skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I started to read up on Chomsky a couple of times but didn't get far.

The first time, I saw his opinions re USA's/NATO's intervention in ex-Yugoslavia. It just seemed like conspiracy theories, especially when I googled and found his apologetics for the Khmer Rouge (before they were found to be massmurding crazies).

The second time, I got a link to a Chomsky interview. I got shocked -- Chomsky claimed that he didn't talk about the Sudan atrocities, because he couldn't influence much. WTF?! If the most famous academic US-critic, beloved by dictators, publicly condemned the Darfur handling etc by Sudan's government as 1000 times worse than what he complained about Israel, it would have an effect...

I wrote Chomsky off as another effect of the US right/left being equally crazy. Here in Europe we mostly get the left crazies, so he is big. Maybe I'm wrong. Maybe. It seems to me Chomsky argues by (correctly) noting that governments lie a lot -- then he comes with really weird explanations to what really happens.
Netflix's USA ISP Speed Index
I think you'll find most of your allies are not happy being dragged into US wars where nobody thinks they belong.
Notice how the hub cities are all small to mid-size with low costs of living. There are none in California or New York. This probably makes paying the workers only $9-12/hour much more viable than in parts of the country with higher costs of living. Essentially, they've "outsourced" to the less-expensive parts of the US, rather than to India or the Philippines.
I get the impression Apple's at-home workers discussed in this article aren't engineers or otherwise involved with core product development? The weird training and mock customer calls tells me it's customer support, or something similar. In which case the comparison to Yahoo's recent closing of its work at home program doesn't really seem apt (since, as I understand it, Yahoo's was mostly engineers).
Sounds kind of interesting, but when I go to check it out I find out that IPython 1.0 has not been released yet. Couldn't you have waited to make this post untill it was actually available? You're missing out on installs this way.
The future is now: http://www.ted.com/talks/eli_pariser_beware_online_filter_bu...
It should be. Unfortunately the web has been taken over by designers who want to be able to control every pixel, and browser makers are too eager to please them to change any defaults. So we get monstrosities like html5, which just adds more and more things to html without any attempt to rationalize and remove the bits that turned out to be a mistake.
My favorite analogy for US security policy during the past two decades is a huge allergic reaction. It seems quite likely that allergies are caused by the immune system lacking antagonists and instead latching onto factors that are not real threats [1]. Similarly, the early '90s saw serious reductions in objective threats that US security was organized to deal with, internal (a sustained decline in crime [2]) and external (the disappearance of a second superpower). The resulting reaction is... what else if not allergic? Police is more militarized than ever and drives tanks into the living rooms of nonviolent offenders. The military's budget is unprecedentedly large and it hunts down shepherds in the Afghan hills at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars per kill. Any claim that such threats are comparable with those that were adequately met in the '80s (crack epidemic, nuclear-tipped ICBMs etc.) is nothing short of risible. Yet the response is, if anything, even more aggressive than it was back then.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hygiene_hypothesis

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Crime_in_the_United_States#Crim...
There's a difference between chemicals and genetically modified foods.

We know that human health can be damaged by all sorts of different chemicals. That being established, the task at hand is identifying which are harmful (or usually in what quantities do they become harmful).

Meanwhile there is no persuasive evidence that any foods become harmful simple because they have been genetically modified. Completely different.

> if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods?

Perhaps precisely because of this hysteria surrounding GMO?
Politics is about votes, not money.

You can get votes by promising free chickens in every pot. You can get votes by bringing a big defense contract into an area. Politicians get elected by votes, and the political system runs on votes.

Yes, money is used to fight the battle. But focusing on the money is idiotic. Money is a completely secondary factor. It's main modern use (I speak of direct contributions, not the sweetheart deals to relatives that really is at the heart of corruption) is to attack the opponent's base and prevent them from turning out to vote.

Also, political power is much more important than money. Being able to launch a Predator strike trumps any amount of campaign contributions.

This focus on money has to stop. It's like saying businesses are all about making money. It's not that it's a false statement -- it's that it misses the point entirely of what's going on. Business provide value by giving folks stuff they want. Money is a secondary way to keep score. Political power is accumulated by votes. If you can gain a thousand votes by simply making a speech, much better than throwing money at folks. It's an easy win. Focusing on money ignores the entirety of what's really going on.

You want a really corrupt system, start overengineering the money side.
> but we additionally require websites to serve the enclosing page over SSL because it's both more secure and what users expect.

Curious - what makes it more secure if it does and less secure if doesn't?
Yea? Why do you think so? Did you look it up in a book? You should have felt it, with your gut! [1]

1. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OBRKPoAPXEQ
6 different apps, one of which hosts 12 blogs, all on a $1/mo. 128MB RAM Hosted w/SSD. Node, good stuff..
> Government is a place that is ripe for disruption, but the walls around it are so high, I don't know how to really breach them.

I have had this attitude before, but I am not sure it's a healthy way to look at the problem. What you were flabbergasted by was the inefficiency of bureaucracy. But this is not a government problem per se: large companies can also become bureaucracies; large militaries tend to have similar tiering and divisions to bureaucracies. I think we sometimes think of bureaucracy acausally -- "it's just always been that way, it always will" -- when the truth seems more subtle: something like "bureaucracy is a scaling choice."

I really think that bureaucracies are born as a sort of divide-and-conquer approach to scaling a social system. So it's something like an O(n * log n) total overhead, where n is some abstract quantity of resources; and what you see on-the-ground when interacting with the government is (overhead)/(resource), which grows like O(log n). And it seems to have unbelievable overhead just because n is very large. The pain point which drives this scaling choice is probably free-rider problems. If you can't address free-rider problems, then the potential exploiters grow at least linearly with the number of resources you command, and your scaling is O(n^2) at best. So maybe in some sense bureaucratic solutions are "efficient" -- as crazy as that sounds.

In other words, if you ask "Why do people get shackled by these strict rules?", there are two tones (meanings) you might intend: one is despair ("surely we can do better!") the other is curious ("really, I want to know why that rule is in place!"). Usually the curious tone reveals some sort of free-rider threat. That nice guy who drives the schoolbus is constrained by bureaucracy; he can't hug or praise a student who tells him that she's feeling sad today because kids are picking on her for her perceived smartness; he must act as a robot driver. But why do those rules exist? Probably due to a fear of predators who might become able to lurk in the blurred lines. And the fear of predators is created by the scale of the school-system, which makes it hard for the human discretion of administrators to protect the system from having pockets of abuse without spending even more money than bureaucracy would cost.

Don't get me wrong, if an alternative system of government can do O(n), I'd love to see how it deals with free-riders. I'm really interested in crypto-anarchism. I'm just cautioning you that maybe the status-quo -- which yes, at this scale involves big companies with political connections paralyzing the process -- protects against a lot of people just running off with the money in exchange for the government-contract equivalent of vaporware.
Do you guys measure/optimize on "traffic to revenue" or just "traffic to paid"? Does these two measurements have different optimization techniques?

Also, it would be great to learn about how do you generate top of the funnel. As patio11 said there is an "arms race" on that front and I wonder what do you that on that front.
How about the radio-station model?

6) "We don't sell books, or make money from customers. Instead, your eyeballs are the product, and we sell chain-wide coverage of recently-released titles (including a guarantee our clerks will read+familiarize themselves with your book) to publishing houses. We want people to come in and read the book for 30 minutes and be itching to buy it on Amazon by the time they leave; that's what the publisher is paying us for."

Sort of neatens up the incentive structure, doesn't it?

(This also means they don't have to have any storage; they only need two or three pristine copies of each book to put on display. And it can even work for books that are otherwise digital-only: the only physical copies are one-offs created solely for display purposes, printed by the author's marketing agency using a service like Lulu and delivered directly to each participating book-gallery. In other words, the "books" become part of the PR kit for a book launch, rather than the goods being sold.)
> but I think it could have gone a different way had there been just a couple of nudges in the electric direction at the right time

Gasoline cars were popularized before electric power generation was widespread. It would be decades before the power grid could possibly have supported electric cars.

The Model-T started in 1908 (and there were of course cars before that), the War of the Currents was in the late 1880's. The Model-T represents cars becoming popular, but the War of the Currents was just the beginning of the electric grid.

The first Gasoline car was also around the 1880's (must have been an amazing time to be alive with all those inventions).

It was not until the late 1940's that electricity was widespread, i.e. rural areas which are of course important for long distance travel.

So the electric car would not have been practical until then, and by then of course gasoline was completely entrenched.
Everyone[0] uses Whatsapp in Europe.

[0]Source - me.
A single file on the filesystem, that acts as a complete application (i.e. can be copied to another system, and run on that new system by double-clicking on it, etc.)
with html5 player:

document.getElementsByTagName('video')[0].playbackRate = 2
A Hyperloop sounds to me like a marketed trademarked copyrighted patented implementation of a traditional Launch Loop aka Space Fountain. A wiki link:

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

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

You could buy a kids toy circa 2005 implementing a model of the design using what looks like a shoelace and a blacklight. My kids thought it was pretty cool.

So, take a magnetically controllable loop, like a wagon wheel tire. It'll collapse under its own weight it stood up. Turns out if you spin a rope ridiculously fast it inevitably turns into a circle and can support well over its own weight. Basically you build a linear induction motor to get dragged along and remove the clamps at the appropriate time. Think of how you can ride upside down in a roller coaster as long as you exceed critical speed (too slow and you fall out, whoops)

Compared to a space elevator its well within modern current day tech to build one. I donno if its economically within modern day ability.

Three major problems, if that dude splits at the wrong time its an unholy mess as it augers in, and there's something of a dynamic stability puzzle to stabilize movement and temperature, and finally you need a plan of sorts if the clamp or whatever you call it sticks and hauls the first stage back for another go of it.

One optional problem is to build a loop that stores energy by spinning a bit fast, faster than a vehicle re-entering for a second loop can handle nose first. That makes the "stuck clamp" hollywood disaster even worse. Of course a smart engineer would never do that... would they?

There's a fixation on SSTO, of course. However, aside from economic issues, you can make a real loop thats as worthless as you want, and any delta-v it gives for free to a launch vehicle is a net win. So make a "mere" 10 mile diameter one that only replaces the first stage of a launcher, thats cool. How about reducing the mass fraction for a "SSTO" from 95% to maybe 50%? That would still be cool, even if its not "SSTO".

If you can't mentally handle this rotating stuff, think of it like a really long aircraft carrier catapult... so long it can loop back on itself no problemo. And think of cablecars, although it'll probably be magnetic not literally clamping onto a cable, although that would be a charming steampunk aesthetic.
Most smartphone users in Singapore use WhatsApp for general texting too.

On the other hand, WeChat, LINE and KakaoTalk seem to have rather limited audiences here. (Much of the LINE usage between myself and friends is sticker spam.)

chrischen: What do iOS and Android users in your circles use for free cross-platform texting?
if they weren't knowingly poisoning us, why exactly would corporations be so very afraid of properly labeling foods

For the same reason that measles infections are on the rise? Because the public is largely ignorant and doesn't understand much about Science or genetic engineering and thus is easily influenced by Hollywood and celebrities who in their ignorance push their favorite environmental/medical causes (Jenny McCarthy).
In theory, someone could have MITM'd the page and replaced the site's publishable key with their own.
Ah, yeah ipdb has much of the same functionality but not a full-fledged ipython instance, I don't believe.
Originally, I tried using similar tools (I think I used chrpath, I can't remember whether I tried patchelf) to implement whack, but I found it quite time-consuming to get things working, and had limited success. I chose the current implementation since it was simpler, quicker and more reliable, and the setuid requirement wasn't a problem for my particular use case.

Having said that, it would be great to have an implementation that didn't require setuid/root.
Awesome. Advanced assignment: build a search engine which for each jurisdiction only contains results blocked-in-Google-by-legal-threats in that jurisdiction.
You are being downvoted for being an idiot. What you write makes no sense at all. The US is one of the last countries to be affected.

The entire worlds production of oranges is falling. And there is absolutely NOTHING the growers can do about it.

> and HOPEFULLY hellbanned

If you are an idiot only about oranges then fine (everyone has their sore spot). But if you are an idiot for other things too then don't come back.
Scams, Fraud and Banking: Why Bitcoin Still Has Challenges Beyond Regulation
It might be aimed at people who might buy into fake apologies. Generally, the people who take the apology at face value aren't the ones being apologised to, and it can get pretty ugly. Also, it seems like a good way of removing plausible deniability from people who make those kind of apologies.
Mysterious countdown on "Pronunciation Guide" channel
Why use user story based testing tools like Cucumber instead of other tools?
Reminds me of Silverberg's amazing short story "absolutely inflexible".
Actually, you can get away pretty well with most cases of searching inside postgres arrays (including joins) thanks to partial indexes. This of course doesn't invalidate the point that if you need to perform relational operations on arrays, you need to rethink your database design.

AFAIK, the real tradeoff using arrays vs tables is that any update to the array (or other columns) completely rewrite it as Postgres uses MVCC.
Keep in mind it's a paid, and pricy, service with a very specific type of customer. Don't compare it to conversion rates of other services that have a wider audience. Tripling the conversion rate is huge for them, and no small task.
The A+ website is http://www.aplusdev.org/ for those interested.
Which of the analytics tools were the most useful? Did you use Google Analytics goal conversion tracking?
Interesting, but hardly a show-stopper.
Please consider:

• The self-taught of all ages who may have never set foot in a university, or have begun informally studying an unrelated discipline on their own after leaving formal education. That they exist and can make use of academic research may sound far-fetched for people in some disciplines, but it's not at all unheard of, at the very least, for CS, statistics, and mathematics.

• Precocious youth

• As jasonwatkinspdx mentioned, students that do not live in the US

• That restricting access to these materials takes a hidden toll on humanity; unless they are made freely available to all, we will never know how others might have taken advantage of them.
The poster didn't mean that the hysteria was against Science itself, rather that it wasn't based upon any type of Scientific analysis or investigation.

The fact that people will become apathetic to GMO labeling eventually doesn't mean that the industry won't fight to avoid the unwanted (and undeserved) stigma for now.
I currently use a couple of things:

* Heroku

* ec2 using awsbox for dev with push deploys https://github.com/mozilla/awsbox

If you want SSL support and have a few apps then heroku can be a bit expensive, also monitoring is a paid addon.

Lots of choices at the moment which is awesome.
Eike Batista is no longer a billionaire
Great app, however a big bug that breaks visualisation for me in the UK is that messages from 07123123123 and +447123123123 appear as separate contacts (i.e., one number has the contact name, the other shows as the number with the country code prefix), even though iOS treats them as the same.
http://www.haskellforall.com/
American Exceptionalism is the worst kind of circular logic. "We're special because we're a nation built on values and laws. That means only we are allowed to violate those values and laws, because we're special. You're welcome."
There's a great link in the original comments to a video from 1974, where Iverson, Falkoff, and others discuss the origins of APL. It was a pleasure to watch. A peculiar contrast in language and attitude to today's rockstars and ninjas :)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8kUQWuK1L4w
Exactly. It's like comparing apples to oranges. I can imagine the scrutiny when it comes to support reps working from home. But when it comes to engineers, it's a total different ball game. I hope they change the title to "How Apple manages at home Support Reps"
0.5% conversion is pretty good for a SaaS product that only targets businesses.
There's nowhere in this thread where I said it ("it" being that his wife was escorted out) was no big deal. What I've said is that focusing on this particular detail and equating it to abandoning his wife in a dangerous, threatening place, which is what's been done here (note the repeated citing of crime statistics), distracts from the real issue, Microsoft mishandling their guests.
Imagine if this was actually created by the NSA (I mean, naming it Prism seems too obvious to be true), and we're all just falling into it's aesthetically-pleasing honeytrap.
Works great, thanks!

Have you thought about adding horizontal scale so you can see how many messages/day were sent? Or maybe a quick overview over how many messages/contact were sent in total.
What's the advantage of doing this instead of just making tags a separate table with a many-to-many relationship with documents?
You cut off the quote just before it details the experts' estimate that, extrapolating from animal studies, the threat of BPA ranges from "some concern" for fetuses (the FDA banned the use of BPA in baby bottles) to "negligible concern" for adults. From a much more recent meta-analysis of existing data: "The analysis showed that BPA levels were often so low that it was below the ability of current toxicological methods to detect it, raising the possibility that most instances of high BPA dose might have been the result of contamination from tubes and plastics in hospitals." http://www.guardian.co.uk/society/2013/feb/15/no-toxic-effec...

Anyway, I agree it's hard to argue with "label the product and let the consumer decide." But I think the case could be made that it plays on people's unscientific views of what is and isn't healthy. As with "organic" or "locally sourced" there's nothing stopping companies that don't use GMOs from putting a "No GMO" label on their food. Some already do.
I don't understand why modern languages still use the "mutli-value context" in place of tuples. When I first saw it in Matlab, I thought it was a mistake, and seeing it in Go and Julia reinforced this belief. IMO, tuples are superior in almost every way, as they are first-class, i.e. they act like any other values. They also avoid such sad patterns:

record MyInt (value:Int);

// delegate any function called with a MyInt to be called on its Int value
[F] overload F(x:MyInt) = ..F(x.value);

where `..` must be used to extract multiple values in a single-value context. This could easily avoided using tuples.

The only advantage of Matlab-style multiple values is that they allow a kind of return-value type overloading, i.e. some Matlab functions perform less work if you don't only consume 1 return value. But I believe that this could be easily solved with a first-class code pattern.
Greenland’s ice sheets are disappearing faster than anyone predicted
Patent US8296192 – Method for making money on the internet
I built this in 5hrs to help me decide what to build next
Diodes! Great idea, I should have thought of that.
.136% to .424% is a 211% increase.
"The burden of proof must always be on state power to justify itself."
I think it depends on the organization and how many hands in the mix... If you have one or two stake holders and one person taking charge of the direction of development, it can come out pretty well.

On the flip side it isn't always management.. I've seen developers create forms that should be simple with really weird layouts on screen that make absolutely no sense at all.
Maybe you've already heard Lessig's arguments on the subject, but if you have not, you should give 18 minutes to his recent TED Talk:

http://www.ted.com/talks/lawrence_lessig_we_the_people_and_t...
Very popular in EU
Ok, we disagree.

But, as an example, I'd just like to mention the obscene amounts of money being wasted during presidential elections. Why should candidates be allowed to be able to get more votes because they spend more money because they literally got paid/owned by some private interests/ultra-rich people? It's just plain stupidity. How can we allow that?

We're technically not exactly there yet, b/c not every household has an Internet connection yet, but why shouldn't the goal be this:

Set up just 1 website where all political parties can express their positions. And let that be the only allowed form of communication with the voter.

It's a sane pull versus an insane push approach.

And it would take a lot of money out of politics, which can then be spent for intelligent things like research, for example.