skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why do great people like Iain Banks, Steve Jobs, Carl Sagan all die relatively young, while evil sons of bitches like Dick Cheney live to a ripe old age despite having 100 heart attacks?
core.logic is extensible in a way that Prologs traditionally are not and it integrates quite deeply with Clojure - for example you can extend unification to your own data structures and stream "facts" from your own data sources.
"The cure for cancer" is about an ill-defined goal as "the right way to earn money" - it's a very complex topic and we're making a shitload of progress on it every year.

Which doesn't mean it doesn't suck.
A relevant article..has been posted earlier here ...
"Why privacy matters even if you have nothing to hide?" ...http://chronicle.com/article/Why-Privacy-Matters-Even-if/127...
Along the same lines:
1) Govt asks: Have you ever committed a crime? and waits for your response
2) Then asks: Have you ever jaywalked/gone faster than posted speed/etc? (any other "common" crime)

If you answered "no" to 1) and "yes" to 2) then, congrats! You've committed a felony (perjury) in the US. Even if you've done nothing else wrong, you can go to jail.

Also: Always take the 5th... http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6wXkI4t7nuc
(especially in light of infractions against the 4th)
Facebook’s New Patents Tease The Future Of Sharing
PRISM: An international perspective
These types of strategic economic articles have always fascinated me. But I have to ask, what can the Japanese do about that high retiree:worker ratio? As the article mentions, they aren't the only country with that issue. Presumably there is some solution other than "sit there and suffer" or to push the retirees off onto an ice floe.
Sounds like incarceration is a profitable business to me...
maybe it shows that they don't have ENOUGH data ? that is also viable viewpoint

just saying
'Shock jock' disrupts BBC's Sunday Politics show
I was approached by O'Reilly very early. I wasn't even considering writing a book prior to that. However, my experience with O'Reilly has been _fantastic_. I was never writing the book for money, I was writing it for publicity and to help push the project forward. For these reasons, O'Reilly was the clear winner.

Additionally, everyone I've ever worked with at O'Reilly has been very professional, and they've been doing a great job helping push the book forward. They even rushed the production process (editing, indexing, proofreading, printing, etc.) from their typical timelines down to only a couple weeks so the book would be fully ready for VelocityConf in a couple weeks. And they did it! I'll be at VelocityConf signing books.

:)
You're not going to hear me defending the Patriot Act, or the Iraq war, or the way the Afghanistan war has massively overstepped its original purpose.
Yes, you can run `vagrant package` and it'll turn it into a single file format that can be sent to other people to reuse.
Obviously confirmation bias is a very long term illness.
He did indeed marry Adelle back in April.
It was only yesterday I came across his most recent update[1] and was hoping the best for him. Truly a sad day for all who knew him, or enjoyed his works.

In the spirit of Douglas Adams' Towel Day[2], I propose the institution of 'Anti-Gravitas Day', date to be determined.

[1] http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2013/may/21/iain-banks-updat...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Towel_Day
> Expect kamikaze attacks. They happen.

But they don't. Not from the Vietnamese, nor the Indians nor are the Gabonese. Nor the Chileans and Nicaraguans, as was pointed out in the comment I originally responded to.
I have tried this with several documents. No luck. I get "TypeError: Cannot call method "getActiveSection" of null." Same when I select something or not.
Try an additional weight or graph based on your elections.
The stars of Kickstarter: Slovenian edition
Hard to say with the way automatic filtering is done. If you don't mind waiting, post it again when you do a major update.
A Million Simulations
I'm feeling really sad about this. His culture novels in particular had a big effect on me. Right now it seems like the world just got a little bit less interesting and less fun.
Well, I prefer the latter because it leads to a community where I can take more posts at face value and thus learn quicker. I don't think it's unreasonable to encourage this kind of behaviour. It seems to have very little cost.

> Indeed, you have broken your own rule and left your comment open for easy misinterpretation.

Have I? What's easy to misinterpret?
See: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5849186
Better yet would be to rig the vote based on usage. So if you have 500 comments your vote is worth more than someone with 10, you could even scale it precisely on a curve. This way, rather than having a static seniority-based system the site can still develop based on who uses the site the most. You'd still have herd mentality, but there would be more insulation from it.
While adding to Google's impressive collection of mapping data. Google has and will continue to make a lot of acquisitions in this space.
Having defined the most beautiful imaginary world where there's no more sickness and unwanted death, and dying of cancer before 60. What a cruel world where're living in.

I'll go and reopen Excession for one more time - just for you, dear Iain.
By the way, its not a "perception", it's the US backing Israeli war crimes as a point of FACT.

Don't try to justify Israel to me because you will look stupid when I list for you Israeli sources admitting Israel's aggression.

Starting with the Israeli national archives which have detailed the ethnic cleansing in 1948.

Stay on topic. Don't justify Israel. Just don't go there. Please.
JavaScript is fun and easier if you don't have to share code or data with other people. there are no contracts, no interfaces, no classes to slow you down, and most of the software world has a 'screw the other guy' mentality anyway. All you have to do is remember what your own data looks like for a short time. Most code will not be shared with outsiders and most people want to impede their coworkers rather than do extra work to make things easier. so the mentality is "why not use JavaScript for everything."
Not even close, they literally asked for it out loud on twitter for all the world to see.
It's worth repeating that the name for people who are constantly being watched is 'prisoners'.
>> For example, any user could ask for content weighted towards an arbitrary date, like “Show me content to the taste of people who registered in December 2008” or “What do the 1,000 newest users like?”

> That sounds like an incredibly interesting way to navigate a social news site.

Except that votes aren't stochastically independent events - on the contrary, exposure to the first page, which is determined by any vote (not just your chosen cohort), determines most of the votes of a story.

I guess that with that kind of weighting you could perhaps have a different order of the stories that went to the home page, but the stories would still be the same - ie, you wouldn't find all the stories that would have come to the home page in the old days, and were instead pushed out by some kitten-stories.
Spammers would love that ;)
Cultures without cavities: Placing evidence in context
unfortunately this wouldn't work very well because generally speaking there is attrition involved and the original "early users" base will slowly deteriorate as people die, retire or change interest, etc. and are replaced by newer users

so like it or not, under a weighted voting scheme, the site will still migrate away from its "early spirit" because the exact same people won't be around but replaced by newer people

with the inevitable march of time, the complete userbase will be replaced several times over and the site can completely change its tone and "early spirit" in spite of such measures
Yes, just spotted that, thanks.

I'll leave this here, but for anyone reading this, the discussion is "over there".
I read an interview with a prosecuter (it may have been an AMA on reddit) where he said that while a lot of lawyers wanted to become defence lawyers because they dreamed of saving innocent people, as prosecutor he had the power to simply drop the charges, with no reason to go to trial.
Encourage immigration from poorer countries with younger workers.
There are a plenty of examples that say otherwise.

Also, the older someone is the higher chance you'll get to hate him. "You either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain."
Uh well probably the majority of us would answer yes to many or some of those questions

and you know what it would show that were all the same ... HUMAN!
I see an intelligent immigration policy as the only viable solution.
In pre-urban times with smaller houses people used to have far less privacy from their families and their neighbours than they do today, but of course back then the lack of privacy was symmetric. I think I would like to live in a society with less privacy, but only if it was something that everybody had to endure. I certainly don't want some person unknown to me spying on me without being able to spy back, that creates a very dangerous power differential.

And of course a big part of the problem nowadays is that everybody does things that are illegal regularly, there are so many laws that how could we not? "Ignorance of the law is no excuse", just the fact that you're not aware of having committed any felonies doesn't in any way guarantee you haven't committed one.
Gulag was very small thing comparing to this contemporary enslaving machine.
Singapore has only recently relaxed (read: suspended) the imposition of mandatory capital punishment for drug trafficking charges.

While Western governments and media have long criticized Singapore's draconian laws and its low tolerance for all crime, it has to be said that the prosperous city-state has been highly effective at warding off the ill effects of lax criminal jurisprudence and enforcement that typify, with the exception of an absurdly oil-rich Norway or two, almost all developed Western societies.

It pays to give our approach to crime and sentencing another look before we blissfully laud ourselves for 'upholding' some imaginary ethos governing human dignity at the cost of rampant societal maladies that continue to plague us, while in reality, doing a sloppy job at both.

Case in point:

Number of deaths in Iraq over the period of 2003-11 : 4,422

Number of murders in Chicago,Ill. over the same period : 4,265

Source(s):

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nNIT9Dn_Rjk

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WaDR2kLI0m0

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_99LydvXqDk

https://www.osac.gov/Pages/ContentReportDetails.aspx?cid=138...

http://hbo.vice.com/episode-nine/ep-9-seg-1
Re Google Glass:

Do you think that security forces would be less able to violate your rights if all interactions with them recorded? Alternatively, do you think video logs of interactions with oppressive security forces might spark public outrage in a way that mere eyewitness testimony would not?
This is a sad day... the world, hell the universe, had become a greyer place... Rest in peace Mr. Banks. Your books saved me from depression&suicide.
This is why they want everything secret. Perversions of justice and insane prosecutions such as this. Because open coverage reveals their multiple levels of failure.

What's next? Being charged with "Interference with Lawful Surveillance" if you encrypt files, use TOR?
speeding is a not a crime.
Ok, I wasn't not trying to insult fruit or anything, and I was referring to research about sugar, which some other commenters are debating. Just saying that it's not even clear cut that eating fruits is particularly healthful.

And regarding "Getting all your vitamins from meat is ridiculously inefficient" -- you are trying to hack the unhackable, speaking in scientific terms about things we have little clear scientific understanding of. "Fruits and vegetables cut out the middle man; they use much less water and land to get the same nutrients into your body." -- Nope; you don't know that. Some people believe that, some don't.

For all we know, such careful nutritional hacking has little, if any, effect on our health. That's what we know. What people believe is a whole other matter. Most of the diet-talk we hear is just catechism of a new religion (and there's nothing inherently wrong with that, except that pseudoscience is a little annoying) and a whole lotta politics (in this case, it's fascinating to see liberals defending pseudoscience, while conservatives discard it, maybe because they believe the liberals who believe it's actual science). Science it ain't.
> The federal manager of Y-12 said the protestors had damaged the credibility of the site in the U.S. and globally and even claimed that their acts had an impact on nuclear deterrence.

LOL
I don't think than Iain Banks, Steve Jobs, and Carl Sagan made contributions as important as:

Galois — 20; Markov — 25; Abel — 26; Ramsey — 26; Ramanujan — 32; Riemann — 39; Turing — 41; Von Neumann — 53, etc.

But Erdős, Cantor, Newton, Archimedes, and Gödel (though he starved himself to death) lived past 70. So not all great mathematicians die young.
There isn't really such category as a tor 'enter' node. Any node can be the first node of the chain, but it has no idea whether it is the first or one in the middle of the chain. Essentially, it's as if the 'entrance node' is running on your computer.

That means that no node knows the source of the traffic, and only the exit node knows the destination.

For the NSA to effectively monitor Tor, they'd need to run a large proportion of the nodes - one paper thought it would require an attacker to run at least one third of the network.
Does anybody have ideas about how a small foreign investor could borrow money in yen? I've got a mortgage too, and it is denominated in the too-strong-for-our-good Euro :)
There is a lot of money invested in this, it's just that it's terribly hard, and - as others said - there is no simple cure.

http://www.phdcomics.com/comics.php?n=1162
http://www.smbc-comics.com/index.php?db=comics&id=1500#comic
Or maybe it's just one of those things in the real world that doesn't have any easy answers.
There was also a massive increase in crime rates around that time, which eventually led to a massive increase in incarceration rates as people voted for politicians who promised to get tough on crime (which, in practice, means putting lots of people in prison).

Other developed countries don't have the kind of crime rates the US does/did, so they don't put as many people in prison.

No doubt government spending is higher for the reasons you state, but if we had the crime rate of Sweden we'd find something else to spend it on. Most prisoners are incarcerated by state or local governments, anyway, which do not get to print their own money.
Google was, IIRC, the second widely reported suitor after Facebook; I don't see that there's much reason to see it as defensive rather than an acquisition to enhance a major existing offering -- AFAICT, lots of people that preferred Google Maps prior to Waze shifted to Waze, at least for at-the-moment navigation, due to Waze's social features which resulted in better realtime traffic and routing.
I am not trying to do a comparison with Google Maps on this level.

Even when Google Maps came out, it was nevertheless showing useful mapping information and not only background data layers. In this respect, it was not a shiny toy.

My point is that the current prototype for ViziCities is focusing almost exclusively on visual appeal, at the expense of mapping accuracy / actual usefulness / advanced interactivity.
How America Lost Its Way
The version control aspect is really great.

It's really nice to be able branch, commit, merge, go back, whatever with your installed infrastructure. This gets even better if you use puppet or chef (or even the shell) for provisioning of infrastructure in concert with vagrant.

Doing the same thing with snapshots and VM clones with VirtualBox alone is similar to zipping your project periodically as a backup strategy. Yeah,, it works, but it has no granularity.

Bottom line though, it feels very liberating at any point to be able to flip the fuckit bit, do a vagrant destroy and vagrant up and just start over. It makes for painless experimentation on your VM, among other things. Once you've got what you want, you can formalize it in your Vagrantfile, puppet manifests or other versioned artifacts of development.

Is good.
The Moscow situation is not comparable to Afghan countryside.

If "effective" includes "not killing innocent civilians" then sleeping gas would work much better than what they are dropping now.

If smoke or CS would work better, well it's the military's responsibility, not mine, to the the R&D to pick the right tool to protect civilians as required by law.

It doesn't look like they give a fuck.
https encrypts the host header (indeed all the http headers), so yes it does encrypt the domain in that respect. What it can't encrypt is the destination IP address, which would be reverse looked up to the domain if everything was configured right in the DNS.
Track startups Wayra Germany 2012
That might depend on how you look at it:

http://www.sens.org/research/introduction-to-sens-research/n...

High risk, ambitious ideas are more than worth a try.
> Well, as but one example, computer crimes are more harshly punished than in the past

Computer crimes cause more damage than in the past.
Privatization of prisons is nothing more than formal restructuring of gov spendings. Call it what you want, the money flow is still the same:

1. Force people to give up 40-50% of their income (directly and indirectly via sales taxes, import/export regulations, licensing, patents etc).

2. Give that money to some other people to do stuff that you want to do.
Did Maudlin correctly predict the housing bubble and collapse? Otherwise, his opinion is worth nothing.
The Spy Factory
Is this not equivalent and avoids running grep(1) once for each path?

find -exec grep -iH ${1?} {} +

Though it still runs grep on directories.
The World as Free-Fire Zone
On the other side, Alvin C. York.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alvin_C._York#World_War_I
It wouldn't matter how environmentally unfriendly it was to cultivate land as long as livestock are fed cultivated crops, since they require more than one pound of food to produce one pound of meat.

If x = environmental impact of cultivating crops

then R*x = environmental impact of raising livestock

where R = pounds of feed required to produce one pound of meat

Now if we raised our meat differently, such as only on grass-fed pastures, then things might look a lot different. But in the US at least, factory farming and animal feed is the norm.
How much of the crimes are caused by the state programs? When 99,9% of children in the most crucial age for development (7-17 years) are educated in state schools, isn't government responsible for those people misbehaving?

Also, how many laws there are for victimless crimes? That only increases tension between armed police and other folks? How many restrictions are put in economy that keeps poor people poor and desperate?
The doctor's check up might cost $200. I pay $60 a year for my vitamins.
On Being a Good Listener
Many types of cancer that were uniformly fatal 50 years ago now have near-100% survival rates. The easier ones have been cracked. The hard ones are left.

The reason cancer is so hard to fight is that it's not so much a single type of bad cell but an evolutionary process (see: clonal evolution) that continues to generate hardier bad cells. Cancer is when cells become individually fit (in an aggressive way) at the expense of the organism. Cancer isn't one undesirable mutation; a typical cancer cell has at least 5 detectable mutations. It's a process.

The perversity is that cancer treatments are themselves carcinogenic (of different cancers) because the stress on the body (exposure to cellular toxics) causes faster mutation and creates more opportunities for mutant cells (that thrive amid the toxin, at least differentially) to take over.

This is also why cancer can stop responding to treatment. It's like antibiotic resistance.

People are working on more targeted treatments (including minimally invasive ones like radiofrequency ablation) than the typical systemic chemotherapy. The problem is that these are best used with early detection. At Stage IV, the cancer is likely to be all over the body and systemic treatments are necessary... but there are limits to how far those work.
There is absolutely no way that the total death count in Iraq from 2003, at the start of the US invasion, to 2011 is only 4,422. Bush's own estimate, which was heavily sandbagged, was 30,000.
We need more regulation!

But yeah, there seems to be tons of money in the problem. Take into account how many rich people don't want to die and have cancer. And, while there are many different kinds of cancer, they all just boil down to unregulated cell growth. Could that be solved programmatically? I think so, provided we could interpret existing genetic code and write it from scratch. But we are far from this--at the moment, we can't even read it in long strands very well.
You should consider Paris. You'll have real height available for the buildings ;-)
The litany of charges seems a bit much, but a light sentence for trespassing is too little.

The penalty, must deter future attempts by other people. $1000 and a couple weeks of jail is not going to deter other similar protesters.
Anyone else get hijacked to some creepy ad page?
I am still kinda shocked that is even possible. I mean the US go to great lengths to prevent Iran from getting nukes, but they don't even protect their own storage facilities?

I understand that you can't exactly just press a button to make a nuclear bomb go of (although if the PAL is still set to its cold war default of 00000000 that might be just that simple) but on of the US fears is how close Iran is to be able to make enriched uranium, best case (or worst case, for us) estimates are still years away but if they can simply waltz into a weapons storage facility and walk away with it, then they could get it at any time and what is possibly worse is that they could finish the rest of the components (which wouldn't worry the US too much, as they still wouldn't have the uranium) and then get the uranium in a few days (and if the storage facilities aren't tracking their inventory closely enough, the first indication of the nukes being stole may be when the Iranians announce that they have them).

And if Iran doesn't want nuclear bombs, then we know that North Korea wants them.
But they did from the Vietnamese, when the Vietnamese were occupied.

And try googling for "suicide attack India" or "suicide attack Kashmir" or "suicide attack Sri Lanka", you'll find plenty of hits.

Just because South Americans haven't done it (yet) (that we know of), it doesn't mean that it doesn't happen. Like I told you, you've had at least 2500 years warning.

Hell, there's even the American saying "Give me Liberty or give me Death!"

I have referenced academic study on this topic elsewhere, go read it.
Men do commit nearly all of the violent crimes against strangers, but women commit violence against acquaintances at roughly similar rates to men. My impression is that violence against strangers has decreased quite a bit over the last couple of decades but that domestic violence has remained steady, so I'd expect that graph based on composition effects.

I suspect that the gap in murder rates is higher since due to size differences random male on female violence is more likely to be fatal than vice versa. For instance a male acquaintance of mine's ex-girlfriend snuck into his room at night and stabbed him, but thankfully she wasn't able to get the knife through his ribcage and he lived. If the genders had been reversed it might very well have gone differently.