skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It is insane to give money to people and expect that that will solve all their problems. Particularly if it is a one time thing (much like just handing a homeless person a dollar on the street). If you really want to help people it takes time, patience, and compassion. Poverty is a hard problem with no easy solution.
I am so far out of my depth here that it is not funny but..

Why not use wheels that use magnets instead of bearings so that there is no friction?
I fail to see how this has anything to do with his age. There are assholes at all stages of life.
after being treated this way, i doubt this man (probably everyone who read this) will ever report bugs to facebook anymore.
So the takeaway of the article as far as I can tell is that technologists (it talks about software ones but you could abstract it out to all technology disciplines) aren't good at being powerful. Which makes sense. To be popular in high school, or to get elected, requires mastering the nuances of the social order, whereas being an engineer requires mastering the nuances of some technological problem domain. It's pretty rare for someone to have mastered both. Obviously there are exceptions but in the general case the article is right, technologists don't rule the world; they're the primary instruments by which others rule.
Could you do something like spin ferrofluid inside a hollow donut with some coils round it to make a reaction wheel that would take ages to wear out? No bearings and the only friction would be the fluid against the inside of the donut.
Andrew Carnegie write in his essay "wealth" that excessive inheritances can only be a burden to the heirs. this story certainly demonstrates that.
Some websites block emails from mailinator which is pretty annoying.
I've been to Kenya (village of Ngaamba) 4 times in the last 5 years on service trips through the 410Bridge organization. Their model relies on a village leadership council to prioritize need and decide how resources should be used. Then we come alongside and help. Our first trip focused on water. The second was infrastructure. The third was education. This past June it was staffing a medical clinic that was recently built. Now a community center has sprouted around the clinic and the trip next year will likely focus on micro-finance and entrepreneurship.

This isn't charity. It is partnering with a talented group of village leaders that understand the needs of the community far better than we could. There is accountability but it's driven locally and it's sustainable. They'll be able to carry the momentum they created long after we're gone.

There are plenty of models that work, and I'm glad there are so many helping out. But I've seen first-hand that allowing a community to pull the help they need works better than a foreign push model.
Yes, I think that would be a good option. When you enter the theater, it pops up with a dialog - "You have entered Regal Cinemas - your phone is going to theater mode. Press here to cancel."

Making it opt-out rather than opt-in would create much more social pressure to not text during the movie.
There's a certain irony between your comment and her article.

Her article was about how you shouldn't care what other people desire, you should figure out what you desire and go after that. After all, they're not the one living your life.

Your comment is about how you read the article because of the Google brand, and that you trusted the upvoting masses on HN to weed this out. Notice the language. "Google brand" - why does the fact that this has the word "Google" in it make you want to read it? "upvoting masses" - you trust the masses of HN more than your own judgment?

Perhaps there was something in this article that's worth reading after all, and you glossed over it?

(FWIW, it was my upvote that put this article on the front page - it had 2 upvotes on the New page and was 10 minutes old when I saw it, and I liked it, and so gave it the 3rd upvote.)
Show HN: TitanPass Getting Started Video
A bunch of people asked me to make a getting started video for TitanPass. I was so excited to release the application that I left the entire user experience by the wayside. Please check out the video at www.titanpass.com or www.vimeo.com/72562670. Thanks for all the feedback so far and I hope you enjoy the video. Please let me know what you think.
> If anything, keeping other drugs illegal while legalizing marijuana would provide a transition period for those impoverished drug dealers, a transition period that would be unavailable if the whole deal fell with one blow as he seems to desire.

Or we could fix poverty.
if this bug, does what i think it does, this man if met with certain group of people, had the chance to make millions out of this bug.
Immediately following that quote: Do not interact with other accounts without the consent of their owners.
I wonder who would recruit him. Moreover watch out for the company recruits him.
While I'm very much in support of perhaps some sort of basic living wage, there is the undeniable issue that an incorrectly-applied dollar may simply support an ever-ratcheting drain on resources, as argued by Hardin:

http://web.ntpu.edu.tw/~ckliu/course/research/lifeboat.pdf

Whether you agree or not, there is something in the argument to consider.
What struck me more is how somebody can get that far in life without properly examining themselves and their relationship with the world. Isn't she aware of the stereotype that corporations are full of drones that will suddenly realize that they've wasted their life when they're forty? Hasn't she picked up a copy of Be Here Now on a coffee table somewhere? Was that really the first time that she's gazed at the stars and felt like she could do anything – doesn't everybody do that when they're 15? I suppose not everybody has hippy parents, not everybody is allowed to go to bonfire parties in their teens, not everybody takes LSD before their first corporate job.

It's like we need another world war and then another 60's and 70's, but then no 80's to erase all the lessons we learned.

Most people that I know who are in my generation (millennial) are incredibly self-aware and make life choices according to what they want out of life first and foremost. Sadly that often leaves them stuck without the skills to make a significant impact on the world and on the lives of those around them.
What I don't get is why he doesn't just go out and tell Americans what exactly they should do to remedy this... specific actions. Clearly he's signaling that there is something top secret that we, the people, should know is being done in our name. The problem is that the average person isn't going to know what's the next step they should take upon hearing his warning.
I work 40+ hours a week, I'm a drilling reservist, I have a wife and kids, I'm enrolled full-time in college, and I still find time to learn about programming, design, network security, and a wide variety of other topics. My ability to learn new things is only hindered by the amount of time I spend playing videogames.

A job won't stop you from learning to code. A job also won't stop you from launching a start-up.

I suggest that if you are broke, find a job and continue working until you actually have an idea that seems marketable. Sorry to sound blunt, but if you are in financial trouble, you seriously need to just start working again, even if you have to take a worse job than you had before.

If you don't need money immediately, try thinking of problems that you had as an electrical engineer that can be solved by software. Do the same thing for any other niches that you are familiar with. Many successful companies succeeded by solving problems that their founders experienced while working in another domain.
This immediately reminds me of pg's essay on 'Stuff',

http://www.paulgraham.com/stuff.html

"...once you've accumulated a certain amount of stuff, it starts to own you rather than the other way around. I know of one couple who couldn't retire to the town they preferred because they couldn't afford a place there big enough for all their stuff. Their house isn't theirs; it's their stuff's."

(I recently translated the essay into dutch; it's at http://www.michielovertoom.com/articles/paul-graham-spullen/)
I guess we'll just have to disagree. In my opinion, "benefit to society" is a necessary but insufficient condition to morally justify paying for something via taxation. The other necessary condition being "requires force to administer", for example, police (if someone is murdering another person you are going to have to detain them with force).

The reason, why it is insufficient, is the question, "if it were so beneficial to society why didn't society pay for it voluntarily?" Now, the usual argument is "because they were too stupid or selfish to" - but then, why would we expect the politicians to be any better? Day by day, it seems to me that the political class is more capricious, narcissistic, and self-centered than most humans they rule over. I do not see this as a particularly effective cadre of individuals to be overseeing spending money on science research, however indirect. Might as well just get money from the people directly with outstretched hands.

To your original point, "What about the medical funding for stuff like cancer, where the vast bulk is in the public sector?" This is a particularly bad example because there is a large BINGO (although I would not call it a shining example of an efficient charity) that funds quite a bit of cancer research - the ACS. The early decades of the NCI were a disaster. To be sure, the NCI has gotten way better over time, and there are some indispensible services they provide (which nonetheless in theory could be spun off to nonprofit private orgs) like the NCI-60 cell line screening service; but there are also plenty of stories about the siloing/turfwarring that goes on between the NCI and the NIH - which has led to severe inefficiencies and plenty of lost opportunities. The ex-boss program manager manages projects for the NIH that OFTEN cross over into NCI territory and the political machinations she's complained about make my head spin.
"No one is under any particular obligation to devote their energy to those problems." Why?
> In a similar vein, here is a video from the US Navy in the 1950s which describes how mechanical computers work (for calculating trajectories of missiles being shot from ships.)

Guns, not missiles. At 0:50, the narrator refers to "initial shell velocity."

They were last used in combat in the 1990s, when the Iowa-class battleships fired their 16-inch guns at Iraqi positions in Kuwait. The Navy never bothered to replace them with digital computers, because they were already accurate enough for the guns they controlled.
Salary numbers are not much of a guess - they're stated right there in the offer letter. Neither are expenses - you know exactly how money will be going out and can make choices to limit that. What will make you happy is a guess, and it didn't actually work out the first - or second, or third - time that I tried. I'm still evaluating whether my fourth choice works on a happiness level, but if it doesn't, I've got the resources and professional reputation to try again.

But in the absence of any useful information about that, why not take the choice that gives you the biggest chance of being able to make more choices later? Picking a job that gives you savings gives you a bunch of options later, should you decide that you hate it, and it also gives you information about what sort of work you like to do. So if your guess works, great, if it doesn't, you have the resources to try again.
May I suggest the one week trial?
Four Ideas of Design
where to upload resume ?
i am fresher,currently in 7th sem B.Tech(IT) in IIITA.
Abdul Rais
abdulrais1993@gmail.com
I can see that as a possibility, though a rather dystopian one. Resistance is futile.
Split Testing your Adsense Ads
But if you want to build a classifier that distinguishes a bird flight path from that of an airplane (or from a helicopter), you're going to have to model bird-specific dynamics at some point.

Likewise, if you're trying to beat captchas -- ie simulate human answers, and there seems to be no capturable regularity to the human answers (as suggested in the article) ... then the easiest approach may very well be to simulate human-specific (thinking) dynamics directly.

OTOH you're right that if your goal is not to predict some natural system (birds or humans) but simply to do some more general task very well (flying, or eg computer design), then yes, you're best off discarding nature's designs in favor of an approach that captures the more essential elements of the problem domain (aerodynamic lift or processor efficiency) -- and thereby end up with fixed rather than flapping wings, or binary logic rather than neural nets.
Moving to USA (NYC) – Need Advice
Hello All,
I need a bit of advice as my research on google has not cleared my doubts.
I am based out of Hong Kong as a C++ and Java developer (10 years exp) and my company (an Investment Bank) has decided to move my role to New York. I have persuaded my bosses to relocate me to NYC and they have agreed. Though the HR talks have not yet happened regarding salaries, i would like to prepare and set mine and their's expectations.

After a lot of research on google/glassdoor/etc, i have come to the following conclusions:
1. I might not get the best market salaries (Asian/NYC being high cost center/non native English speaker/first timer to USA/etc)
2. I should range my salary expectations in a range of 130K-150K just to be safe in the zone and not miss out on the job. Is this fair?
3. I have no option but to work in NYC and live in NJ. It seems that this is the sanest thing to do.
4. Taxes being high compared in NYC, I can safely assume 40% of my salary being cut. So that leaves me in a range of 78K-90K after tax. Assuming my rental will be around 2k and monthly expenses around 1k, that would leave me with 42K-54K. This i believe should be more than enough.
5. My life-work balance might go for a toss given that longer hours are the norm in NYC (Wall Street). Am i right?
6. Given that i will be moving to USA on an L1 B visa? (not a senior management guy) i can apply for a GC (as in Green Card, not the other GC) as soon as i join and get it in around 2-3 years. Am i right?

My preparation for my move has not yet started and i am sure that i will have more questions. Since i have no one in USA (friends/family/etc) i am completely reliant on YC.

Please let me know on the above points and if any of my assumptions are wrong. Also please feel free to advice me on anything that you think would be a appropriate.

Warm regards from Hong Kong...
Reading that makes me angry. As a former ditch-digger, construction laborer, retail associate, airline baggage handler, and furniture mover, I had to scratch and claw my way for 10 years to finally get an engineering position at Google.

This woman seems to have every life opportunity handed to her in a silver plate since the day she was born that all she had to do is work hard and not fuck it up. I know people who are brilliant and work immensely hard but just do not have the socioeconomic status and/or luck to even get an interview.

She just threw away something that millions of people would literally kill for. Something that I, as recently as 4 years ago, would literally kill for.
Certainly we should try that, but keeping pot illegal so that poor people can continue to sell it isn't a solution by any means.
That friction would be substantial, however, requiring a lot of energy just to keep going. But maybe there is potential in exploring some kind of contactless magnetic wheel suspension for space applications.
Disgusting. This is the first post on HN that actually offended me. I bet this is how the Homebrew Computer Club felt after reading Bill Gates' Open Letter to Hobbyists [1] back in '75.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
Hi, I'm the guy in the video. You might also be interested in a presentation I gave last Sept at Strangeloop with a much longer demo of coding in Clojure and Elisp: http://www.infoq.com/presentations/Programming-Voice

There's also this lightning talk http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qXvbQQV1ydo from PolyglotConf (warning: crappy audio from a shaky cell phone cam).

I promised to release my duct tape code later this year. I'm a bit behind schedule with that but it should be out in a month or two.
Breaking the Rules Thousands of Times at the N.S.A.
Why Software Projects are Terrible and How Not To Fix Them
As far as I understand, Yelp is a pretty scummy company. Apparently, they frequently call small business owners and offer to hide negative reviews in exchange for payment. (http://www.ibtimes.com/yelp-extortion-rampant-say-small-busi...) From Yelp's perspective, it's not in their best interest to protect the companies their users review because there's no money in it for them.
I am not familiar with the Colorado system, but that sounds similar to the Washington system. In order to grow or sell you need to buy a license (available in November I believe). This system is not going to restrict strains or products in any meaningful way. No more so than government issued licenses for medical grow ops have restricted strains... As most here are probably aware, the existence of government licensed growers has had the opposite effect as what you are hypothesising.

I believe Colorado has commercial growers obtain a license as well, though I cannot say that for sure.
Polygraphs are voodoo science anyway, and are about as reliable as a 1970 AMC Gremlin with a load of sand in the carburetor and half the spark-plug wires missing.

But this is absolutely unconscionable. We DO have a right to free speech, and to attempt to prosecute somebody simply teaching skills, shows that our government no longer has any credibility - it has connection to the government we intended to found, and no validity. Our government is the enemy now. So if the NSA, FBI, CIA, ATF, DOJ and friends want to treat us like the enemy, then fine... we'll be the enemy.
Oh damnit! Now I miss my lego technic sets!
The mental trauma of being in a US prison and permanent unemployability from a felony record causes far more hardship to a person than the act of smoking. That alone should indicate that the punishment is not fitting the crime.
It's considered a conspiracy theory, but many people do believe the government takes a cut of the drug trade. That money would be far more valuable than normal tax dollars because a small group would get to control it without any oversight or tax distribution (off the books it could be used for anything).

I believe the Federal Government will only legalize pot under one of two circumstances: 1) it becomes more profitable to tax it (the theory being that it's not today) and 2) they can no longer keep the cartels under control and they become a direct security threat
Excellent article. It's meanders through a multitude of topics. As a software developer this did instill some sense of self respect.
On the other hand, this story is in Rolling Stone and ostensibly "newsworthy" because money almost always provides insulation against this kind of deprivation.

Go to any large city in the US and you'll find this same story played out countless times with children living in equally terrible, deprived and dangerous situations. It won't be news because their parents are poor.
> I'm certainly not going to agree that that's a reason not to do what we have
I'm a robotics software engineer at Vecna, working on our QC Bot[1]. We use a combination of ROS and our own Java stuff for the robot system, and since I'm a long time fish user I started doing the port for my own use. I've been working on getting the patch into shape for actually going upstream in the 4 hours per week we get for community service, contributing to open source, etc.

[1]https://www.vecna.com/solutions/hospital-delivery
Will advanced AI believe in God?
Podcast and Website focused on turning Wantrepreneurs to Entrepreneurs
I used a Kinesis for many years and had a great chair and ergonomic setup before developing the RSI that I describe in the video.
This reminded me of a recent paper on automatically designing animated mechanical characters. Some of these movements could be used to incorporate different kinds of animations into these characters.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DfznnKUwywQ
The mic I used in the video can actually cope with very noisy environments. With lesser mics, speech recognition is useless with even mild background noise.
I'm not sure that "requires force to administer" is that good a qualifier for deciding on what should be funded by taxes, assuming that you mean force in the political sense of force against people. By that standard you wouldn't fund fire departments.

Also, government paying for things is society paying for things. Government is part of society, not an appendage.

On the subject of cancer research, I don't know that much of the situation in the US, but I did look into this a while back and found that the amount spent by governments globally dwarfs the money spent by industry and charity combined. I apologise for not having the figures to hand though and if you think I am wrong on this, let me know.

edit - just had a look at your profile... I was not aware of what you are involved in. Good luck with it all, I hope you do well and I will stop trying to tell you about cancer funding as you are bound to know a hell of a lot more about it than I am.
Once I got the basics working with the DragonFly and Natlink libraries I mentioned, I bootstrapped the rest mostly by voice.
Did you read any of the bits in between your ellipses?

...stinking rich from three trust funds: one from his
father, Walker Inman Sr., heir to an Atlanta cotton
fortune and stepson to American Tobacco Company founder
"Buck" Duke; one from his mother, Georgia Fagan; the third
from his grandmother, Buck's widow Nanaline Duke, who left
the bulk of her $45 million estate to her little grandson.

The money involved was made by people with the same genes as Walter Inman, Jr.
TANRI TEYİDİ : GHSSWA KUTSAL İBADET "H" PAZAR GÜNÜ VE AZRAİL
ghsswa-google moderator. .22.
I am for legalization of drugs, but at the same time, advertising them should be made illegal.

I am worried about commercialization of it. Look at the tobacco industry and its lies.
Pure 100% linkbait.

If you actually read the patent the one place where they mention government blackout is clearly in the context of the agents of the government blacking out their own devices so as not to give themselves away, not some sort of "kill switch" for their targets. It is like a more extreme version of the mute switch.

All the things describes in the patent pertain to opting-in to policies that shut down aspects of the phone in certain environments.
Optical Character Recognition with Javascript pt1
It would need more energy, but on the other hand it would be extremely simple and should last. I guess it depends on how much extra solar you would have to haul to balance the friction. Magnetic bearings are lovely, but seem fiddly.