skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Using technology to improve our social organization doesn't have to mean some sort of dystopian techno-unanimity.

In a more primitive time, would it be "scary" to suggest that through technological advancements like agriculture, writing, and calendars we could achieve a better, more just society?
Actually there's a good case to be made that Scott is talking against our own book. We have entirely private money locked up for 13+ years, we benefit from longer private holding periods. Whether that's good for the industry or the country are separate questions.
Lifecycle of data as it changes, apparently.
The title conflicts with the Disclaimer, also with the OP's twitter description "Ex-Muslim". Seems like a rant against a certain religion/culture after recently converting/migrating. I agree the quality of this post is not subjective enough to be on HN.
IVF baby born using revolutionary genetic-screening process
A great way to divide startup equity
That says nothing about fathers and everything about you. I'm empathetic to a fault and I wouldn't be at all surprised if I were the parent that did better in these emotional situations.

edit: I forgot to explicitly state that I am a male, just in case that wasn't obvious.
Besides OT, check out CRDT.

https://github.com/dominictarr/scuttlebutt
Yeah, black youth unemployment rates in those states won't have much influence since the black population in those states is much smaller.

However if black youth unemployment rates in those states is better than the national rates (it is unclear if the article is claiming this or not), then it is probably worth looking into what these states are doing that makes this the case.
> But this implicit line that there's a secret cabal of "capitalists" all persuaded by some idea that they never publicly proselytize, [...]

The way the Marxist argument for class interest works, is that there does not need to be a secret cabal. To discuss this in the context of basic income (BI): Some capitalists, that is some owners of capital, depend on cheap unskilled labor. Each of them concludes independently, that a BI is against his own interests, since it would reduce the incentive to take unpleasant jobs and force them to pay their workers more.

Or more generally, some people have similar interests, not because they conspire, but because they are in a similar socio-economic situation. And this socio-economic situation generates class interests. ( Marx then goes on to argue, that the capitalist class can more easily leverage its interests, and therefore the workers need class conscious to counter this leverage.)
There's no necessity for a conspiracy; it's in all self-interested capitalists (the majority of them) to have a large supply of labor. Collusion towards those interests is quite implicit, especially if you have political parties that stand for those values quite openly.
"There's more murders with hammers last year than there was shotguns and pistols and AK-47s" is not anywhere close to reality.

If we restrict to rifles (about 5% of homicides where a firearm is used) and broaden to all blunt instruments, we get the same ballpark, not a clear win for the rifles. I can't find anything that calls out hammers specifically, but lumped in a category with baseball bats and tire irons and golf clubs and 2x4s and wrenches and candlesticks and lead pipes, I'd be amazed to find hammers dominating.

It is certainly a perfectly reasonable position to assert that the number of homicides which used a rifle are low enough that a focus on reducing them is a misguided assignment of priority, even before discussion of particular mechanisms. This happens to be a position I hold.

But you don't get to make a point by making false (and false by an order of magnitude) statements.
Interesting point. Also, black youths overwhelmingly live in urban areas where labor laws are more strictly enforced.
The New Zealand Treasury has conducted a preliminary assessment of a guaranteed minimum income (GMI) in New Zealand[1]. It's worth a read.

It's conclusions were broadly:

* To be cost neutral, it would require a significant increase in taxation rates (to a flat tax of ~45% - 50%).

* Although the Gini coefficient is improved, those who currently receive government support would likely receive less under a GMI scheme, which may have the effect of distributing more money away from those most in need.

A brief discussion of the "broad ranging" effects on efficiency and economic growth is also included.

[1] http://igps.victoria.ac.nz/WelfareWorkingGroup/Downloads/Wor...
A simple and secure means to copy your private key between devices would be high on my list.
That's right. The percentage of individuals who have access to top decile hedge funds, PE funds, and VC funds (and in all three categories the top decline generates almost all the returns) is infinitesimal.

In practice, the investor base of those funds is a very small number of high-net-worth individuals and families, plus a set of long-lived private institutions such as Ivy League universities, multi-generational foundations, and the like. Sovereign wealth funds (national treasuries of countries like Abu Dhabi, China, Singapore, and Hong Kong) are becoming a larger part of that base now. (Not the US though, the US has no sovereign wealth fund.) Some big pension funds invest heavily in private equity but not as much into venture capital or hedge funds.

The result is that the vast majority of retirement savings for normal Americans -- whether managed by individuals or institutions -- can't access compelling private market opportunities.
No, the inference from karmajunkie's post is that in America men don't make all the rules.
> nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication

Maybe. We don't know that. We would have to know beyond any doubt how this information is being used. I can imagine it being a tool to play foreign politics; even affects places like Iraq, Afghanistan, you know, where people do die.

> nobody has been killed as a result of NSA surveillance of Americans' communication

Maybe. But its also ironic that being US citizen and living on US soil you are supposed to be protected by the law of the land. If they vacuum everything for 10 years or so, imagine how many people could be found not guilty of robbery, homicides, drug dealing, etc, only if their attorneys would have access to their clients' NSA files. Who knows? Maybe even there is someone recently executed in this country that their NSA chart would have proven they were innocent. That may be over-stretch but you believe noone innocent is doing a lifetime right now because they couldn't prove that they have not been where prosecution claims they were (don't get me even started on "innocent until proven guilty").
What middle class? The fact that we're discussing an across the board baseline income is indicative of the state of the "middleclass". What a disaster, hate to be so melodramatic.

Those leeches are the least of our worries.
Aren't these children's birth certificates usually marked deceased?
An unconditional basic income is probably a better way to go than a guaranteed minimum wage job.

(Of course you could set the basic income at whatever a minimum wage job would provide.)
Where the heck did that come from? For example, China is arguably a very matriarchal society, and guys take their kids out all the time.
Of course it isn't the America that America wants. But the problem is that most people are not aware of the connections between the incentives and the policies and actions those incentives produce. Indeed, most folks, harbor some bit of political ideology which is in some way counter-factual and they refuse to acknowledge that being the case. That applies to EVERYONE of EVERY political party. Period. What's worse is that now our public political discourse is so tainted and poisonous that it is nigh impossible to actually have a frank and honest discussion about any matter of public policy. It's almost all just games and shouting instead.

There is hope, but it's going to take more hard work than most people believe to make things significantly better.
Adam Smith got away with it in Wealth of Nations: "People of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices."

And in his Lectures on Jurisprudence: "Till there be property there can be no government, the very end of which is to secure wealth, and to defend the rich from the poor."

It's not a secret cabal of capitalists. It's capitalists acting as they're incentivized (or perhaps fail and be replaced by those who will). Wouldn't we naturally observe institutional forces in feudalism, the former USSR, chattel slavery, etc; and be astonished by people living in those societies not seeing the obvious?
Aircraft accidents are extremely rare in the first place, so that's a given. The question should rather be whether computers would do a better job than pilots in the same situation, and currently the answer is no. The actual flying of the airplane which autopilots do today is just a small part of the pilots job, and automating the rest of the tasks a pilot performs is non-trivial.
We have surveillance elsewhere because there's a relatively high possibility of criminal activity. On a runway, that possibility is ridiculously low. We fear malice more than incompetence.
It is all politics: snowden, positive discrimination, global warming, women in it, starving children in africa.

Yet somehow womens rights in muslim countries are not even tolerated for discusion.
Eating at home could give you a longer life
'Without democratic collective purchases, it's precisely the wealthy elites who are most able to afford things. (Virtually by definition.)' What? By what logic are you operating?

This is utterly rediculous, and quite frankly bordering on racist. it's often in the poor areas of the 'non-democratic' societies where people learn how to co-operate, and exchange without the state, and rationally function and accomplish goals as teams.

The socialists are about forcibly redistributing property: allocating the fruits of labor as either the electorate or an elected elite sees fit. In the first case, it will be the marginalized minority that gets punished, in the second case, it will be the unconnected poor that get punished.

Nobody is saying don't help out the poor, but the idea that the state is a qualified agent to help out the poor is laughable and there is plenty of evidence spanning milennia that it is a bad idea.

As for public healthcare. Healthcare in the US sucks, but would I rather be part of the private healthcare system or the VA (public healthcare)? Did you not see? As part of the 'healthcare reform bill' all legislators and their staff were required to join the public option. They are busy carving out an exemption to this as we speak.

As for publically funded research, it's horrifyingly wasteful, and all, I mean ALL of it goes to the "1%". Realistically there is no professor that is not a part of the 1%, and their work is built on the backs of a very very exploitative system of labor where grad students and postdocs' most productive years are sucked dry. Much of that essentially becomes subsidies for the military-industrial complex or the pharmaceutical-medical complex (allowing them to shove off some of what should be R&D money off onto the backs of the public).

Don't beleive me? Here is a 501(c)(3) - and four-stars on charity navigator, no less - organization that operates 90% on NIH money (and negotiates a sweet 85% 'overhead' deal) its president makes 1.3 million dollars. http://990s.foundationcenter.org/990_pdf_archive/330/3304359...

The hilarious thing is this: i'm now working at a different nonprofit science research institute. About 10 years ago, it was almost entirely run on the endowment - salaries given to postdocs and professors were generous, and the president was paid about 1/1000th of the net worth of the company. Since then, the net worth of the nonprofit has decreased by two orders of magnitude, and it is almost completely run off of public funds, in fact private granting organizations are turned down because they bring in no overhead. Now, the president gets paid three times what he did back then. Moreover, his son is about to be employed with us (uh, that's a no-no), as is the grandson of a board member.

There is something about accepting 'public monies' that is almost magically a corrupting factor.
Hmm, that used to be my theory, but the data doesn't seem to support it. The rise in M&A as exit over IPO is the key metric I tracked in researching this. The inflection point seems to be around two years earlier than the 2002 passage of SarbOx, c. 2000: http://www.xconomy.com/national/2008/07/01/whos-afraid-of-an... and http://smallbiztrends.com/2010/05/trends-in-exits-from-vc-ba...

That said, the modern startup path does seem to structurally delay IPO, which in the short term has resulted in 20-50% shaves of post-IPO public investors and long term difficulties in adding value of the sort Garry mentions. Just the causality basis isn't clearly SarbOx.

My current theory is the tilting of the king vs. cash towards king, as epitomized by Zuck. It's possible that the market had started driving companies towards private control to emphasize long-term growth over short-term, quarterly stock performance, which drove the Enron-era scandals. The collapse of the tech bubble might have had an impact, too. I concur with Bilal that private audits are a more likely causal link than SarbOx, though that could be our mutual gov't experience talking.

The JOBS Act created the IPO on-ramp (5 year SarbOx tapered exemption to reduce costs of public compliance), as well as 10x expanding the Reg A ($5M → $50M mini-offering cap) exemption to make it easier for startups to blend over into public exposure. However, these non-standard pathways are little known to both the investors that traditionally take early board seats and certainly early-stage founders. It's also unclear how much of JOBS has even been implemented due to continuing backlogs from political obstruction of Dodd-Frank at the regulatory level.
I think this discussion gets too polarized around "speculating on IPOs" too quickly. Think instead about the general characteristics of the overall equity market. Assume for example that you simply hold the market index.

What's happened over the last 15 years is that growth has been mostly stripped out of the public market -- due to the collapse of IPOs and the reduction in publicly listed US companies from 8800 in 1997 to 4100 now. The result is a public market that is more and more just old, slow-growing companies. That's fine if that's what you want, but for people who are investing their retirement savings over a multi-decade period, that's bad news. (E.g. the overall stock market is flat over the last 15 years adjusted for inflation -- I don't think that's a coincidence.)
I was far from a fan of Steve Jobs, but that's one thing where I really agree with him:

When you're young, you look at television and think, There's a
conspiracy. The networks have conspired to dumb us down. But when
you get a little older, you realize that's not true. The networks
are in business to give people exactly what they want. That's a
far more depressing thought. Conspiracy is optimistic! You can
shoot the bastards! We can have a revolution! But the networks
are really in business to give people what they want.

Which doesn't necessarily make his suggestion a bad idea, though. That broadcasting FUD is a profitable business model doesn't make it an ethical one.
SO what do I do after I mess with the cow?
> especially when it's a society in a country that traditionally values freedom and individuals' rights

You're not hearing what I said. It's exactly that tradition that causes the culture of fear. Our society is designed to minimize the influence one random person has over another. One of the things that falls out from that design is a hue and cry any time the suggestion of a bad influence of one person over another is possible.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ai2HmvAXcU0

video of boeing stress-testing 777 wings by deflecting them up with cables, against a stationary fuselage

first thing that came to mind after seeing the video of the crashed plane do a cartwheel on its wing.
Go down the hole he's "eating"
I've been wanting something like this for a while. I've been using my own just straight JSON flat files to store things, which works out pretty well for getting something out the door fast, or coding without an internet connection.
> The same amount of hype could have us ripping out bathtubs, or being screened for hammer purchases.

Consider the media and government complicity in the south korean myth of "fan death"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fan_death
No? Think about that every time you see "hackers" on the news.
The clothing choices I mentioned are more classic examples of behavioral stereotypes.... I don't encourage being judgmental at all. It's really not what you wear, but how you wear it and how you comport yourself in the workplace. But there are limits.

Barefoot is just not acceptable. it's unhygenic. Nobody wants to smell your feet, and even if your feet aren't smelly, you're at risk of developing a fungal infection, injury, etc. Wear some shoes.

The other aspect to picking a particular style or dress (let's call it "conservative dress") is that it makes people more comfortable. People are weird. Often they get uncomfortable if people around them dress different than they're used to. You see it in tech workers all the time: they say "I'll never wear a tie! Oppression!" or somesuch thing. Ties make them uncomfortable, just like people in shorts, sandals and a t-shirt with a slogan might make other people uncomfortable. Something in the middle would make everyone more comfortable, which makes for a better work environment.

But the way you dress can influence the way you and your co-workers behave. In my experience, dressing more relaxed leads to more relaxed personalities, which has both great and horrible side-effects. People think they can act however they would with their friends, which (for tech types) might be very abrasive to strangers. It may also affect their work, or how they compose themselves in meetings. I can't tell you how often i've heard the causally-dressed guy tell someone to fuck off in a meeting, while the guy in business-casual is much more tactful. These are just some examples.
The lack of accountability here disgusts me.

Therefore, I propose a rule:

Discharge a firearm while serving as a cop, no matter the reason, and that's it, you're no longer a cop. Take your toys and go home, thank you for your service.

Yes, you'd fire good people, but you'd also remove any incentive for less-than-good people to act irresponsibly and ensure they thought twice about using lethal force. I'd argue that by far this is the greater good.
Scott's point is that Enron was a giant, long-established public company. Sarbox may have helped prevent the next Enron, with an unanticipated side effect of all but killing IPOs and growth in the public market. It's like passing a law to prevent the next giant cruise ship from hitting an iceberg, and accidentally killing rowboats in the process.
Why do we build products that suck?
Inflation isn't based solely on M0.
This is not crititicism of islam, there are many muslims, who do not lock up their doughters.
Oh brilliant, I didn't even realize it was powerline that was giving me this issue. They should probably consider making this trick more prominent.
Number of US public companies in 1997: 8800. Number today: 4100. Total stock market index fund return adjusted for inflation between 1997 and today: 0%.
> There are no written documents. The exchanges are based on mutual trust (perhaps for that reason unpopular in the United States?).

This would make it less popular in most of the developed world, with some exceptions, including (possibly) ones in the US. It's the difference between high- and low-context cultures, with the Arab world being generally more high-context than most of the US, with the exception of the South and Texas.

In addition, some subcultures are fairly low-context even if they exist in a generally high-context culture. A "Good Old Boy's Network" is going to be low-context regardless of where it is. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Old_boy_network Exclusive? Yes. Exclusionary? Hell, yeah. Those are the costs of being able to do business on a handshake.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/High_and_low_context_cultures

http://www.marin.edu/buscom/index_files/Page605.htm

http://www2.pacific.edu/sis/culture/pub/Context_Cultures_Hig...

This has more context:

http://www.analytictech.com/mb021/cultural.htm
My own mum pulled this one on me. We were talking on the phone and she could hear my daughter playing in the background. As one point it dawned on her that she could not hear my wife.

"Is Susan out?"
"Yeah she's gone out to [I forget what]."
"So you're home babysitting?"
"No, it's just Alice here, no one else."
"???"

In an extremely polite but pointed way, I informed her that I was her father, not her babysitter. She never made that mistake again.
Well, at least the supervisor was honest. If they were legal savvy, they still would have rejected him, but would have used something more vague and icky. The fact is that age/status discrimination is still a thing in the United States, and why many of us most go work for BigCorps (who are savvy also, but less so) rather than startups or small companies.
Total market funds pick them up quickly.
> RSA (and Rabin) and conventional DH, both of which are looking increasingly sketchy in 2013.

May I ask why you say this? (Not agreeing nor disagreeing, just curious.)