skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Home electrical work is a great example, because like crypto, there are many opportunities to screw up. The Home Depot book usually assumes that the underlying electrical system is reasonably modern and implemented in accordance with the NEC.

Not always true! Your simple change like adding a GFCI outlet or a socket somewhere may not behave as expected if some idiot 30 years ago did something like attach ground to the neutral wire. Or, unbeknownst to you, that old line that you make a pigtail with may be an aluminium wire, which requires specific hardware to safely splice. 5 years later, the trivial act of installing a ceiling fan could be a fire.

Crypto is similar, there are lots of icebergs lurking around. That doesn't mean that you need to fear it, but you do need to know what you are doing, or take measures to validate that what you're learning and applying is accurate.
> "What people would pay for it" is a controversial quantity

Yep. A friend thinks we should have a "You bought it!" law for insurance companies that assess the value of your belongs to calculate a premium. Basically once they give you their assessment, you have to right to say, "You bought it!" and they have to take it off your hands at that price. Not that such a law could work in the real world, but it is pretty clever. I bet a lot of people wish they could use such a law for property tax assessments.
Sorry, I should have been more clear - I meant the maintinence would be inexpensive compared to a gasoline piston helicopter. Given the requirement for safety in aviation, piston engines have to be inspected (and rebuilt, at a cost of ~$50k) every ~2000 hours the aircraft is flown. This cost essentially goes away with an electric engine, partially because they last 10x as long, and partially because they cost significantly less than a piston engine.
And everyone is Washington just stands by and does nothing.
Lisp has had metaprogramming, optional type declarations, speed, and DSLs since at least the '80s. This isn't some magic new technology just introduced by the shiny new languages cited by the author.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greenspun%27s_tenth_rule
The big money saver would be the engines. Most big helicopters run on turbines and they are not cheap. And they have a limited lifetime before you're legally required to overhaul or replace them. For the engines on business jets that a friend of mine used to charter pilot, that number was between $500 and $1500 per hour.

If you built electric motors for a chopper you could theoretically design so that it had 8 motor any one or two or three of which could fail and still fly. Make several different independent battery packs and you enjoy more robustness. If you engineered it right you could make the case to the FAA that the helicopter doesn't need any expensive preventative maintenance on the motors or batteries, just on the drivetrain. Which would save a lot of money.

EDIT: "most helicopters" to "most big helicopters"
Based on your #1, I can say the same thing. Grep for my username in both these places:

https://gist.github.com/paulmillr/2657075/

https://news.ycombinator.com/leaders

Now, maybe my GitHub rank would be even higher without my HN rank...
THANK YOU! I just needed to erase a FB account today and after struggling for a while I came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks again!
Does "just another face in the crowd" pseudo-privacy have any legal precedent?
ASICs are very power efficient.

Plus the system is self-correcting. Mining becomes unprofitable, people quit, complexity drops enough, mining becomes profitable.
It's a mission statement, not a strategy.
I just needed to erase a FB account today and came across this. Made my life so much easier. Thanks you!
To play devil's advocate here, what else would people have Microsoft do? Is there a scenario in which they can successfully resist enabling surveillance features in their products while operating in the US?

Take $5B out of the cash pile. Lobby to dismantle the laws or severely weaken it.
You really put the ass in assumption. Thanks for your input; this is your output.
Great links. Curious, how does the book address the issues of cost of living across regions? As $10k in SF is very different than $10k in St. Louis.
Pirate Bay Co-Founder Says Site Should Be Shut Down | News  Ultimate-Guitar.Com
They don't seem to mind taking risks when it comes to questionable tax deductions.

I don't think that's taking a risk. From all accounts, the tax deductions they're taking are perfectly legal. Leaking government secrets? Not so legal…

There's an obvious reward for taking "questionable" tax deductions: lower taxes. What does Ballmer, specifically, gain from releasing classified information?

And really? You want to compare questionable tax practices that aren't actually questionable legally to something that can be construed as espionage?

But they wouldn't. The type of activity the government is engaged in only works when people are passive.

Those two statements don't follow. The government may cease these practices if people find out and come out against them, but that doesn't stop them from prosecuting the person that brought them to light.

When was the last time anyone of stature went to jail for defending the public against the government?

When was the last time anyone of stature defended the public from the government via illegal means?

It's a risk. Full-stop. You can get prosecuted for releasing classified information. And let's not even take it all the way to going to jail. The government can make your life a living hell just by prosecuting you for a crime, even if they're unsuccessful in getting a conviction.

Which leads me back to my first question, why would Ballmer take that risk?
In current job-valuing society, yes.
Having worked at the FTC for a year in the team that goes after companies for violating consumers' privacy, I can comfortably say that you are 100% right on that point.

The FTC (unfortunately) does not police deceptive statements about government surveillance.
"I'm in a terminal or, most likely, my editor way more often than I'm in the browser and for any non-trivial change it's way faster to use git in the terminal or fugitive (vim-git integration) than the web interface."

I've no doubt that this is true for you, but other users have very different situations.

I'm a front-end developer, which means that I live in the browser. For me, if it's just a simple change, I'd much rather do it from the browser than the terminal. This is despite the fact that I know the terminal pretty well (love tmux and tmuxinator, for example).
On which fields is it obviously false that the status quo is to work 40'ish hours per week?
Here's a good response. http://bit.ly/1dnJQnW
Who pays the broker is generally a sign of the market conditions. When it's a renters market the landlord eats the fees, when vacancies are down, like now, it's the other way around.

Also, for all the reasons mentioned in potatolicious's other post [1], it's difficult for a landlord that is renting directly (i.e. without a fee) to convincingly communicate that fact to potential renters.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6027785
I'm surprised there's still so much manual entry going on for people with microwaves. I guess my needs are much simpler than for most. 70% of my microwave needs are met by just pressing the "Heat/Start" button and letting the microwave auto-heat to 75 C. 20% are met by just pressing "Defrost" then "Heat/Start". It's quite rare I actually need to set the time manually (it's basically only for popcorn...)
Very cute. I didn't extrapolate it to "all of us;" if it fits you, you're not "us" in the sense it was intended.

Choose a job you love, and you will never work a day in your life? Very petty sentiment from an industry that's swamped with demand.
It looks like Cervelo was sponsoring the team, based on the bike being used appearing to be an R5 and the kit he was wearing. Nowadays Garmin (for whom Cervelo is a major co-sponsor) only has one Canadian on the team, Ryder Hesdejal, but they do have a number of Americans, including Dave Zabriskie, a reasonably slim time-trial powerhouse (read: perfect for this), who is currently sitting on his couch in Colorado unable to ride due to his six-month suspension he received as part of admitting to doping and testifying against Lance regarding his time on the US Postal team. They could have made it happen...
Windows Server 2012 R2 Preview: Your cloud on-ramp is under construction
Protest. Lobby. Seek publicity. Take the government to court. Put up a fight.

Note that when the EU data retention directive (which is often used here under the header "see, others are doing it to", even though it doesn't even come close to what the NSA does) was initiated, that's exactly what many telecom providers and ISP's did, before and after this came into affect. It didn't stop it, but it least it has brought it out into the open, making it an (still ongoing) public issue.

The remarkable part of what's happening in the US is the utterly quiet and extremely forthcoming complicity of major companies who otherwise don't seem to have any problem throwing a lot of resources at manipulating governments foreign and domestic.

And in the case of Microsoft, in it's monopolists heydays, even up to the point of structurally breaking the law.

Also, it's not like they are only quiet about it because the law tells them so: they actively deny it, hell, they even advertise with pure lies about the privacy of their services.

These companies aren't victims anymore. They are complicit.

Lastly, it should be quiet obvious that with absolutely no restriction in the wiretapping of foreign nationals, they are breaking the law in every country they do business in. Those foreigners, like myself, have no voice in US legislation.

From my perspective as a non-American, Microsoft is complicit in a full frontal attack on our civil liberties. We can't stop the US government, but we can certainly stop Microsoft e.a. from doing business here.
You're right; it does need a (map key) line to be equivalent. I was thinking of http://www.leancrew.com/all-this/2011/12/more-shell-less-egg..., which wants the counts too. :)

On a side note, I'd like to point out a key difference between this Clojure example and corresponding variants in C#, Python, &c: the Clojure variant has no variables. This isn't just a matter of concision: coming up with descriptive names is hard, and usually means duplicated information, either in the name or the type declaration. Often, those names are re-used over and over again with subtly different meanings, for each stage in a pipeline--forcing the reader to reason carefully about the declaring scope at each use.

Consider, for example:

Swimmer swimmer = new Swimmer("foo");
swimmer.setStyle("butterfly");
swimmer.swim();
return swimmer;

(doto (Swimmer. foo)
(.setStyle "butterfly")
.swim)

Same operation--but with (doto), four uses of a variable and one type declaration have been cleared away. Consider the original post:

var words = s.Split(' ');
var wordCounts = words.GroupBy(x => x).Select(x => new { Name = x.Key, Count = x.Count() }).OrderByDescending(x => x.Count);
var countedWords = wordCounts.Select(x => x.Name).Take(10).ToList();
return ExtractTopTen(countedWords);

Six uses of three formal variables, including the bewilderingly confusable countedWords and wordCounts, plus nine uses of the delightfully generic "x". Even in the more compact C# example from this thread, consider:

var top = (from w in text.Split(' ')
group w by w into g
orderby g.Count() descending
select g.Key).Take(10);

This variant refers to the temporary variables w (for "words") and g (for "groups"?) six times. Both authors felt the need to reduce the repetition of variables, but the best they could do was to choose single-character names.

This is the real power of ->, .., ->>, doto, and friends: eliminating names for things. By thinking about the composition of transformations, instead of the intermediate results, you can make an algorithm easier to understand and change.
Good news. Polymer.dart continues the Polymer web components goodness, more closely following the standard: https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/web-u...
Actually he isn't mormon, just raised mormon like so many SLC residents.
And now, Polymer.dart ;-) https://groups.google.com/a/dartlang.org/forum/#!topic/web-u...
I feel kind of divided about using the Cryptocat as an example. On the one hand, yes, off-by-one errors (and similar simple mistakes) are really easy to make if you you're writing something with low feedback.

But the Cryptocat example is frustrating because the code is so bad. Not in a "poorly written" sense, but in a "going about things in a completely insane way" sense. The code generates a random number between 0 and 1 not by dividing a 53 bit random number by 2^53, but by generating 16 decimal digits, with the rationale that 2^53 ≈ 10^16. If the code hadn't been trying to do the wrong thing in the first place, there wouldn't have been an opportunity for that off-by-one error.

My point isn't that you'll be protected from simple classes of errors as long as you're coding sanely, but rather that that is the lesson you teach if you point to Cryptocat as your example. Crypto is hard, but you can't make that point very well by pointing to code written by someone who doesn't know the correct (and incredibly standard) solutions to common non-crypto problems.
Pretty cool result. I'd wonder what the performance would be with ~150 lb of batteries, motors and electronic sensors/controllers instead of a human. I wonder if given the same mechanics of this system a human is the optimal motor just because of the built-in automation and control system (probably not).
Very excited to see more and more discussion around this concept - I think Universal Basic Income should be a goal for humanity in the 21st century.
From http://philip.greenspun.com/seia/writeup

Between March 2001 and April 2004 roughly 400,000 American jobs in information technology were eliminated. Many of those who had coded Java in obscurity ended up as cab drivers or greeters at Walmart. A personal professional reputation, by contrast, is a bit harder to build than the big salary but also harder to lose. If you don't invest some time in writing (prose, not code), however, you'll never have any reputation outside your immediate circle of colleagues, who themselves may end up working at McDonald's and be unable to help you get an engineering job during a recession.
It won't be so different once everyone in both places is paid 10k pa.
I think this is more perception than reality. People do get Internet points for code, it's just that they get very little feedback that they're getting Internet points for the code. But everybody knows (or can easily find out) if you, say, invented Django or Redis or memcached or sold a company or make lots of money selling Bingo Cards or redesigned the Google search page or various other technical accomplishments. And that does affect how your comments are perceived. You don't see that effect because it's tacky to argue from authority, but people know who the authorities are.
Wow, I love that the blades seem to be spinning so slow, yet it all works.

Exciting times to be a human.
Congrats and welcome to the fold :-)
Don't know about pg, but Scott Adams has mentioned it a few times. One example: http://dilbert.com/blog/entry/author_by_relocation/
Interesting that Aerovelo won this. As I recall, they were the only contender not using electronic assists which were set to become invalid this month:

'With the pilot using both hands and feet to power the aircraft, UMD faced a challenge developing a control system for the Gamera II. But an attempt to clarify the rule prohibiting energy-storage devices inadvertently opened the door to electronic controls being used on both the Gamera II and Upturn II.

AHS has closed the loophole, but both teams have until July to attempt winning the prize under previous rules.[0]

0: http://www.aviationweek.com/Article/PrintArticle.aspx?id=/ar...
Designing a page with CSS animations, keyframes and a full-size background cover
http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/johncassidy/2013/06/go...

"Google Lawsuit Challenges N.S.A. Domestic-Spying Apparatus"

the first hit on google for "google nsa lawsuit"
Geolibertarianism: a system to supply an unconditional basic income
But mathematically taxes don't behave like costs.
It's all about risk.

It's risky for a business to hire someone to "write code", which is how the average freelancer positions themselves. The act of writing code doesn't necessarily translate to the hiring business being better off than they were before they hired you.

Consultants positions themselves to align with the underlying business problem and recognize themselves as an investment vessel, not an expense. "Ah, so your employees are wasting dozens of hours a week on dealing with this crazy Excel spreadsheet that runs your business? Let's find out how we can put together a solution together that will dramatically lower the time spent fiddling around in cells. A quick back of the napkin calculation... your employees dump about 30 hours into this spreadsheet a week. If you're paying $50 an hour to keep these people on payroll, that's close to $100k a year in spreadsheet overhead. Here's what I'm thinking..."
It is possible, perhaps through a clever arrangement of gears and what not, to create a human powered copter that can create sufficient lift with just one rotor?
I like how you snuck in "modern languages (like Closure)", as if C# is not a "modern language". Both languages have their place, but let's not pretend that Closure is somehow superior for all applications.
If we shift a huge portion of the tax burden to financial and real-estate assets and ignore others, will that remain at 5.8%?

If we don't ignore non-financial, non-real estate assets, then difficulty of estimating their value becomes a significant issue.
Which basically means things that do not scale will skyrocket in price.

You already see this as prices of education and housing grow decade to decade.

Essentials are: bad food that doesn't taste well, bad housing, bad medical care, bad transportation and bad service.
That's what Soviet Union consistently delivered to every citizen and while there were vitrually no hungry, unemployed or homeless people, nobody felt happy too, everybody fought to be able to afford a tiny bit of something of quality.

In short, cheap essentials are not so cool.
You do realize the whole premise of an application-specific-integrated-circuit is to do one thing the best. If properly architected, an ASIC that does the most SHA hashing with the least transistors will be the best miner, inherent to the technology.
9 Awesome HTML5/Canvas Demos
Quinoa should be taking over the world. This is why it isn’t
Do they have any rules for this that disallow doped riders?
I would almost guess that would be like turbo-charging or water injection.
I think this project has great ambition and tone. I like it, it seems good.

But — trust users to manage their own physical data? Forget it. It seems to me that people don't just want their data accessible from everywhere, but they want it to be kept in perpetuity. Considering the backup schemes I see among even tech savvy friends: really, forget it. Those fussy WD Passports can't compare to the reliability of Glacier. The cost of cloud storage is worth it.

There are a few workarounds I can imagine though, and I like where this is headed overall, so: nice work!
Is it possible that they might want to save money by giving you wimpy memory, because they feel that with the 32gb they give you, they could be making a lot more with something like 64 micros?
I've written plenty of Python but only played a little with Haskell (just in GHCI, to see what the excitement is about).

Yet, looking at his two scripts, the Haskell was so transparent as to not need running, whereas the Python was opaque (probably because I don't use numpy).
AltaVista was really neglected by DEC, and in fact they were at such a low point that many early Google employees came directly from AltaVista. And DEC was a mess at the time because they were sold to Compaq. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AltaVista
> Automation reduces costs and prices, creates new job fields, and permits for specialization.

Specializing(education) takes time and effort. At what kind of rate can the technology make jobs obsolete that thesociety and workforce can keep up? As far as I am aware, technological progress is exponential, meaning that it accelerates at an accelerating pace. As such, it's inevitable that at some point people and the society as a whole can't keep up anymore.

At the point where it's simply easier to use machines, if not basic income or some other way of more or less equal resource distribution, what do you do?
PCs attacked after Google worker revealed Microsoft bug
Right, I think practical reasons militate towards eliminating corporate taxes and shifting the burden to capital gains taxes. A number of companies have recently reincorporated from the U.S. to high-tax (but low corporate tax) jurisdictions like the U.K. and Switzerland. Companies have shown that they don't care about forcing their executives to move to jurisdictions with high personal income taxes, if they can get the benefit of lower corporate taxes to show higher earnings per share.
The left most search pane is completely unintuitive.

Are these apps installed on my phone? Are these even apps? WTF is this?
Ah, good point on Azure, that's fairly big. Windows 7 I guess I don't really see as anything more than iteration. It was an honest question, so I appreciate a good answer!
at the end of the day the beast doesn't care if it's fed willingly or unwillingly

I totally hear what you saying and as a matter of fact, I used to be very depressed by this. And maybe I'm being a coward. But I also think that billions of people need to be organized somewhat to live together, even millions or thousands. We need plumbing, we need roads, hospitals, and even taxes. To some degree, at least. I mean, come on, even though there are bad doctors, it's kinda cool that I can just look one up in the yellow pages and have a great chance of getting competent treatment. Or eat fast food without dying of salmonella or something. It's not perfect, but I don't want medieval times back either. Yeah, I'm probably a coward ^^

Still, to me the problem isn't so much that there is government, but that it's not a mechanism for people to govern themselves, but like something external we accept to be broken and our enemy, instead of us. That it's a shitty government, run by people who wanted to get in for all the wrong reasons - instead of by everyone, all the time. Mr. Taxman [1], who just lies to you before election and there is fuck all anyone can do.

As Chomsky said, governments have one "defect", they are theoretically democratic -- corporations have no defect, they're pure tyrannies. So unless you become some kind of super inventor / investor, and so rich that you and others of your calibre could really move things around, well.. you'd still have your voice I guess. And that might be enough, there are surely ways to not pay into the wrong hands and still affect people, so I'm not knocking it at all. If you can pull it off, good luck! And write a book/blog about it, too.

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_0M__0Z1pjg
I think it would be better to focus on lowering the cost of living (approaching zero) than to provide an unconditional basic income.