skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Nope. A rough count shows that over twenty million people work directly for our govenments from local to federal.

http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/11fedfun.pdf

http://www2.census.gov/govs/apes/11stlus.txt

If we reduced government by 90% by reduction, automation, privatization and outright agency elimination you'd still have two million people in government.

"Ultra-limited" does not mean "no government".

I think 50% to 75% could be a good range. So you'd still have somewhere between five and ten million people in government.

Also, "ultra limited" refers more to what they are allowed to do rather than how many.
> Even if it did increase the probability of an Obama win, or even if it did have no effect on the election outcome, why would it be a wasted vote?

If you think Obama is substantially worse than Romney and it increased the probability of an Obama win, its not a wasted vote, its a counterproductive vote. (That is, its a worse that decreases the expected realized utility.)

> What you're effectively doing is raising publicity for the cause.

There's better ways to do that that precede the voting booth, and which, if successful, eliminate the problem of counterproductive voting. At the voting booth, when those prior efforts haven't succeeded, you have to weigh the benefits of maybe microscopically advancing the PR for the cause by adding one to the count of protest votes against the microscopic possibility (times the expected magnitude of harm) of tossing the election to the least-favored of the major party candidate, and the policy consequences of that (which can, depending on the candidates choices, include a greater decrease in the long-term prospects of the kind of changes you want than the increase that would be expected from the PR value of a third-party vote, particularly if you think the major-party choices are between "basically maintaining the status quo" and "maintaining the worst features of the status quo while substantial reducing economic and political freedoms".)

Political engagement isn't limited to voting.
I don't know what could possibly done. If the legislature or courts got involved and told the NSA to stop, they'd just say "Ok, sure" and then continue on in secret.
I Wanna Mohawk (Mom Won’t Let Me Get One)
Considering https://twitter.com/omgtbh/status/337567604887658496 I can't say I'm surprised...

(tweet text reproduced here: "I asked Hetzner if they plan to support 2 factor auth & was told that they already do - they require a username and a password. Seriously.")
> And now, like my dad I look for "virtuous" people/business to trust.

This relates to the virtue/value discussion elsewhere in this thread. As a consultant I'm learning that some companies are price-averse and some are risk-averse. The latter are willing to pay more to lower their risks. In other words they are willing to pay more to people they trust, which they base on perceived virtue. So here is at least one case where virtue really does have value precisely as virtue (leaving aside the difference between appearance vs. reality).
herro :)
That's got to be the saddest thing I've read on HN. I'm going to hug my sons, and play with them more.
Well, we don't have as complete a constitution as you specified, but I think we've pretty much proven that a constitution doesn't just enforce itself.

It's like introducing a constitution and elections to Afghanistan. They don't mean anything without the culture or "civil society" to back them up.
A tale of four proxies
Two things about this article (which are really more prominent in the comments and on twitter) bother me.

First, and perhaps this is because I am of lower working-class roots, whats actually wrong with being a plumber? I believe its fairly common to ask good programmers how they view the task -- generally speaking framed as a carpenter, a writer, or a mathematician.

Second is the ending: "Am I paid too much to code? Am I paid too little to write? No: in each case, I’m paid exactly what I should be." which I find important in tone but redundant. Generally speaking in America the idea is you take the pay you agree to -- which to me inherently means "I’m paid exactly what I should be".
Yes and no. VPS' providers under Europeaian juridistiction will have to collect and store all the information of their customers (emails, telephone calls) but if you're an American customer to a Europian VPS provider and you host an email-server on that VPS, you aren't forced to save that data for use by the europeian countries.
> What is truly a scary thought is if the vast, mindless mass of people...

This is why privacy advocates (and libertarians more generally), can't get more popular traction: the incredibly derisive and arrogant tone with which they address their fellow citizens, and their flippant, dismissive attitude towards democracy.

Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?
They are a provider of hosted dedicated servers, colo and virtual machines (with or without server management services), based in Germany.
Like any time somebody shares anything. You're guaranteed to have a few people rip apart the color choice, or layout, or whatever.

I get that HN commenters are the pinnacle of the design industry, but there are better ways to remind people of it than ripping apart something unique based on the color of the buttons on the web page.
RubySource |RubySource
You can also do this with CSS:

pointer-events: none;

cursor: not-allowed;
Logo Stack: real world logo design inspiration
Just wait until it turns out that forcing all software to have back-doors wasn't all that great of an idea.
I assume this is how China can functionally be running an active and violent war of hacking with no repercussions.
Is Mobile Video Changing Marketing? Why We Should All Embrace the Shift
It was AOL:

http://news.cnet.com/8301-32973_3-57440513-296/meet-the-tire...

On the same vein, the Apple Graphing Calculator story:

http://www.pacifict.com/Story/
The implicit claim is that your trading engine won't beat established trading engines and because of volume.

Both can be falsified, by inventing a better trading engine and getting foreign capital into it. Yes the margin for profit isn't that high anymore, but trading engines+trading markets are one card in the stack one can fight with. There is no holistic solution to making maximum profit, except succeeding when others fail. That's why innovators are always rare goods, because capital herds dry it out.
just as a point of clarification: "genetic programming" is not the same as a "genetic algorithm". Genetic programming is an area of evolutionary computation in which the AST of a program is created using a genetic algorithm. So while genetic programming is definitely "machine learning" in the truest sense, it's not terribly useful for classification and regression problems (what we usually think of when we talk about ml).

Now genetic algorithms are any algorithm that encodes solutions (typically parameters to a cost function) as a gene and performs optimization through an artificial evolutionary process. Now GAs are incredibly easy to learn how to implement, but it's much harder to figure out when they should be used.

In theory GAs can be used anywhere in this diagram that parameters need to be chosen. However there are two major draw backs to GAs:

1. Cost function is a huge bottle neck
2. In many cases there is a known, better method of optimization.

So for example you might want to use a GA to determine the parameters for training an SVM, however (given you have enough data) this runs into problem 1, since it might take minutes, hours or days to train an SVM. Which is too long and you would have to train 100s or more SVM for each iteration of the GA, with a least 100s of iterations.

Also GAs have been used to find optimal weights in neural nets, however here you run into 2 (and I believe 1 as well), as using backprop usually performs better.

All that said GAs are an amazing tool when you have some cost function you need to optimize that 1.) can be evaluated very quickly, and 2.) is weird, very non linear, or otherwise has no known 'good' solution already.

So finally to your question: most heavily studied areas of ML already have a better optimization algorithm than a GA (hence no GAs on this diagram), however in the real world you never know when you my find some very strange, difficult and poorly studied optimization issue and then GAs can be very useful
StackOverflow does such a good job now I don't think you could compete. S.O. won't do your homework for you so that's unserved market. If your service was called "Help Me Cheat On My Homework" it might work. ;-)
Hacking is good for democracy
I'm curious, what makes you think that moving would help?
Just got the email too. I'm quite happy with how clear they are about what happened and how they hash their passwords. Very different from Linode.

I just wish that they used bcrypt instead of a salted SHA256 but at least it's salted (and anyway in my case I never reuse passwords so no big deal).
http://rootopic.com/test/root

I created a forum service.
Flat time ordered comment system is easy to read.
You can create your own community.
Startup Definition
Facebook has internal teams and tools used to do searches on activity of users, when law enforcement requests come in FB looks at the request and makes a judgement on whether to comply with it. They supply information such as when and from what IP a user logged in, and can provide user content - however I do not know to what extent they provide it.

Nothing gets deleted from FB. So the data is there for a long time - further, FB is careful about where they build datacenters and hold the data so as to ensure that FB is the owner of the data, and not subject to some foreign government claiming that they own the data of their national users.

Google surely has the same team, tools and procedures.

What about Dropbox? and Box? How do these companies deal with this whole situation? FB has an entire .gov policy/interfacing office in DC - do these other companies as well?
The presentation will actually take place tomorrow. I'll do my best to be entertaining!
You can still remain silent but a jury is allowed to infer possible guilt from your refusal to answer questions.
is the 'reason' even verified? is that not just a pretty way of saying "they can't browse through the data, unless they have a reason - any reason will do - feel secure:) "
> nobody is calling for no government

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarchism_in_the_United_States
The codename for the NSA telephone metadata collection program is RAGTIME-P
Ask HN: Determining worth and negotiation points during job offer?
I'll be receiving a job offer soon from one of the top 3 and was wondering what your strategies are for determining worth and negotiation points. Fresh BS CS grad, but I'd say I have roughly 4x the work experience of your typical fresh grad at some pretty notable places, the majority of it being pure research in ML and also have a non-profit startup. Is this sort of stuff a negotiation point?
Gotcha. In case it's helpful, FastSpring order pages are localized into these languages:
Arabic, Chinese (Traditional and Simplified), Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, French, German, Greek, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Lithuanian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Serbian, Spanish, Swedish and Turkish
This guy is living my dream.
This++. The 30-day rules are set up to protect the tenant across the hall.
You're trying to prove a point by giving a single example. Those pictures on that website are expensive houses in Amsterdam where people like to show off their wealth in a "non-intrusive" way. Once you get into sub-urbal and rural areas, you won't find a house without curtains. At least in the whole 10 blocks around me, I haven't seen a single house without blinds or curtains.
I really don't agree with much of this.

I have a feeling that in spite of all this teens google (or back in the day, AltaVista'd) how-to guides about what they're seeing. There are tons of resources online and, perhaps I may have been in the minority, but I was Lycosing all kinds of guides about anal sex, safe sex, different kinds of kinky sex, etc if I saw something that piqued my interest. Porn showed me what was possible and written articles gave me more details about what I was seeing. I tried all kinds of stuff because of the porn I watched and I believe I'm better off for it. I had a lot of fun because of it.

It seems that what you're really arguing for is not a restriction on adult content, but more of it in the form of better and broader sex education. If that is the case, I couldn't agree more. If half of these [1] books were available to teens as part of sex ed I think they'd be getting a better sex education because it's mixing naughty pics with good information.

I have almost no exposure to straight porn so I can't speak for that side, but I don't see this kind of degrading behavior in gay porn that you're talking about. Maybe there's some kind of difference here that's coloring my opinion but I really don't think I have a clue what you're talking about in regards to men dominating women in porn. (If you want to link to some examples, this might be the only time NSFW content is appropriate in a HN comment!)

What kind of porn did you watch as a teen, and how has it affected you as an adult? I'm willing to wager you watched a lot of stuff and haven't been negatively affected as an adult.

You really are looking for the edge cases and disregarding the general benefits of porn. It's hard to imagine that society is being horrifically damaged by porn, and in fact I'd argue that society shapes porn to a greater extent than porn shapes society. If women are degraded in porn (as you say they are), it's likely because that's a reflection of society.

[1] http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_1/175-4932095-5801103...
I heard that idiom in English just a few days ago. One friend asked another, "Can I steal that book for a minute?" The other replied, "Yes, let me just hide it first." It stuck in my mind because I don't think I've heard that usage of "steal" very often, or that degree of quick-wittedness among my friends!
Looks really useful.
I also got the mail.
Ark.com (YC W12) Hiring Node.js and ElasticSearch Engineers
Why should I listen to the opinions of someone who calls my parents, most of my friends, my in-laws, my wife, etc, "mindless"? Just because they have different priorities and care about different issues, or (gasp!) have different ideas about the appropriate boundaries of police surveillance?

It is not that you are mindless, it is that we are too dumb to contain the sums of human knowledge within our head. Individually, we can be great at disciplines that we specialize in. But expecting us to decide competent government officials to represent us? That's impossible.
You keep mentioning "privacy" as though I argued its merits relative to abortion. I didn't even use the word.

My post was all about the size and power of the Federal government trumping all other issues such as whether or not abortion is good or bad. Once you've abdicated your liberty, your ability to complain or resolve other issues is gone.
Why would moving from place where your job is in low-to-medium income range to place where the same job will be in decent-to-high income range help?

For starters, you'll have more money.
Am I the only one that wants coders to stop feeling guilty and devaluing themselves?

The plumber analogy is off base. Web development is incredibly more complex than plumbing in a home. Importantly, web development changes extremely fast while plumbing is largely the same as it has been for decades.

The web and the developers that have created all of the sites and apps on top of it has added tremendous value to our economy and world. Web developers have streamlined almost the entirety of our lives and created enormous productivity gains.

The things that we create may seem trivial to us, but are fantastically valuable to society.

Jet packs and flying cars were always a terrible benchmark to measure human technological progress against. Iterative improvement has created a world of fantastic possibilities.

Good development is hard, and requires a lot of knowledge. Value yourself and feel good about what you are doing.
Mindless with respect to political issues, is quite appropriate, I think. When my mom or my dad or my grandma says, "I have nothing to hide" (and they do, whenever I call them about some privacy concern), my respect for them with regards to political issues, drastically drops. Perhaps "mindless" is harsh, but they certainly aren't being insightful or politically educated.

I'm not trying to launch ad hominem attacks on you or your relatives. I'm trying to get people to wake up.
The likely scenario is that information distributed throughout the agency suggests that they do not spy on US citizens. Basic training is done for all employees where they are taught not to spy on US citizens.

However, NSA also conducts clandestine operations. Employees selected for those operations are probably recommended based on their willingness and trustworthiness when it comes to spying on US citizens and effectively breaking the law.

Alternatively, as has been suggested recently in numerous articles, FBI probably works hand-in-hand with NSA to "legally" allocate information required for datamining. To the employees of the clandestine operations, the information obtained is technically "legal", so perhaps that serves to settle the nerves of the employees involved.
Former drone operator says he's haunted by his part in more than 1,600 deaths
> Based on this, it would be counterproductive to vote third party, and the responsible thing would be to vote for Romney.

Exactly right. When faced with wasting your vote the intelligent thing to do is to try to mitigate damage and cast a vote for the person who is likely to do the most good where it matters. Obama, as it turns out, isn't even qualified to run a cookie-baking operation. We really needed someone with a deep understanding of business and economics at the helm. The only electable choice was Romney. Any other vote would have been a wasted vote.
Why? Going to llvm constrains you to do llvm's models. (Also, the timing issue mentioned by a sibling.)
"Dearth" means scarcity. I had to read your post over a few times to understand that you (probably) meant an abundance of poor business ideas. An enjoyable word to use, though!
God, when I was scanning HN's front-page, for a moment saw this as "Using heroine helped decode Linear B"!

Which brings to mind two things:

* Many people have used "mind-expanding" drugs to create new art, literature, etc. but I wonder if there has been any cases where they helped with a scientific discovery, e.g. similar to the classic example of Kekule seeing a snake biting his tail while day-dreaming and realized that this was the structure of the benzene molecule. On a different note: can you code while you're high (caffeine doesn't count!)?

* The other thought was gaining intuition on how the brain decodes writing, there seems to be a probabilistic aspect to it, where word meanings have probabilities assigned to them, much like a spelling checker: http://norvig.com/spell-correct.html
One-hit wonder list
To resolve physics’ paradoxes, physicists craft mind-boggling visions of reality
I would be very surprised if Facebook doesn't strip the referral out and replace it with their own.
"What's actually wrong with being a plumber?"

Nothing is "wrong" with it, but the skill required to be one is much lower than it is for other vocations. This means that there are more of them and so they are lower paid. The perception in society is one that because of this they have a lower value.

From my perspective, people who choose low-skill, low-pay work aren't pushing themselves hard enough. It's great if you're good at it and you are low on money, but if it's your life goal to be a plumber you may be setting the bar too low.
I bet many people here can guess the top comment on particular threads based solely upon the submission title. (There's a high probability the top comment has the phrase "Am I the only one, or ...")

You might just have a point.[1]

[1]: https://www.hnsearch.com/search#request/comments&q=%22am...
I'd like to know what kinds of criminals this stuff is really being used to catch, since it's clearly not being used to fight terrorism.
Thanks, that would be fantastic. As it is now, though, I really can't see myself using it because it would take me a week to scan through my feeds.

Props on the work you've done, though.
What's the Score? The Ultimate Guide to Social Scoring
Sigh, another hosting provider hack. As if Linode and OVH are not enough. This is the reason why we use full disk encryption, where we enter the key manually during boot. This way we're protected against many types of hosting provider hacks.
You've been brainwashed. The best option for consumers is for it to be free, with no ads.
Also Dutch. Didn't know about the drones, got a link for that? I believe you (esp. given all the other crap they pull), I'm curious how and where they use the drones.
Oh really? And what OS is IE mostly used on? Let me answer that for you - Windows. I think there are a lower hanging fruit than browser power optimization that can save on battery life on a windows powered machine.
I seriously recommend the Riverworld series, written by the excellent Philip José Farmer. I think after The Foundation from Asimov I cannot find anything good or exciting for fiction.

http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philip_Jos%C3%A9_Farmer

PD: I've read a lot, guys. Those were my favs :D
No reason it couldn't. It's not the size of a government that determines its efficacy, esp with the right kind of private-sector support.
Seriously, again??

I think such a fauxpas shouldn't be tolerated twice.
Ask HN: Do you take freelance jobs outside of your day job?
For those of you who have full time jobs with competitive salaries, do you still continue to take freelance/contractor/consultant work? If so, is it the same type of work you do at your day job?
Not only does this seem like a gross generalization but it also isn't responding to anything the parent commenter said - where does it say that Mormons are also over-represented in the population of interrogators?
Oh, that's what you were getting at. I agree. I would also love a step-by-step example of how to build something cool using machine learning.
Of course! Not trying to say its all Mormons, I'm simply commenting on the various explanations for Mormons being heavily overrepresented in the IC, and linking it to the facility being built in Utah.
I don't understand, are they saying the backdoor might be because of the Nagios software or because something has implanted itself into the Nagios software?
I think the state of California is a pretty good counter-example to the purported benefits of increased direct democracy.
Several events with Linode, now Hetzner. These are relatively "premier," high-quality hosting companies, you can count on thousands and thousands of companies to pay even less attention.

Yet every time, the discussion is only about one specific company, without seeing any broader pattern.

When are we ever going to draw the conclusion that popular hosting companies (and, actually related, facilities like RubyGems) are especially attractive targets, and that the approach of waiting for an exploit and then shaming the targeted company is not an effective way of getting better security?
Rocket Lease: 1 Year Review
And a pretty low population density: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_U.S._states_by_populati...
Not just German actually, they (Hetzner Online AG) have also got a subsidiary in South Africa ... http://www.hetzner.co.za/
You think voting for Romney shows that you learned anything? Shame on you.
This is somewhere between "oh god my eyes" and extremely interesting. Thanks for sharing that!