skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I see more problems than benefits.

1. Poverty is a relative term. Giving the entire population a basic income would shift everyone up, but ultimately it's a zero sum game. Obviously, the additional income will be marginal for high earners and the income gap will largely remain.

2. Massive distribution of money tends to be inflationary. As purchasing power and demand go up, so does the market pricing. Think of rent prices around poor neighborhoods for example.

3. It will not mitigate the "reverse Darwinism" that occurs across the socioeconomic layers. High earners have neutral or negative population growth, while the poor are procreating at a much higher rate. This phenomena crosses communities, countries and continents. It's the reason some rich European countries have declining indigenous population, with any growth attributed to poor immigrants.

4. It reduces the incentive to adapt to the new employment situation.

5. It does nothing to curb to social unrest that will happen due to income gaps. I don't want to sound like "The Man", but in effect this has the potential to make the income gap much more volatile; a large portion of the population that's idle and feels neglected is a massive unrest waiting for a cause.

The talks of automation as if it's the end of the materialistic society - as everything is produced effortlessly and cost effectively - are premature. We'll be there when we ultimately master the matter at a particle level (think of the Culture novels).
Society can, and will adapt to the added manufacturing capabilities with strong demand for better products and services. In fact, I think automation will be the saving grace of manufacturing in the first world nations.

As controversial as it sounds, I think the solution lies in balancing the growth across the different socioeconomic levels. There should be a policy of encouraging growth across the upper echelons of society, while discouraging the growth among the lower ranks:

1. Immediately, it will reduce poverty levels;

2. It will provide a better opportunity to take care of low income families, including government sponsored education, health and food programs;

3. In the long run, it will be the most effective redistribution tool of wealth. For every kid the Walton family had, each of the others had billions less in inheritance.
Accumulation of individual wealth is greatly amplified when successful families make 1 or 2 children. If they have an average of 4 children, the transfer of wealth between and across generations will be more reasonable.

The current situation of the financially weakest population multiplying in the quickest rate is bad for everyone (first and foremost to themselves); it is a demographic and economic dead end. No matter how much you try patching it with wealth redistribution, you WILL eventually "run out of other people's money".
Edward Snowden whereabouts unknown as US presses Russia
Take a look at state government employees most of whom are middle class. A major portion of this labor force is involved in managing data. Rough guess ~30000 * 50 states=1500000. Pretty sure its a much bigger number.

Facebook can manage the data of a billion people with 5000 employees.
Unfortunately, not everyone knows what you mean.
I find the Eigengrau to be a very relaxing color and I use it as the background of my desktop. It always puzzled me that it's not a pure grey but it has a little blue. I thought he had more sense that there was a little red because of the minimal amount of light that passes through the capillaries of the eyelids.

I suffer from epilepsy and often I see scintillating scotoma, visual snow and other strange light phenomena. Given this I came to the conclusion that my brain associate this color to a quiet mental state.
Perk of being a professional is the ability to get a .pro Domain (really).
90% of Everything is Crap, and What This Means
Again, not really a hidden feature but one I was very happy to find: moving files via Finder using Cmd-C to 'cut' and Cmd+Opt-V to 'paste'. (I come from a Windows background and cutting and pasting using the keyboard is deep in my DNA).
Printing JVM generated Assembler on Mac OS X
I think you deserve a more thought out response than I have time for just now. I've tried to be judicious in my original comment and not point out specific artists I prefer or take issue with.

But I'll say this, I'm specifically only talking about the direction high-art has taken that I'm finding troublesome. Pop music and its equivalents in other media I don't really have a problem with. It's the modern day equivalent of a Jig, a Gigue or a Sarabande. By definitely, it's the perfect representation of der Geist seiner Zeit. That kind of art is doing its own thing and I'm specifically not talking about it (though that would be an interesting discussion by itself).

- lest you think I'm poo pooing the entire field, here's some music I think is worthwhile for us to both enjoy, Steve Reich's later works like this http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zLckHHc25ww and I'm coming at it as somebody who once aspired to be a professional concert violinist.
Fun fact: In Star Trek the Next Generation, Picard mentions that Fermat's Last Theorem had gone unsolved for 800 years.

5 years after that episode came out, Wiles showed his proof.
Every single day I look at my code and I think how bad it was yesterday. Sigh.
"Meanwhile a planeload of journalists are now off to spend the day in Cuba"
There's a lovely documentary from the BBC/Horizon on Andrew Wiles' accomplishment. Also ran on PBS as the "The Proof".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7FnXgprKgSE

It's a very moving piece that puts a lot of depth behind the 2d scribbling on paper that describes whole universes. Also a very humane look into the lives of mathematicians.

Reminds me so much of how people obsessed with a solution will give up any semblance of a social life to pursue it.
Neat. I didn't know Apple still did this. Mac OS 7 and 8 hat tons of useful hidden features and modifiers. Having a keyboard key modify basic actions is such a benevolent way to increase productivity for power users without harming newbies. It's also fairly easy to add.

I don't understand why Linux desktops apps don't do this more often. Or maybe they do and I just don't know where to look.
A a lot of these start-up (except for Facebook maybe ) are using python in their stack, why is that ? all I hear about around me is "Java Java Java". What makes python better ? ( it is just a question ). Or is python just for mvp then the stack moves to Java ( like Twitter did with rails )?
Violin; Instrumenting JavaScript
Princeton Academics Form GitHub Book Club
There could be many reasons for that. I would like to see the comparisons between Americans life expectancy after retirement vs. Europeans (removing all people who quickly start work again after retirement).

People who have stressful jobs and then go on long vacations often get sick the first few days into it. It seems to me to be some kind of "stress dump" as your body and mind begin to ease into a lower stress environment. In the US we get such a small amount of vacation days, my personal (completely unchecked) hypothesis is that when people retire they finally get to do that dump that Europeans are doing once or more per year but the strain of a 60+ year dump is too much for their bodies to handle.
In the case of
instant messaging, we have merged the Skype and Windows Messenger message
delivery backend services, and this now gets you delivery of messages even
when the recipient is offline, and other nice features like spam filtering
and malicious URL removal.

This relates well to the HTTPS url visiting thing of a while back.
I think this is the sensible implementation of the basic income. You get basic payment and then you can get rid of not just many benefits but also tax allowances and thresholds and pay a flat rate on all earned income.

This would eliminate further the cliffs/incentive changes with the basic income payment added to the tax the actual effect would be pretty progressive while everyone (who earns anything above the basic) would feel they are contributing.

What I have never done is really make an attempt to calculate the necessary rate of tax to support a useful basic income. I suspect it would be quite high.
The USA has really gone off the deep end about Wikileaks. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5920530 Note the author there lives in the USA but is not a citizen. One source says NSA spying is about 2/3 foreigners and 1/3 citizens, so take from that what you will.
First time I've seen my country's TLD on HackerNews :)
Ask HN: anyone hiring a designer in Brisbane AU (or remote)
My girlfriend is a design/front end coder, fantastic photoshop skills, photography, HTML/CSS, Wordpress experience etc and looking for a new gig. Currently working for a consulting firm at the Sunshine Coast but looking to move to Brisbane.

Local or remote would be fine.

If you have a position or know of one, email hello@luchia.com.au

Thanks guys!
No, I'm saying no one cared then and disater or tragedy struck anyway. There is little correlation about how we feel vs. what happens to us.
You realise how long you've been using a Mac when you know every single one of these, bar one (Opt+Clicking Menu Bar Extras)
Because other people are clueless and apathetic?
Then all they have to do is stop the pigeon (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dastardly_and_Muttley_in_Their...).
It's still so much better than any other OS.
9 Worst Practices in SaaS Metrics
Which is why I found it odd to see such a decent UX from IE. Microsoft really never wanted to support SVG, so I didn't expect comparatively good support. There is a lot of stuff in WPF and presumably SilverLight that is analogous to SVG, so it isn't as if Microsoft doesn't know how to hardware accelerate geometry drawing.
This is like discussing the architecture of buildings by listing the principal building materials
> This will get me down voted to eternity, but this entire thought is so wrong.

A different sort of wrong than 'technically wrong' perhaps.

http://sandiegofreepress.org/2013/01/some-factual-gun-statis...

There was a very high profile case a while back where a farmer shot some intruders and went to jail. It made national news because it was so extraordinary for an intruder to be shot.

Of course it triggers the debate of how much force should you be able to use and we go round again.
Solar cell, heal thyself
Techu v0.20-beta: RESTful Search API - Moving closer to production release
We've adapted to a life of work, both positively and negatively. Culturally and socially our jobs validate and define us. Think about people who are already in the situation of not having to work, e.g. those with large trust funds from their parents - my impression is that while they have more free time than those who have to work they often find their lives less fulfilling.

I'm not saying we shouldn't remove work, but culture will need time to adapt. Maybe we should try to reduce working hours and days - move to a 4-day week, then a 3-day - rather than abolishing work all in one go.
‘Climate bomb’ warning over China coolant release
Hey there! Make sure you check out the list of issues for planned features https://github.com/georgepsarakis/techu-search-server/issues....
Add your own request!
What is not published, and never will be, is how many real terrorist threats or sleeper cells have been taken out because of PRISM intelligence gathering?
All the public are wanting to see is "USA IS SPYING ON ME" however I will say I think the public would be outraged if there was no PRISM and if terrorists kept attacking the country.

You either spy on your own country (because sleeper cells live in your country) and defend it better or you don't and you get attacked... people want the best of both worlds, life doesn't work that way!
And yet slowly it has happened. It's the underlying reason why we haven't yet recovered from the financial bubble.

A shift to creative/performance means talent an even more scarse resource than people with high education.

Less jobs are created than lost. It is a real problem and can't just be brushed of this time.
It would be awesome if they released their AMD GPU drivers for FreeBSD
As a cat-person, I hope the tongue-in-cheek was between the two jaws. :/
It is deeply shameful that the article can't even spare a sentence to describe what the documents are and their relevance to the public interest, instead generically describing them as "documents about top-secret U.S. surveillance programs". Instead, we see a simplified fugitive-manhunt story, with a smattering of speculative fear-mongering about China and Russia.

The unsubtlety of the smear campaign against Snowden is exceeded only by its seeming effectiveness so far. Here's hoping a new document drops soon to force a shift in the conversation.
PHP - Display social statistics for each article
in Picard's parallel universe Wiles wasn't born.
The history of the Theorem and the attempts to crack it, and how Wiles finally got there is fantastic, and if you've not come across it in detail then I'd definitely recommend finding out more about it.

If anyone is looking for a good book about the history of Fermat's Last Theorem I can thoroughly recommend Simon Singh's book about it [1], which is both accessible for those without a strong maths background (like myself) and paints a wonderful history of mathematics as well. In places it's more entertaining than fiction.

[1] http://www.amazon.co.uk/Fermats-Last-Theorem-confounded-grea...
Yup. I'm not surprised. Call out a government shill on their bullshit and/or not give handjobs to the startup elite and you get shadowbanned.
Yes, delivering JS crypto over the pipes is dangerous. But surely, bundling the code as a browser extension (such that you download and install it once and from then on it's loading everything locally) mitigates most of the issues apart from the memory clearing and perhaps timing?

This is how Cryptocat (https://crypto.cat/) does it.
How do we make encryption more accessible
That is good news. Hopefully this will mean StarCraft 2 runs a bit smoother on my machine since it uses OpenGL.
I'm not a mathematician, but I find it unsatisfying that the solution to such a simply stated theorem requires 100s of pages of mathematics.

Would have been cooler if the proof was extremely simple to write out, but required outside-the-box thought process that evaded thousands of humans for centuries.

I hope the same thing does not happen to physics. Discoveries that lead to simple equations like e=mc^2 are so cool!
Income redistribution is just a fancy name for stealing. Everyone should have just as much money as he is capable of earning. There is nothing wrong in high income gap. It's existence is just an evidence that society works as expected.

Redistribution is just a way of punishing smart and hardworking people for their success and reward the rest of society for their laziness. This would surely end in a disaster: people loose motivation to do anything, because they cannot see any correlation between their effort and income. This is also known as "learned helplessness" and will occur in most of middle class people.

Also, nothing depraves people more that money got without effort.
>The problem that bugs me is this presumption that the people are not cognizant of what is good for them.

Go to America. Live there for a while. Move to a red state and actually talk to people. This presumption won't seem so arrogant when you meet so many people for which there is no other logical conclusion to make.

>I would argue that it is not in Warren Buffett's self interest to vote for higher taxes

It's not, but the voting environment has gotten so skewed that people like Buffet feel they have to abandon voting in their best interests to try and get some kind of balance. At least they claim to publicly.
Tesla system will swap a Model S battery in 90 seconds
It's pretty mind-boggling that thanks to the likes of twitter, we can actually see the seat he was meant to be sitting in as the plane is ready to take off - https://twitter.com/maxseddon/status/349106511257161729/phot...
Parents who sued Apple over in-app purchases can now claim compensation
Some entity (or service) has to provide your internet access. So perhaps you are always going to need an ISP to some extent. Or you are thinking mesh? Maybe in the future ISPs will compete on privacy issues and concerns in addition to how they compete now: bandwidth and cost. Maybe we'll have municipal WiFi, maybe we'll have mesh. We should work towards a mix of mesh and muni as well as a more privacy-focused ISP model. One can dream :)
Agree, to do everything right they have to understand when and how to do that.
Actually, graphics drivers provide the OpenGL interface, just like they provide the rendering backend to DirectX. People are going to install graphics drivers anyway if they're going to do GPU stuff.
Success Motivation by Noah Kagan
I don't see it as a problem. As a consumer and amateur producer of EDM the only surprise that registers is that someone thought this was newsworthy. The practice doesn't bother me and I'm not sure anyone should feel threatened by it. I suppose fans might rightly feel cheated.
What I don't get is – all the journalists made it sound like he was definitely in Moscow yesterday, yet by the sound of it nobody actually saw him get on or out of the HK to Moscow plane? Is that not a huge journalism failure?
I certainly can. Just thinking of the movies and TV shows I missed, the books I never read, essays I never wrote, recipes I never tried, places I didn't visit...

(of course, I would procrastinate all of these things even if I had the time to do them...)
I notice the same thing, Even in one week holidays where only the elementary schools are closed the traffic is much lighter. I expect this because a lot of working parents take this week off too to be with the kids, probably a 10-15% drop of traffic means that traffic is a lot easier.
No, it's the wisdom of the crowd.
You are just assuming that.
It certainly is a reason why I might vote for them in the coming election.
Generate enigmatic documents to challenge PRISM & Tempora
the project vy2ms gives the NSA, the GCHQ, customs officers, secret agencies and police forces new work. it generates documents that can be read, searched and deciphered by otherwise underemployed personal. it challenges them with enigmatic language and mysterious images and diagrams. the text and images are not completely random but rather follow a pseudosemantic set of rules. this makes it hard to easily discard it as random. more fun for the governmental code-crackers!
Password encrypt your wallet and nobody is cracking AES256 with a good passphrase any time soon unless they torture it out of you. And keep a backup copy hidden somewhere so that if they just take the wallet.dat file you have a clone.
But if that were the case, then we would have a progressive consumption tax, not a progressive income tax.

Consumption is the benefit received from society. Income is merely potential consumption. And the rich tend not to consume to their full potential - rather, they tend to reinvest significant chunks of their income in society instead.
So we should just breed away poverty? For all the assumptions and various levels of truthiness in your five enumerated problems, this is awfully optimistic pie-in-the-sky thinking.

Have you considered how long it would take the 1% families to achieve meaningful growth relative to population sizes even if every woman has 15 children starting at age 18? On the flip side, have you considered how hard it is to get poor people to stop getting pregnant? What would the incentives look like?
The only thing I dislike about apple, is that it forces you to use cocoa to use opengl. As a C++ programmer and Ogre3D user, it put a lot of pain in the porting process.

Maybe OpenGL is better with apple, but C++ is not. Shoving Nextstep under programmer's throats is really a weird strategy.
>In my mind, the only way to vote is to vote your conscience, not what happens to give me the greatest personal gain.

Then you should abstain from voting in the present US system because that's not how it works nor how it was designed to work. It's a combative system where compromise is achieved by basically averaging the desires of the interested parties.

> 'Always devise your rules as if you didn't know whether you were going be at the top or the bottom of the pecking order.'

This is a Utopian way to govern, which would be great. But it doesn't apply to the US system. If your position is reasonable and the other side is pushing extremely toward their interests you're going to end up with the middle point between you both.

> as a libertarian, I consider taxes to be unethical regardless of whether I gain a net profit from them or not.

Fine, consider what ever you like. But when you vote you should vote for what directly helps you personally. Giving billionaires tax breaks can't possibly help you in any manner.

I look forward to the day when the US reaches the level of political enlightenment that having an uncle who is a libertarian is as embarrassing a revelation as having an uncle in the KKK is today. There is a reason that this party exists only inside the US and probably couldn't even be sensibly articulated to anyone from another country.
> Over many generations, the base rate of consumption would become tuned to how long nights last in that region.

From the article - "the starch store lasts until dawn even if the night comes unexpectedly early or the size of the starch store varies."

The point is that the plants can handle 2 changing variables
I was investigating today into something similar.

The concusion of my research:

- Model A uses a way less (about 33%) electricity, because it does not have a lan controller. So it will be useless as a server, but for my application this is the choice.

- The RPi does work with 3.3 Volts, but then the USB does not work. Yet again, for me good enough.

- Undervolting (the core and ram) and downclocking do not make much sense. It does save nearly nothing and make the board absurd slow.

- The biggest powersink seems to be the GPU, but AFAIK it can't sleep.

- The most inefficient component are the voltage regulators. Replacing them with dc-dc converters was discussed, i have no experimental results. The easies way is to convert the input to 3.3V without replaying and board components.

- Displays use very much power. But they can be turned of if not needed.

It seems the solar panel can be significantly smaller, but not for a webserver.
Quite a bit of discussion around the meaning of Karma in here.

As an Indian, I'd like to chip in with the actual meaning of "Karma" - the closest synonym in English is "fulfilling your purpose".

The Indian culture is heavy with assumptions that everyone has some purpose in life. The concept of karma urges you to act upon your purpose in life - intended or perceived. It never promises any rewards or punishments by itself. That is primarily taken care of by the rest of the philosophy in these books - unsurprisingly similar to all the other religions of the world.

By itself, karma has no positive or negative association. In fact, one of the holy texts dissociates your "karma" with the fruits reaped subsequent to it. "Continue fulfilling your purpose in life without expecting any rewards for your actions whatsoever." In other words:

Happiness = Reality - Expectations.

The lower the expectations and 'better' the reality, the greater your happiness. :)
As a Dutch man, I think our beer is highly overrated. Belgian and German beers are great though.