock grants (in a publicly traded company).

Unless you can somehow generate similar amounts of demand for bitcoin, and simultaneously tightly couple that demand with major streams of economic activity, you won't accomplish the same thing. As far as I can determine, only the government can unilaterally dictate the currency that large, double-digit percentages of the GDP need to be denominated in.
Exactly what I thought. I even think it was a clever way to end, and a point he might have been making as a sort of subtext.
Some Tips to Protect your Wordpress site from Brute Force Attacks
What fantasy world do you live in where the components (both structural and electrical) of a wind turbine require no mining?

Either way though this whole discussion is just ridiculous. Nuclear isn't competing with wind, it's competing with fossil-fueled thermal generation. All of the wind energy that Denmark is producing per this article is less than 1/6th of a single Canadian nuclear power plant (Bruce N.G.S.).
Kendall Square itself isn't the most residential area, but you're a subway stop away from a ton of nightlife & live music in Central Square. One stop further and Harvard Square has an active city events scene (Mayfair, Book Festival, Bastille Day) + a ton of shops & restaurants. Just over the river you have the Esplanade, with regular concerts, movie nights, and festivals. And that's all within a mile or so.

What kind of recreation are you looking for?
In that particular reply I was talking Haskell specifically; I should have been more clear. You are of course right that being a monad does not mean being an instance of the Haskell type class Monad. It means being a monoid in the category of endofunctors. It does not mean "anything that satisfies ... associativity and left/right identity". You have to specify what operation is associative, which in this case is composition of endofunctors. Associativity and identity on binary operations on sets, for example, gives you a monoid, but not a monad.

Monads are more specific, and it is in that specificity that you find the requirement for monads to be "polymorphic": monads are endofunctors, and the monad laws concern the composition of those endofunctors. An endofunctor is a mapping between a category and itself. When we apply this category theory to programming, we talk about a category of types. In Haskell this is the category Hask. This is where the polymorphism requirement comes into play. The monad maps from Hask to itself. That means that it must be able to map over all types, which means polymorphism.
Also, there's the small matter of renumeration for that other ~128hrs per week.

I'm perfectly happy to be 100% committed to my employers interests/projects for the ~40hrs a week that all the salary negotiations were assuming. I'm even perfectly happy to adjust those assumptions when it benefits the company - I'll work overtime when needed or do a few 60hr weeks at "crunch time" with time off in lieu.

But if work wants to start dictating what I do or don't do in those _other_ 128 hours, we first need to discuss what a reasonable rate to pay for that is. (And, indeed, whether I'm even interested in a job that wants control of more than 40-ish hours a week of my time.)
DMSO ((CH3)2SO) is a polar aprotic molecule, which means it's neutral _and_ polar. It's easier for a small, neutral polar molecule like DMSO to pass through the phospholipid bilayer of your cells than it is for acetate (CH3COO-).

The "dimethyl" is not what it's important.
A new approach to building companies
Pardon me if I'm really ignorant of the AI field here, but doesn't this look like the beginning of more general artificial intelligence? The organic feel of some of these moves is almost scary to me.
Interesting error, since it's more common to get confused in the other direction. Many people think the peninsula of Jutland is Denmark, even though the center of business/power/economy is in Copenhagen, on the island of Zealand, which is closer to Sweden than to the Jutland peninsula.
Because it's considered poor form (if not racist or sexist) to attribute someone's mistakes on a whole population group... unless the population group in question is "American".

It's probably a better problem to have than some of the other problems we might have though.
Let me add to the complexity. What if Silk Road is also gov't? We have had proof of CIA drug-running. And the so-called Drug War is a failure. You don't get failure on that magnitude without gov't complicity, even if it's simple bribery. See: Alcohol Prohibition.
I really don't follow what you're trying to say here. >>= has signature m a -> (a -> m b) -> m b, so clearly you are working with a concrete type m a. The point is that the concrete type isn't what instantiates the Monad type class, the constructor m is.
I threw my own attempt at this on HN a ways back, but it didn't get any traction: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4906343

Mine supports things like multi-key commands and has predictable (if not entirely desirable) undo behavior, but it has issues in its own right. I figure we may both learn a thing or two from each other's attempts.

Vim really does need this feature to get some mindshare back from ST2, and I'd love to see this well-implemented, even if its by someone else.
Google Codejam 2013 Qualification Round Analysis
Paul Buchheit has more details in his Founders at Work interview, but basically the first version of GMail was a Perl script that grabbed his e-mail inbox and stuffed it into the Groups indexing engine, so that other people could search his e-mail. Version 2 was to let it search over their inbox instead of his, and Version 3 added the ability to send e-mail.
IT Security in a Nutshell
By 'output' I (think) I meant the output we get for the energy used by the miners.

You seem to be saying that The Miners have to verify transactions to claim their reward? When you say "which are all verified separately" - you mean verified by the same miner who publishes the block? If so then the bitcoin network as a whole benefits from their energy use.

On the other hand, I see your point that the make-work is not intrinsically linked to transaction verification. But my understanding is, its the difficulty of the make-work that protects the block-chain from being hijacked by ..er... 'the bad guys', whomever they may be.

So, the whole thing kinda makes sense, and the 'make-work' is like an energy commitment that keeps the whole thing integrated. The assumption being, the total commitment of all bitcoin users will always be greater than the commitment of any single attacker/attacker group.
Well it needs a lot of water (which can be problematic for the areas which solar is most competitive in) and a lot of unused area. It's a very reasonable solution when you meet those constraints though.
I'm curious how many people sign up for your python screencasts? The format looks good-- I'm considering it.
You'll be surprised: http://www2.egovlink.com/press-release-bitcoin.cfm
So what happened when he got to Oxford? I'm on the edge of my seat here!
From whats said here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5548503 miners grant themselves a fraction of a bitcoin for each block, and that fraction is what decreases over time.
If the professor knows the both of you get them to make an introduction.
Linear algebra: My work tends to be mostly visual; either computer vision or graphics.
From the article: "A pure meritocracy, we'd discovered, can only promote; it can't legitimize."

He was an outsider who became an insider, only to discover there was another elite (social, economic, political) level that he feared he'd never crack.

Eventually, he's bed-ridden with a cold, and for the first time, actually reads and gets lost in literary works (whereas academia had become a "scene" too focused on abstract literary criticism).
Very funny video and worth watching.

But it's not even close to beating NES Games. I'm not a expert in AI but I'm not sure it actually achieves anything.

I'd consider it more an art project than a computer science project.
Possibly, but they'd have to be designed to be remotely controlled (possibly at an individual level). They'd also have to be specifically engineered to withstand the sudden reduction in countertorque when the windmill is removed from the grid and then to lock the blades against windmilling while shutdown. And of course, to reverse the whole process on command.
The most lucrative formulas are never patented. Coca-Cola, for example.
I think the Armory (Silk Road's sister site for weapons) is evidence against that. It was shut down because it wasn't profitable for the owner(s). Funding obviously wouldn't be an issue if it were the government, so if the Armory were good for their strategic objectives, why would they have shut it down? And if it were bad for their objectives, why would they have created it to begin with?
Quite possibly, but on the other hand population growth is inversely correlated with affluence (Higher income results in less children).
And if a nickel could only be spent once, this would matter.
I'm English. I live in Denmark.
Yes, on this, we win:
https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
5) As a honeypot for crypto fans, anti-government types, money laundering, and such?
Yes, I can disprove. This has nothing to do with Haskell, I'm only going to use the monad laws. The first monad law says:

bind f (return a) = f a

For all a and f. Therefore, by substituting f = id, and a = return x:

bind id (return (return x)) = return x

If, as in jQuery, `return (return x) = return x`, then we can simplify to:

bind id (return x) = return x

Now, applying the first monad law again, we get:

x = return x

So return must be the identity function. But jQuery's $ is not the identity function. Contradiction. QED.
I agree with the three "revolutions" described in the article. I really believe they are happening and actually believe we can expect them to continue happening.

Its just that the numbers are to good to be believed. I may be biased tho.

Anyway, I sure hope the article is 100% correct.
Yes but it's libertarian pie in the sky fantasy, so we like it.
So not impossible, you _just_ have to guess the owners private key?

Presumably you could in theory brute force that in a million years or whatever. Also if there were an example of data encrypted with that key (is there in the block chain by virtue of the protocol?) then if the private key system were broken - eg by advance in quantum computing or a weakness found in the crypto used - then perhaps it would then be feasible.

The corollary of this appears to be that you'd then be able to take anyone's bitcoins?
I see it more likely being a fork of Firefox OS or something new that takes the same route.

All Facebook should need is a browser for their OS, if they provide a browser as good as or better than Chrome for Android they should be fine.
The Facebook apps we use on desktop are just browser apps, and it'd be very easy to win developers over that way, plus the App Center is already there serving web apps.

And going with the web should help them stay away from competing with partners like Apple and Microsoft.

All in all their bottom line is Facebook as a service, all they need is to provide something that brings users to using Facebook more and to see more ads.

They've likely even thought of this themselves but are waiting it out to see the web mature more.
Going from six to seven billion people is a 16% growth whereas a lot of the statistics show much larger changes so even before factoring population the figures are probably still significant. There are nuances such as the exponential effects of the internet and mobile phones (a mobile phone or internet connection can have a massive impact on a remote community) and other unknown factors. If you dive into the academic literature I'm sure you can find some analysis of the figures.

I believe the extreme poverty goal used absolute numbers. Percentiles wouldn't make sense to begin with because extreme poverty is largely inherited and as you said could be dwarfed by population growth.
Thank you. So how should I take it forward from there? What can I ask him directly?
I want to introduce myself in 3-4 lines, and then ask about how to be a successful applicant for the given position. Will this be a good subject matter?
Maybe they're (a) not particularly interested in money and/or (b) waiting to see how the legal situation for Ⓑ turns out in another decade or so.
Yes, but you may be able to convince them that you do!
Well since the wind is due in large part to the rotational inertia of the the planet (the air stays still, the earth and everything on the surface moves through the air) the earth's rotational kinetic energy is being sapped. It can't last. Peak spinnage! Tell the people! (...some will say)
>Consider me amazed at how far it's already gone

Not very far, in the grand scheme of things.

The whole amount of money involved is less than what some LOCAL restaurant chains make in a year.

There have been more widespread regional alternative currencies in the past. Given that this one also has all those internet-technology advantages to spread, it's surprisingly minuscule and insignificant.
Good thing there are still developers seeing things differently. I'll take story and mechanics over graphics every day.
Seems like sound design is nearly half of the game. Art direction is another big chunk. Playability is another big chunk. How technically advanced the graphics are fits into the remainder.
Really? Tell that to the tens of thousand of USSR 18-20 yo soldiers, that were called biorobots during the cleanup. 100% of them either died or ended with very serious cases of cancer and kids with malformation. IMHO one has to be literally mad to advocate for nuclear power.
Ask HN:  Google X labs new baby
Well, a month ago Google X labs' "moonshot director" revealed that a new project would be released in "About a month", and would be related to control systems.

http://thenextweb.com/google/2013/03/12/google-x-lab-will-reveal-another-moonshot-next-month-but-its-not-working-on-a-space-elevator/

I'll take a wild stab:

I think it could be related to bitcoin, an alternative chain. It would be advantageous to be able to control the amount of coins in existence such that the exchange rate is stable. Thus the software could simply multiply everyones coins by a floating-point multiplier depending on the current exchange rate. In essence a currency governor. This seems a really simple problem in control systems theory.

Anyone else want to speculate?
It does not; Bitcoin is currently legal in the US. In what countries is it illegal?
With Pulse, LinkedIn Is Becoming The Newspaper Of The Future
Yes, but Danes are quite prepared to pay 25% VAT and up to 62% income tax so that among many other things, The (evil statist) State can afford to buy hugely expensive turbines from Siemens just to avoid giving money to Arabs. And those loaded Norwegians.

Americans, apparrently, while in huge numbers, in thrall to Rand/Objectivism and the Kochs, are not.
First thought: "Necessary but not sufficient"

Second thought: "Minecraft rather undermines the 'necessary' part."

Flippancy aside - there is a place for incredible graphics and I'd be the last person to want progress to halt in that direction but many games wade through the uncanny valley and the immersiveness(?) suffers. Others refuse to even play that game and seem no poorer because of it.

I rate Doom (original), Journey on the PS3 and of course Minecraft as amongst the most captivating gaming experiences I've had. Food for thought.
>Going forward, nobody is ever going to catch that much grief for releasing encryption software.

Citation needed.

>Trust me, no governmental entity gives a hoot about who created the bitcoin standard.

Are you talking of the same government agencies that had 10,000 page files on people such as John Lennon and such?
Why does "crypto guys who don't leak" equal government? That doesn't sound like it would be all that hard to reproduce outside of government. Most corporates don't leak either.
It's probably mixed. Lower taxation encourages the type of risk-taking that leads to innovation, but government spending on science and technology also leads to innovation.

Silicon Valley, for what it's worth, was innovative long before it was a liberal bastion. And while the liberal bastion of Austin is booming these days, it's subject to the same rather conservative governmental policies as the rest of us in Texas.
Note that it was published as part of SIGBOVIK. This paper definitely falls within the approaches to computer science exemplified by the illustrious, eponymous Harry Q. Bovik.
You must not be very fun at parties.
Of course the construction material requires mining. My point was that there is no way you can plausibly claim that nuclear and wind power are equally environmentally friendly. I'm really tired of all the pro-nuclear people here that can't wait to trash any renewable energy as utopian and irrelevant while downplaying the downsides of nuclear power.
Yeah, for a few million years. What a great excuse ...
So it wasn't a "prototype of Gmail" so much as a hack that got people starting to think about storing mail on google technology stack.

It's really funny, that this is the story of the the beginning of Gmail, when the part of Gmail that caught the whole world's attention was the AJAX web UI. I had always assumed Bucheit was a DHTML whiz. Storing and indexing mail already was rather old hat.

Wait, is this a part of Gmail? "other people could search his e-mail." o_O
My own worry isn't so much about employing domestic workers per se, as about which kinds of power relations result from it. If it's just an exchange of services for a fee, that's fine. You can sell some hours of programming as a freelancer, and that's not particularly objectionable.

The domestic-help arrangement often seems to end up with weird power dynamics, though, where it's more like having a "servant" who is clearly of lower social status, and is supposed to cater to their employers' whims in some kind of old-fashioned aristocratic style. Feels less like "freelancing" and more like something more problematic.
Uninformed speculative question here: could the algorithm be improved with some sort of momentum term in the input selection?

It seems to succeed with move-to-the-right (position counter) but fall into what looks like Brownian motion on Pac-Man. It seems to me that putting momentum into its strategy (and changing when the objective function declined) might reduce the implicit branching tree.

What it simulates, then, is the tendency for people to fall into "a groove" and depart from it when their objective function ceases increasing.
In any recent Crytek game, they're 100% of the game.
I wonder how this would handle an NES golf game.
What you say you want: more skilled immigrants.

What we will get: more welfare, more crime, more unemployment, more ethnic nepotism.
You could probably store and recover more energy from those batteries by lifting them from a crane.
Shit. I just lost.
Is there a windows (or Linux command line) equivalent that will backup Google-based data?