skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
To be fair, nobody is placing Muslims in internment camps nor are they being forced to ride in the back of the bus.

If anything, we are learning that we are all under constant surveillance.
Sounds like feudalism to me. Your friend seems to have a tenuous grasp on what Marxism is, but still uses it as a pejorative; which is unfortunate.

>There was no market because that culture was run by theocratic totalitarian blood thirsty central planners

This implies that markets would have arisen in Incan society but were suppressed. Is there evidence of markets organically manifesting in Incan society?
OS X is BSD based and you don't need to be a power user to learn how to use it. I'm not sure what your argument is here. With the right UX and application suite, Linux is for all intents and purposes just as functional as Windows is.
> Lots of scientists disagree with other scientists. I find science to still be valid.

I wasn't saying libertarianism isn't valid. I was saying that making a claim about what libertarianism is is necessarily suspect, mine as much as yours.

> Libertarian insight is more relevant because it's deduced using principled and empirically evident reasoning.

Are the principles deduced from empirically evident reasoning, or is it as questionably axiomatic as any other system?

This isn't a "libertarianism makes sense" claim you're making; this is a "libertarians are so awesome" claim. Furthermore, neither this sentence nor your economics analogy actually refutes my essential claim that the inability to evaluate and reason at anything other than the individual level makes it impossible to speak usefully about groups of people. The empirical evidence is that groups have significant effects on people. It is quite clear that it is extremely rare, if at all extant, that people can be defined without relation to a group.

That leaves libertarianism and its radical individualism very suspect, from an empirical point of view.

> False dichotomy ;)

You have to present a third alternative to show it's a false dichotomy.

> It's simply saying, here's a framework for analyzing human action, and here's what the outcomes will be.

To be frank, that's not a philosophy at all. That's a model. These are two hugely different things, not least because philosophies are normative.

Libertarianism, as I understand it, is founded on the claim that the word "liberty" has an esteemed place in the structure of the world. That isn't a "framework for analyzing human action"; that's an assertion that "freedom is important and we should not impinge on it". This is a really significant deviation from your claims.

Or I guess you could disagree with all this. Are you sure you're a libertarian? You haven't brought up freedom or liberty at all. You kinda sound like an economist.
In the original post though, the company is paying 100% of the premiums - and would presumably do the same for the disability insurancee. So you would pay nothing out of pocket. You could view it as 2500/x not going into your check - but it's probably 2500/x that would have gone elsewhere.
Lawrence Krauss Explains Quantum Computing
Yes, I'd be paying for your care either way. The difference is, the way you're doing it now, you contribute nothing while I still pay for your care. If I get a million-dollar hospital bill, you don't pay more, but the reverse is true.

If insurance weren't ubiquitous, service would be cheaper, sure. And people would die or be bankrupted by treatable medical conditions like crazy. This is why insurance is so common. People don't like that kind of thing.

Given the system that we're in, you're doing me no favors at all by refraining from obtaining health insurance as a healthy person. You've decided that the risk of bankruptcy is acceptable while externalizing a lot of that risk.
I don't remember the specifics.
They could add a checkbox "store this decision locally", which would allow storing this single information - and localStorage is the best place to put it (unlike cookies).
Everyone, including(maybe even especially) black americans, should watch this speech

There is nothing in that speech which is not already common-knowledge or thoroughly discussed among blacks.
You're wrong.

http://www.google.com/finance?q=NYSE%3AUNH&fstype=ii&ei=8Z0b...
I'll take a look. His Wikipedia page is kinda... thin, and I get the sense he hasn't done much besides host a radio show.
I guess statistically ;)

They take average paying morale in a neighborhood into account. But I guess one very bad seed can spoil pull down a otherwise good/average neighborhood.
> Traveling is a right, regardless of what power any government exerts to claim otherwise.

A right in the US is what's defined in the Constitution. Flying is not one.
I bring it up because there are downsides to coupling essential services to whoever happens to be your employer at the time. The upsides are mostly a consequence of the market adapting to decades-long tax policy. There's nothing special about employers, but I guess sometimes it's easier to reinforce a problem than to fix it.
> Why should it be cheaper to have group policies through employers? The entire freaking point of the insurance company is that they are pooling money from a bunch of people over time in the form of premiums to be able to distribute to a minority who need it in emergencies.

Good question. The answer is that the insurance companies know that people are self-selecting if they buy insurance on their own, while (to a good approximation) they do not select jobs on the basis of the insurance that they will get from it. So insurance offered through an employer comes from a pool of typical people with a certain age and wealth distribution, while insurance sold directly to consumers comes from a pool of people who think that they need that particular kind of insurance. Needless to say, the risk is MUCH higher with the individual policies, and it is priced accordingly.
The Surface RT is not competition.

What I'm saying by all this is you only have a competitor when they're a threat. Azure and Surface RT are not threats, they're merely nuisances.
This sounds like a great default behavior.
You might be surprised just how much churn there is if you look at the source of, for instance, Haskell's Data.Map, which in the name of immutability is implemented as a balanced binary-tree representation, rather than the more common hash table. Many operations that are amortized O(1) with a hash table are O(log N) with a balanced B-tree, since for instance after an update a all the sub-trees around the update site will be made afresh, since the balancing will change.
Bureaucracies don't like originality and critical thinking, but most people don't exhibit those behaviors anyway. And those that do, will do so regardless of reward or risk. Any hierarchy of control will calcify as it gets larger otherwise it would collapse under its own weight, so a surveillance state that aims to keep artistic endeavors in check makes sense.

While we do need a small number of elites to improve and think up new ideas (see Lenin's New Economic Policy of infusing innovation into Communism through temporary small scale Capitalism), it would be dangerous if everyone had free time or capacity of enlightened intellect to be as creative and critical as they are capable. The 60s are great existence proof of that.

As we are seeing with a general lack of outrage in the population over the snowden released information, people are more cautious, saying less and policing themselves. It is a small minority, maybe to their own peril who are speaking their minds.

The cynic would say that maybe Snowden's release was a planned move by the Administration. Think of how much more effective the system will be if it is in "the open." A bold move, but if successful, forever changes what the notion of liberty means in the US.
I've also read Game Engine Architecture, and I've written a (much less sophisticated) engine on a small team in school. Unless your goal is to make a game engine rather than a game, it would be the height of foolishness to build a game engine.

The main takeaways of the article are "have a business model" and "don't build your own engine." It adds years to the process, it's extremely difficult to get right, and the end result will be worse than using existing tools.

If your goal was to make a web app, would your first step be to write a garbage collector and a database management system? Would you invent a templating language, and build a parsing engine for it in C? Would you think it responsible to pay a web developer a salary to do those things if their goal is to just make a website? If not, then it'd pretty foolish to pay yourself to make a game engine.
Burning Man's big hangup: cellphones
"Listen to Rihanna and be Cool"

Kudos.
For me, the key way of thinking is that if I want someone to agree with me, my argument needs to make sense to them from within their own internal perspective. So to be effective I need to understand their perspective first, then see if what I want can be fit into it respectfully.

The big exception to this is if a third party is adjudicating the argument--like in a debate or trial. In that case, hammering the foe can help establish a perception of confidence and credibility with the 3rd party.
It seems like the main vulnerability was that it was built in true "scalable" Facebook style, but gifts need a more personal touch, which is harder to scale.
One thing not mentioned here is the waiting period. I.e. after you are injured and stop working, you are typically required to use up all of your sick/vacation time, and/or wait for 180 days until you can receive benefits.

I've worked for companies that offer short-term disability insurance -- which will cover the gap -- but this is less common than LTD.

This is why it's important to have an emergency fund to cover your living expenses for at least the waiting period. Otherwise you could be looking at eviction before the money from your disability insurance comes in.
Coffeeshop, Craigslist posting, take it to local game events (IGDA meetings/etc), contact local game schools and bring it there for testing (game schools are everywhere)...
I've had popped.at running for over a year and a half and in a different form since the earthquake in Japan. It was originally tensecondstotokyo.com and focused on Japan.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cognitive_dissonance -- I believe this idea is called "cognitive dissonance", and has been demonstrated in some interesting studies.

As I read about it, I could remember several instances in my life where I have behaved exactly as described.
> When Google's next hardware product comes out, can we
> stop thanking them and instead point out how they have a
> history of releasing products that give users no control
> over what runs on them?

Consumer hardware devices that Google has released so far are: Nexus {One,S,Galaxy,4,7,10,Q}, Glass, Chromebook Pixel, Chromecast.

All of the Nexus devices (except for the abandoned-before-launch Q) have official support for flashing custom firmware. The Chromebook Pixel comes with "developer mode", which turns it into a standard unverified laptop. Glass can be unlocked, and Google employees demonstrated how to install Ubuntu on it at Google IO.

Other than the Chromecast, which devices do you feel restrict the user from controlling which code they run?
Centralized states that pretend to be egalitarian need terror so that the peons don't forget to shore the line. Maybe that's why the Inca's had the habit of human sacrifices; (interesting, this seems to have been a common 'feature' of both Aztec and Inca culture)

Also without the terror component the Soviet state became stagnant.
How many more sales would you get if the price were $1 or $2, instead of $5? That's quite a leap to make.
Other than the lack of a trading class the economy is very much like the early Egyptian economy, based around the production of food and with taxes extracted in the form of labor and food. My guess for the lack of a trading class is due to too few neighbors to trade with.
Interesting. I haven't read the paper, but I took the "theory" to be: "when presented with a visualization of one's body, augmented with a signal pulsing synchronously with one's heartbeat, one's perception of self extends to include the visualization. This builds on the existing theory that the brain generates our experience of self by merging information about our body from multiple sources, including the eyes, the skin, the ears, and even one’s internal organs. Here we present statistically affirmative research."

Can this not be empirically tested? Can it not be falsified or generate consensus?

I would think it more direct to criticize theories like this for their qualial basis. Still, how is the statistical nature of a sufficiently large sample of humans providing qualial data different from that of a sufficiently large number of H20 molecules providing neutrino collision data?
Interestingly, governments are doing exactly that:
http://www.theactuary.com/news/2013/01/gender-directive-has-...

It's now illegal in some nations to discriminate pricing based on gender.
Aren't jokes usually funny?
Microsoft should buy Yahoo and name Marissa Mayer CEO
Maybe because they've lied on numerous occasions. Every 2 or 4 years the nation chooses to trust another group of people, many of which quickly lose the trust of those they are supposed to be representing.

A government is not a single entity, but it made of individuals. I trust some of those individuals more than others.

Hiding one of the biggest surveillance programs without ever getting consent for it, is a complete and utter betrayal of trust. I trusted them to respect the 1st and 4th amendment. That trust was betrayed when they choose to play fast and loose with those two constitutional rights. Now that we are demanding to know what is going on, they retreat to more lies as opposed to opening up and trying to earn that trust back.
Which is a disingenuous answer since he's not even using the SDK. The ChromeCast at least notionally supports an open protocol (DIAL). Only it doesn't, because if you try to use it with software other than Google's, it breaks.
More details here http://hak-it.blogspot.ro/2013/08/google-palestine-hacked.ht...
That insistence on his operating system being NOT portable put a nice smile on my face.
Building a follower model from scratch
I bet it doesn't feel great for the people who don't have a connection available and are getting punished because of other people's actions.
> you can learn it quickly and immediately play against the best computer players and expect to win

That is not true at all. The best available bots on the Arimaa server are rated above 2000 elo, which is way higher than beginners can expect to be rated at.
Gazelle iPhone trade-in lock till Oct 15th
BSD sockets first feature request ever
The aggregate probability of a heathy 25 year old deciding to pay full market price for Heath insurance is lower than a sick 25 year old. However, you also get people who discover there at an increased risk for a disease and decide to get coverage etc.

PS: Heath insurance company's are vary rational, if the risks where equivalent they would charge close to the same rates due to market forces. Instead identical group plans even for small groups can be significantly cheaper.
This may be the quiet beginning of a revolution. A shift in not only the public perception of all-electric/non-petroleum vehicles, but also in their availability and affordability.
IPS and Boot Environments using ZFS is an OpenSolaris thing, available in Solaris 11 and some Illumos distributions like OmniOS. And someone has ported BEs to FreeBSD.

But of course, all the cool new features in Linux have been in use in production by Solaris people for years. :-)
They had a solid track record of crushing their opposition, by starving them of money (vs. Netscape), depriving them of critical applications (Apple with Office), or by throwing mountains of money at the problem (vs. Sony PS3).

Now they utterly own a few key markets, but have consistently failed to gain traction in others. Their online division is a disaster. Their console is set up for an apocalyptic flame-out. Their phone and tablet sales are already costing them billions in partnership deals and write-downs with almost nothing to show for it.

At this point Microsoft would be hard pressed to beat out Blackberry in the phone space.
I too have written less than inspired articles in the past, so, I'll assume the author was under some kind of editorial pressure and couldn't think through the core idea.

The idea of giving away RT in order to compete with Android is only viable financially with the multiple network effects between the products of different divisions. If he proposes breaking up Microsoft, he should, at least, propose a business model that would work with the broken up company.
Silent film on the mass production of food
He starts talking about FP/Haskell at the 2:06 mark.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1PhArSujR_A#t=126
Obviously you can't pay more than your means, but the housing market has people bidding against one another for products that differ in dozens of different dimensions.

Me, maybe I'm willing to pay more for my favorite architectural style and off-road parking for my motorbike. Maybe you're starting a family, you'll pay more to live in an area with a quality public school, and a park where you can walk your dog. Another person might pay a premium for a safer neighborhood with lower crime rates and more local shops.

We all take our preferences, decide what we're willing to pay, and you outbid me because I wasn't willing to pay any premium for that public school (or whatever).
True. At the least, it's just to let them know that the first black president understands their plight. That they're not inferior or prone to violence by birth(a few really do think that). That in itself is worth something I think. On a sidenote, the fact that my comments aren't getting downvoted shows that there's hope too. Maybe I didn't give HN enough credit and could have used my main HN account to post.
"An alternative is to put an end to mass surveillance, forcing the security services to fall in line with the parts of government that value liberty."

Which parts of the government are those?
I don't see it as 'expecting remuneration to continue', so much as I see it as simply paying for insurance of income.

Life insurance is essentially the same thing, as far as I'm concerned: I'm paying now so that if / when something in the future happens, there is a financial aspect that helps me / my family.

So out of curiosity, do you consider life insurance the same way?
Sometimes a product is kept around because it has worth beyond making money.
Or a friend suggestion app to increase your score
You can get a sense of that from the first night though. Some I've been to have been full of random ideas, others have been "Hi, I'm the cofounder of X and we're going to add Y feature to the site this weekend!". Sets the tone immediately.
I would argue the exact opposite. The average startup is likely using MySQL as a glorified key-value store already anyway, and they're likely using it in lieu of a more appropriate datastore because people tell them they don't need a NoSQL database until they get to Google-size.

The lesson is: match your database to your use-case, not the other way around. Need advanced querying/reporting options? Get a warm, fuzzy feeling from a SQL prompt? Use MySQL. Want a plain jane key-value store? Use Voldemort/Kyoto Cabinet. Want flexible schemas? Use MongoDB. Want a Key-value store with secondary indexes and lots of scaling capabilities? Use Cassandra/HBase. Want a powerful datastore that's supported by a BigCo? Use DynamoDB or Cloud Datastore.
The non-power user will use whatever comes with the computer, as long as it can access Facebook.
Siri just started a beef with Google Glass
Looks like their domain was compromised. It points to an IP associated with this hosting provider: http://www.genious.net/
Facebook Unveils Shared Photo Albums
I think it's awesome they are knocking down applications IN ALL CAPS. Finally someone is punishing internet shouters in their pocketbooks.
Car and house purchases use a slightly different metric to determine your creditworthiness, acc. to the dealership where I got my car. Essentially, cars and houses are material objects that can be repo'd far more easily if you don't make your payments.

Personally, I'd be happiest if I had a credit score of zero or whatever the number indicating non-existence is these days.
What would happen if you were self-employed? Is there some sort of sick-leave state benefit then?
The twist is that Everyone needs - or at least should have - it, but it's so expensive on an individual basis that most individuals forego it. The first few organizations I worked for did not provide it. I priced it and decided against it because it was so expensive and I was young and invincible. I would have been up a creek if I'd become disabled. Would that have been my employer's fault or responsibility? Nope. . .but it's an excellent benefit.
I've watched one documentary which claimed the Egyptians were paid, in beer.
Also from Atlanta here and I'm always most aware of this when riding MARTA to the airport. Once you get south of downtown, it becomes hard to ignore the strange fact that the only white people still on the train are those with luggage.

And in case it consoles you to know that others are living your dreams, I just had two donuts at the Krispy Kreme on Ponce earlier this morning -- in fact right around the time of your comment. They were delicious but I should really stop going so often.
Your notions of my responsibilities for how and when to protect your financial security are of no concern to me. I will make my own contributions to society as I see fit.
Presumably being likable is important when you're trying to make business deals. Plus, if you are doing well and earning more money that is necessary, you can probably afford to optimize for other things, like enjoying the people you work with.
Here's some feedback:

1. Your logo is extremely similar to Buffer. Buffer won't sue you b/c Joel's a nice guy (on Twitter at least), but Buffer has a huge amount of traction, to the point where I thought your logo was a link to buffer. That's not good, so do everyone a favor and change it.

2. Pltts might not be the best domain. It took me awhile to realize it was Pltts, not Pitts. The brain can be funny about pattern matching sometimes. In this case I don't think it helps your cause.

Otherwise, pretty cool! I bookmarked it.
I don't have numbers, but back when I had no dental insurance, my dentist reduced the price without any prodding. I'd be surprised if this wasn't common.
> lack of Office on any of MS's mobile devices

WP7 had Office. WP8 has Office. Hell, Office for phones started as Pocket Office in 1996 for Windows CE 1.0, and has been updated all the way until Windows Mobile 6.5.

>who had versions of all of their iWork apps available on the iPad when that device launched

Furthermore, the iPhone existed for 3 years before iWork was released for it. Since we're talking about mobile devices, it's only fair to use the original iDevice for comparison, since Office for Mobile is available for phones. Office for RT was released, and built-in to the OS, for free.

Office Web Apps for SkyDrive was released 3 years ago. iCloud's iWork implementation is still in Beta.

>Office has its own UX norms which frequently contradict the Windows norms.

It's generally followed Windows UI style. Windows 7 brought in Ribbon in some built-in apps, and Windows 8 extended that even further.

You can try as hard as you want to diss Office, but their product offerings have been top notch across devices.
do I need to pay you royalties when I incorporate those concepts into my own contracts from now on?
why? I think the post is very relevant