skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ayn Rand was a strange and interesting woman who, among other things, sexually abused her most devoted fans and manipulated them in horrible ways. She was never considered an important, serious, or good writer, and her works were ridiculed pretty much as soon as people first first laid eyes on them. But, her novels are, to this day, bestsellers, especially popular, as you write yourself, with teenagers. They are meant to spark a feeling of grandeur, which they effectively do as the task is not hard by any means in people of that age.

Refuting her claims and observations may be a bit redundant as they've never been taken seriously outside a very specific circle, but since her ideas have been influential inside that circle, and because said circle is not small in the US, where, quite amazingly, Rand's works are liked even by some adults (it's hard to believe but it's true), you can always shoot some more arrows into that corpse, for whatever good that would do. She does make an easy, and fun, target, and there are all those teenagers you can upset, which is always fun to watch. As to those American adults still fond of her works well into their mid-twenties and even beyond, well, it's best to keep a safe distance from them. Once you do, you might want to go back for a more sober look at Ayn Rand because she was a fascinating person, and her ideas have influenced some of the more colorful branches of American politics. Here's a famous interview she gave Mike Wallace in 1959: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ouBZ-YqOnsU
Everyday I wonder if people still read Alexis de Tocqueville's Democracy in America.
Show Instagram images in Twitter feed
I wonder why some people cannot stop saying how wrong Ayn Rand had been in general and how wrong is Atlas Shrugged in particular.

If it's a book of lies then why do you care so much? Don't you think for the book to have any effect on you it has to be true, at least in your own opinion.
Ayn Rand represents a growing philosophical movement in America. Attacking Ayn Rand is attacking Ayn Rand... and that is good enough for me.
Talk about missing the forest for the trees.

This person has a valid point, a relatively minute one that is being made in an overly-dramatic and annoyingly self-important way.

KA is great, far better than anything I was exposed to in traditional education. I'm currently using it to refresh and prepare for pursuit of a late CS degree.
> There are a variety of good arguments for socialized health care, but "we all get sick" is not among them.

I disagree. The more specific "we all can get very sick, and being very sick is very expensive" is a very good argument for pooling our resources to make sure that we all get help when we need it.
As the book is so poorly written, those who enjoy it as literature are indeed in a small club.
So we have political circlejerks in HN's front page now? This is getting more like Reddit by the minute.
Ask HN: How to get a blog at svbtle?
I was wondering if anyone knows is it possible to get a blog at svbtle? I have already sent them several emails but I got no response from them!
Many of the comments here boil down to:

At least he's doing something - let him get
on with it. If you think you can do better,
then do so.

To some extent, I agree with that.

However ...

In the past I've been faced with students who have a serious mental block about some operation, or some process, or some concept, and upon digging deeper into what they believe and why, I have usually come across a moment in their past where someone has taught something badly.

The KA videos are generally great, especially because they teach things differently, and therefore provide an alternate approach, or an alternate viewpoint, and thus provide the opportunity to bolster existing instruction.

They are especially brilliant at providing access for those who are otherwise disenfranchised.

However ...

In some cases they give examples or exercises that experienced teachers know are fraught with the potential for misunderstanding.

I know there are some fantastic people on the KA staff, I have full confidence that problems like this will be sorted out over time, and I desperately wish this letter had been better phrased. But I suspect it wouldn't have got this level of attention had the writer written a respectful note pointing out that recent research advises against the methods being used.
A Running Story
The military industrial complex isn't "corporatism" specifically. It addresses the relationship between defense/arms companies and the military/congress. Prior to WW1 the US was very isolationist and furthermore, lacked arms manufacturers on a large scale (as percent of gdp) so it seems unlikely they were able to direct significant policy or spending via contributions and bribes.

I'm not really seeing any evidence that it predates WW1 (and in significant size, WW2) in the United States from the links you posted. Butler's book appears to be more of an attack on profiteering and the futility of war in general. Given "beforeitsnews" also has "Reptilian Caught Hissing On MSM TV" as its top story, I'm inclined to wonder about the factual basis for what it says.
And this is where we see the clowns who don't understand economics. Snow removal is handled by the folks who have a greater vested financial interest in having roads clear. And if you seriously can't imagine a nation with private roads, than you simply haven't tried very hard.
Think how someone could falsify your entire life...
I would characterize their main efforts as building a modular autopilot software & hardware infrastructure, for which the optical flow sensor is one part. They are both an academic research group & generous providers of an open source platform competitive with the best out there.

Also check out Openpilot & Paparazzi--of which http://transition-robotics.com is a good current example.
Bem, eu estou vindo na direção oposta - Eu sei que não Português em tudo, apenas Inglês e um pouco de espanhol Google Translate é a única maneira que eu tenho para COMUNICAÇÃ para você -.. E é muito bom um truque, é a traduzir novamente para verificar.
Heh. More along the lines of a good story. Though I have to admit, I had to skim John Galt's 50 page monologue.
Unfortunately, it's a much more systemic problem than can be solved by ousting a politician here or there.

I encourage everyone who cares about this to get politically involved at a level beyond merely voting for congress critters now and then.

There's a lot that you can do, from joining and supporting organizations like the EFF and the ACLU to getting involved in local politics, which is usually the level that can be most affected by relatively small numbers of individuals.
Heh, okay. Can't argue with that ;)
One thing that bothers me is that the author suggests that the decimal place value exercise is broken because all of the numbers are represented as the same size.

The "representing numbers" exercise uses the 1-10-100 blocks that the poster alludes to using here, but I think the bigger issue is that in the real world, decimal quantities are not always sized proportionally to the value they represent. Money is a good example of this -- a US $100 bill is the same size as a US $1 bill and students need to be able to recognize the difference without seeing an object that's 100x bigger.
I just finished reading through the flynn spec. It shares a lot of features with scrz.

The major difference is that scrz already exists (but is somewhat complicated to set up..). I'm already using it for one of my projects, but once flynn is released I may consider switching to it.

But I also think it's healthy to have competition or alternative implementations. Maybe I'll keep scrz compatible with flynn to make it easier to switch between the two (if it makes sense).
> Deleting email can sometimes be construed as destruction of evidence. And having email can sometimes win you court cases.

We have annual training on PIPA and FOI (Canada) and it's stressed any e-mail, written notes or any form of recording are fair game for anyone to request seeing. Even blank lines on a notepad should have a line and initialed, all pages should be numbered sequentially.

You can destroy notes and delete e-mail in fact it's probably a good idea since the less ammunition there is the safer you are.
Rayiner: your comment is marked as dead, I think because you used the word circle.... Perhaps try re-posting without it.

Edit: actually here, I did it for you:

False dichotomy.

Rallies in San Francisco are just excuses for like minded people to have a merry old time. It's a politically irrelevant city, because it has no votes in play. Want to have some actual impact, some actual chance to change hearts and minds, go protest in Utah, where you can connect the cause to the site, or DC, or heck Iowa, where you can take advantage of their natural libertarian streak and there are votes to be swayed.
I think Github made a huge effect on Ruby On Rails movements ( or revolutions). So many peopole use it (instead of mysterious Python community before), brought theories into reality. Thank you, Github.
The heart of the matter is this question: should the community violate the consent of the individual or not?

Coming at it from the utilitarian point of view (for sake of argument -- I am not a utilitarian[1]), does it really need to be argued that every humane person should naturally wish to respect individual consent to the fullest extent possible? The only remaining question should be to determine to what extent this is possible. Is there a way to get the road clearing paid for without violating the consent of those who don't care if it's cleared or not?

It turns out that we can form systems whereby this is possible. For example, take a home owners association (HOA). It violates no consent to have contracts that stipulate that you must pay a yearly fee (or "tax") to join the HOA. So there you go, the snowplowing problem is solved, all without any violation of consent.

If you're creative, it turns out that you can solve all of these dilemmas, without resorting to government fiat, which of course can only be implemented by being willing to point a gun at your neighbor's head. No humane person would prefer this, ergo actually humane people would seek more creative solutions.

[1] https://leanpub.com/reasonandliberty
With regard to 2.b.)

Rand, however, also condemned voluntary communal activities, depending on individual participants' motivations.

E.g. on charity:
"To view the question in its proper perspective, one must begin by rejecting altruism’s terms and all of its ugly emotional aftertaste—then take a fresh look at human relationships. It is morally proper to accept help, when it is offered, not as a moral duty, but as an act of good will and generosity, when the giver can afford it (i.e., when it does not involve self-sacrifice on his part), and when it is offered in response to the receiver’s virtues, not in response to his flaws, weaknesses or moral failures, and not on the ground of his need as such."

If it were truly merely a matter of voluntary choice, there would be no moral blame on me if I chose to help someone, regardless of my motivations as such. If I were giving handouts out of the apparently perverse reason that someone needs it, Rand would condemn that; in contrast, a libertarian emphasis on choice would mean it's as valid as any other motivation, so long as it's non-coercive. (In the same line of argument, she would condemn me for advocating communitarian policies, because speech, even though it's inherently non-coercive, can be morally stained.)

Overall, though, I like the concepts you're pushing for in 2, though I don't think Ayn Rand would have embraced them. You're looking for someone closer to Elinor Ostrom, who is much less inflammatory and not at all focused on moral questions but also much more thoughtful and interesting.
I don't think it's unethical, but I do think it's kind of rude.

If you're looking for idioms, give bab.la a try : http://en.bab.la/dictionary/english-portuguese/

If you're looking to learn/improve your English, take a look at Duolingo : http://www.duolingo.com/ -- it even supports Brazilian Portuguese.

If you really want to understand the links posted on HN and contribute to the discussion, learning some English is obviously the way to go. Make the effort, it's well worth it !

Good luck

(I'm not a native english speaker. I learned by watching US TV series with english subtitles, pausing the video every single word I did not know to look it up on wordreference.com. I eventually didn't need the subtitles anymore.)
Good point. Looking at a product page (http://www.office.xerox.com/multifunction-printer/color-mult...), I see that the first model mentioned is multifunction, it can "Copy, email, fax, print, [and] scan".

So it sounds like there's one code path and it's seriously broken. I looked at the first settings page, and while it's in German I can see it's 200 DPI. There's no excuse for default lossy compression when you're at 200 DPI and doing office sized paper. We didn't do that in 1991, we got CCITT Group 4 lossless compression of around 50KB per image plus or more generally minus for 8.5x11 inch paper, although we did do thinks like noise reduction and straightening documents (that makes them compress better, among other things).
I would also add to that list

- target a very narrow, undeserved market and when successful expand beyond the core market (ie: Craigslist and its local focus)
They are. Socialism is an economy where production is owned and run by the workers for the benefit of the working class, which would be the ruling class at that time.

Simply having a welfare state or some nationalized industries is not socialism. The source of power and ownership of production is still in the hands of the bourgeoisie.

Mises as serious? Hah. But yes, he and the others are attacked less but only because they are less famous. Their ideas are as worthless.
Socialism is forced cooperation, as opposed to voluntary cooperation.
Fair enough. Your choice.

Cant say I have ever found it hard or time consuming to let email automatically archive. It just does it.
If it makes you feel any better, you would not have made a difference.

Having lived there for nearly a decade, including middle and high school, I can tell you that people here just don't care anymore, and news papers and websites would know better than to publish a story like that anyway; you would have self-immolated for nothing.
It certainly has upsides, but I remember pain when involved in or trying to fix things with diverse algorithms. Maybe the memory of the pain was worse than the pain itself, or the pain was from unrelated causes. Mostly it's "I'm not very good at _____, so I like things to be as simple as possible".

JCE implementation (mostly related to scope, era, etc.) -- admittedly, we only needed a non-US JCE for a few specific things, as part of an overcomplicated financial transfer system.

PGP/OpenPGP; there were lots of reasons this sucked, but multiple ciphersuites didn't help at all.

Free S/WAN was painful too (and really most of IPsec), but it's an example of the higher level problem of "too many layers of indirection and abstraction", not "too many algorithm choices."

(Poking at OpenSSL internals as a consumer of the library and trying to get it to work with some hardware shit made me mostly want to die, too, but part of that is my inferior C skills, and other things specific to OpenSSL and not to the overall concept of multiple algorithms)

OTR, ecash protocols of various types, etc. which used hardcoded algorithms were comparatively painless.

ssh is probably a good counterexample -- relatively flexible choices, although the big shift from v1 to v2 fixed a lot more things than just algorithms.
It's popular to read Bill Gates mentioned in the "nobody is great" bit, but if the author had instead said Steve Jobs ..
FWIW, this happens all the time:

In 1927 Ferdinand Buisson (France) and Ludwig Quidde (Germany) shared it "for contributions to Franco-German popular reconciliation".

In 1973 Henry Kissinger (US) and Le Duc Tho (North Vietnam) shared it for the cease fire of the Vietnam war.

In 1978 Anwar Saddat (Egypt) and Menachem Begin (Israel) shared it for the Camp David accords.

In 1993 Nelson Mandela and Frederik Willem de Klerk (South Africa) shared it for the end of apartheid

In 1994 Yasser Arafat (Palestine), Yitzhak Rabin, and Shimon Peres (Israel) shared it for...well, bringing peace between Israel and Palestine, except that hasn't exactly happened yet.

The Peace Prize has always been somewhat aspirational - it's a way not only to reward accomplishments toward world peace, but also to shame & goad people in power into working toward a more peaceful world. Obama's prize was very much in that vein: it sent the signal "We like where you're going, so you better keep it up and live up to the award you just won." There's nothing contradictory about giving it to his opponents as well.
What are the most common open ports for private internet
Hi, I am configuring OpenVPN and I am going to be using it under restricted internet (most of the ports closed) also I can't use 80 and 443 ports, what are the most common open ports except 80 and 443?
This. From what I know, teaching is broken in the U.S. (and probably in many other places), and the way incentives and the balance of power is set up, what matters for most decisions on how things work is what is best for teachers, not what is best for students (the documentary Waiting for Superman shows a lot of this).

So it's not surprising to see teachers fighting back and trying to discredit KA, because success for them would mean a loss of status quo for teachers. If you get 99 things right and 1 thing wrong, those who feel threatened by you will minimize those 99 things and blow that 1 thing out of proportion.
So if AES were broken you'd want the TLS version bumped, some people to spend a caffeine-fueled week implementing and testing a new ciphersuite while global ecommerce slows to a crawl, and then OS maintainers and IT admins everywhere to get the new openssl/nss/schannel versions installed ASAP?

How is that better than having pluggable ciphers?

I don't really understand the combining of symmetric, asymmetric, and hash under one ciphersuite id namespace either. It's like the SSL/TLS authors had never encountered the DRY concept before. It makes adding or removing a cipher or hash into a tedious exercise, getting particular combinations into RFCs.
Productivity and smartness are measured by the consistent ability to impact the world? And there is data linking "productivity", "smartness", and "consistent impact on the world"? Does Will Hunting abandoning math to go see about a girl make him an idiot?
Vehicle Data Science Corporation is looking for employee number three to help design and implement software that processes and analyzes big spatial data sets. The company is an early-stage startup located in the San Francisco Bay Area with initial funding from a National Science Foundation grant. We use location data from vehicles to derive driving behaviors which we capture in a proprietary database. This database feeds applications in the areas of driver safety, fuel economy and autonomous vehicles.

We are looking for a smart, adaptable individual with plenty of skills and breadth in computing to build products from our data streams. By joining us today, you get a unique chance to engineer new technology from the ground up. Working in tandem with the company’s CTO, you will develop key algorithms, design original data visualizations, and deliver data insights to instruct the direction of our product development. Depending on your skills and inclinations, the position could evolve to become either a management or software architect role.

The right candidate will have a solid scientific foundation and a self-starter, small-company work ethic. A graduate engineering or science degree from a top-tier university is preferred. Familiarity with geospatial tools and database architectures are major pluses and other skills of interest include distributed computing, web programming, statistics, and time series analysis. Most of the initial code base is in Python, thus prior experience with that language is highly desirable.

The opportunity is huge and possibilities are wide open for the right individual. Come help us grow the company you want to be a part of!

To reach us, e-mail: contact@VDS-corp.com
If you're scanning a long document to a PDF, compression makes a lot of sense. It's the difference between being able to email the PDF as an attachment and having to find a place to put the file online.
According to discussions on lowendtalk they've cancelled ALL orders made with Paypal as the payment method. This might possible be true for the order I made an EU-resident on the 25th. (The information in OVHs manager is sketchy.) The waiting and "hoop jumping" you have to do makes this an expensive server for what you are getting -- which, for many people, doesn't seem to be anything at all.
Tool to help small businesses/startups understanding and monitoring their growth
In the good old days of analog copiers this would be impossible - the scanner send the light through a system of mirrors to the drum, the drum gets static charged, the toner is pulled on the charged parts and gets transferred to the transfer belt, here the paper has the opposite charge and pulls the toner off of the transfer belt, goes through the fusing unit and here is the toner 'burned' to the paper. End of Story

On a modern copier the scanner transfers the data first to RAM and than usually to a hard disk (the most of the people do not even know that the "copy machine" has one and saves the scanned stuff to it).
From that hard disk the data where transmitted via laser to the drum

Tadaaa - you have the reason for having data be compressed on a modern copier.
I assume that by "full socialism," you're referring to Stalinism, something that's actually rejected by most socialists, and any serious socialist.

To answer your question, no, we can't.
I don't fully agree regarding Manning. He revealed diplomatic cables, which was basically a work of U.S. diplomats, who have been writing "honest" assessments from inside those countries, under the condition that it remains secret. In my opinion, it was unfair to the U.S. gov that it was published - and I say this as a non-American. If leaking this should be automatically pardoned, we would first need a completely different model of how foreign diplomacy should work. (But I agree the life-time sentence is too harsh).

Snowden case is different. (I also don't like that those two guys are mentioned together).
Homakov used XSRF! It's super effective!
This class of error is called (by me, at least) a "contoot" because, long ago, when I was writing the JBIG2 compressor for Google Books PDFs, the first example was on the contents page of book. The title, "Contents", was set in very heavy type which happened to be an unexpected edge case in the classifier and it matched the "o" with the "e" and "n" and output "Contoots".

The classifier was adjusted and these errors mostly went away. It certainly seems that Xerox have configured things incorrectly here.

Also, with Google Books, we held the hi-res original images. It's not like the PDF downloads were copies of record. We could also tweak the classification and regenerate all the PDFs from the originals.

For a scanner, I don't think that symbol compression should be used at all for this reason. For a single page, JBIG2 generic region encoding is generally just as good as symbol compression.

More than you want to know about this topic can be found here: https://www.imperialviolet.org/binary/google-books-pdf.pdf