skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Left wing politicians call themselves socialist in Europe because it has positive connotations in certain circles over there. In the US right wing politicians call somewhat less right wing politicians socialist because it has a negative connotation to many Americans.

They are both wrong. Socialism involves collective ownership of the means of production, not capitalism plus a welfare state.
I like the message -- and the messenger in this case -- a lot. Having read the full transcript of his speech, I'm trying to imagine what he might have left out, what his opponents will use to dismiss this event.

Off-hand, the easy out would be that 'giving people what they want' is actually pretty costly. The steep pilot culling selects for mass appeal. If 80% of the (paying) viewing public like a pilot, it's probably a low-risk venture with pretty predictable rewards. If those returns (ROI) are sufficient to keep the studio running, do the people writing the checks really care that more niche products _might_ gain slightly better rewards?
Wouldn't they be doing that now if they could? How does losing their jobs make their "hobbies" suddenly profitable?
Y'know, I may be missing something but I don't feel like I get much out of the fleeting interaction I have with checkout people. They are almost always "tuned out" and any kindness they dispense is completely rote. If we're worried about human interaction, fire the checkout people and hire more greeters.
I think he may be referring to machine overlords. If the automated processes are what replace humans as the dominant life form, who will watch the automation?

I think the "dominant life form" thing is a bit of semantics. But I have found this entire thread very interesting.

It will be interesting to see what happens when humanity lacks scarcity. Research indicates that humans tend towards heirarchies, which are defined relative to neighbors. The "keeping up with the joneses" disease might be part of our core programming.

In a surplus society, I wonder what will substitute for status. Probably something much like our current system, I suppose.
Story in games is like story in a porno--sure, it's nice to have and expected to be there, but if people were there for something other than the intended purpose they wouldn't be watching porn.

Devs (especially those playing at a level where they want books, as opposed to being jaded and just smashing more Unity/UnrealScript together) are better served by understanding software development and tools than by messing around with that other crap.

You can always backport story onto a game, add fluff, whatever, but if your core mechanics aren't tight and your code doesn't run nobody will play your masterpiece of storytelling.

Anybody who is willing to forgive bad, boring gameplay because "the story was soooo gooood" is a dolt, least of all because the first person to summarize it on TV Tropes or Wikipedia will obviate the need to actually play the game.

Games do remarkably well without much in the way of story: for example Doom, Minecraft, Angry Birds, Bejeweled, and Sim City. There are good games that have excellent stories, but the only reason we care about them is because they were paired with equally compelling gameplay.
That is something that can only "believed" in or "disbelieved" as much as gravity can be "believed" in or "disbelieved."
I'm fine with buying the work directly, but can you point to a good store which sells it simply as files with no DRM attached which I can download after buying? I don't need physical DVDs clutter, it's so much last century.

Sure, streaming as convenience is good to have. But it doesn't remove the need for personal backup. Network connectivity is not available always and everywhere, as well as you can't rely on the service to be always around. If you don't care to lose your extensive digital library when that service goes bust it's up to you, but it's a normal thing to care about it.
Imagine laying out 4 squares the same way. The cap wouldn't be 3D at all, you'd just end up with a big flat square at the top! Now, imagine trying to lay out 5 equilateral triangles in 2D instead of 3D. You'd have a gap. To make the "cap" in 3D, you just pull the first and last triangle together to close the gap, creating a cone. The smaller the gap is in 2D, the less you have to "fudge" the fit in 3D, and the flatter the cap is.
Precisely. The job is already automated; the worker is a value-add resource. That's not entirely unlike what many other 'advanced' roles do, just in a different form.

The same applies to technical support - for the most part, there's FAQs and the like to resolve common problems, but also additionally there's tech support people who can value-add by solving the more difficult, fuzzier issues.
> a) no country has ever tried it, really, so there isn't a real-world experience case to look at yet.

Argentina had implemented a minimum income based on the number of children of a family. There are some studies about it like: http://www.degruyter.com/dg/viewarticle/j$002fbis.2012.7.iss...

This is not a basic salary but it's an important income for poor families.
First of all, there was a big Gulag-supplied industry (google White Sea – Baltic Canal, also known as Belomorkanal, not to be confused with popular - in the USSR - brand of cigarettes). Second, even outside of Gulag, you couldn't just choose what you'd be doing: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parasitism_(social_offense)
If you're not engaging in "socially productive" work, you're going to be relocated to unhospitable areas in the north or in Siberia.
> " But using it during times of inactivity, to me is harmless."

Until the definition of "inactivity" starts to creep, wider and wider. I've noticed that with myself and people I know, that's for sure.

Stealing a bit from the video itself - you're bowling and everyone disappears into smartphone-land while waiting their turn. I've seen this actually happen IRL, so it's far from a farfetched hypothetical. In the old days you used to use this time to, god forbid, talk to someone and make a friend.

Or you're at a party where you don't know enough people. Pre-smartphone you'd get sick of being a wallflower and some point, go "fuck it", and introduce yourself to somebody. Now you can just slink into smartphone-land. I've done it, I'm sure others here have too.

"Inactivity" is a weird concept. Short of being in a sensory deprivation chamber, there are very few moments in life where you're actually involuntarily inactive.

A few months ago I tossed my earbuds in the trash. I no longer listen to music (or podcasts, or whatever) on the move. I'm more present, less tuned out, and I've learned some things and had some spontaneous interactions that are worth more to me than listening to music I've already heard many times before. I like it. People complained about the reduction in engagement when the iPod rolled around and everyone suddenly had earplugs on full-time. At the time a lot of people thought society would grow out of it and the fad of being disconnected full-time would go away.

It did. We discovered smartphones instead.
> In a not-that-near future, C++ will die of ugliness

I am so excited for that day. There are some really amazing upcoming languages positioning themselves to replace C++ for new applications. Rust seems to be in the best spot right now; Nimrod is also pretty compelling.
You're spot on with that thesis. Automation is inevitable. How we react to it is what's going to matter. I tried to encapsulate that here: http://rrwhite.com/on-the-inevitability-of-automation
It can't just be AT&T, it must be regional bells, the other major carriers, small companies, everyone.
It does say "possible", not "recommended" or even "sane"...
> You are not paying for the content in this model - only the ability to access the content through the provider.

Which I think is not something that should even exist IMHO. Since paying for content itself is easier, can work with the same convenience of streaming, while not preventing the backup. Everyone wins, since piracy will exist even when some service attempts to prevent copying.
Exactly. Customer service jobs are actually increasing in pay and sophistication because there's less overall work to be done but what's left behind after automation is more complex.
I need a regex version of this.
>>> Then it's also probably a big fallacy that people can really live off of welfare policy goods

People are living on welfare. Here's one paper on how welfare compares to working in the US: http://www.cato.org/publications/white-paper/work-versus-wel...

>>> you get is barely enough

Barely enough means enough but without extra things, right? I'm pretty sure a random medieval peasant would kill for a promise of being guaranteed not to die from hunger, always have shelter, have basic medical needs taken care of, not counting such things as free education, free communications, etc. I'm not saying we should let people die on the streets, just when you compare something to medieval, be aware how far we are removed from what happened there.
Each of the people and characters listed (from my wife to Lyta) have unique personalities. They are all examples of feminine personality.
Sex in wheelchairs: Aussie entrepreneur ends the stigma
You can get remarkably far using SFML or SDL, or even just a tiny wrapper over OpenGL.

Using OpenGL 2.0 with some simple "Draw yourself" objects for sprite rendering works nicely--it'll be tricky enough to teach you something, but not hardcore enough to sidetrack you from making a game.
Try http://colorbrewer2.org/ - it has a setting for colorblind safe...
you know what, I still dont fully understand Bitcoin. mind explaining it in a few sentences? lol thanks
The article didn't address the question of why AT&T has phone records going back so many years. I doubt that five year old data about a customer would be useful for marketing, considering that they have the most recent data. Nor is old data useful for billing once the time period for contesting a phone bill has elapsed. Network capacity planning could be done with anonymized or aggregated data. So it would seem that the only reason why they hang on to all this data is because the government asks them to, or because they can make money selling it to the government (or both).

Now, think about what adverse effects such old data could have on justice. For example, let's say a friend of mine from school, who I spent a lot of time talking to on the phone a decade ago, decided this year to become a drug dealer. The government could start investigating me based on this stale data, despite not having any reasonable suspicion that I was involved in any crime.

I think that what we really need is a privacy-oriented phone company built on the model of DuckDuckGo, which doesn't keep any data about customers beyond what's necessary for billing purposes. But maybe the U.S. already has laws that would make such an ethical phone company illegal.
Three steps to convert Blu-ray video to Samsung Galaxy Note i9220
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What’s the Difference Between a Board of Directors and an Advisory Board?
GGTracker - New York, NY (Soho) - full-time

We're building a next-generation automated coaching system, starting with StarCraft.

Seeking a full-stack developer. See more at http://ggtracker.com/hiring
`euthanazia` implies that somebody is doing something to another, in this case that we actively make them suffer a cruel sort with the intention of killing them.

It's obviously not my intention, nor do I think it is the intention of most. I believe it is more correct to simply state that human life can be tough walk. If you don't manage to keep your head up, you'll suffer the wrath of some evolutionary conspiration.

We as societies can try to alleviate that minimum suffering by choosing to provide basic needs. Some societies decide to do it, some don't. I believe societies who don't are of this opinion because they are blind to the benefits, not because they are evil.
I think having children is a choice, not an obligation nor a positive right (I'm not going to stop anyone from having children). Also, it's a pretty expensive choice. If others choose to have children, I'd prefer not to have to support them financially (through taxes).

In addition, as several other commenters pointed out, if you increase the BIG per child, you risk enabling people who have large families just to get the money. That much, much worse than asking people who want kids to provide for their own.
I reject the idea that there will suddenly be a shortage of jobs due to automation and technological advances. It didn't happen after all our agricultural advances, it didn't happen after the industrial revolution, and it hasn't happened in the information age. Think about the types of jobs people have today and compare it to the types of jobs people had 100 years ago, or even 50 years ago. I would argue the majority of today's jobs not only didn't exist back then, but didn't even seem conceivable.

As long as something exists that someone else doesn't want to do, there will be work. Even when robots handle 90% of our labor intensive work, there will be new annoyances and problems that require a human element. Artificial intelligence is a long ways away from being better than even the most simple human mind for most creative tasks, and the more information we have to parse the more opportunity there will be for people to help curate and manage it. Or maybe, once we've run out of jobs that are aimed at making our lives comfortable we'll create jobs aimed at making our lives more exciting. More immersive video games and cinematic experiences. Missions to mars and space tourism. Extreme sports. Nature restoration. Etc, use your imagination.

We can't possibly know what the jobs of the future might be, but I'm pretty sure there will be enough for everybody.
Verizon and Vadafone agree on $130b buyout
I myself am not a big Verizon fan. But this is an interesting news story.
When public transport is decent, vehicles become a luxury. So really, this sounds like the continuation of Los Angeles-style mandated luxury to justify the expense of a white elephant property. Instead, finding someplace less committed to a lower threshold for net lifetime greenhouse emissions, expense and digging in mud on union hours appears preferable.
>If you think the majority of people would just lay their lives to waste because they don't need to doing the bidding of others just to survive, then you are wrong. 99% of able-bodied and able-minded adults would not succumb to idlery.

I would like to be the first to welcome you to planet Earth and introduce you human beings, as it is clear you have just arrived here.
You will not need as many total cars as they can be shared and most people do not use them most of the time anyway. Think health clubs and Internet service provided by telcos. They can be oversubscribed by designed because providers know that not everyone will use simultaneously.
Men's average height 'up 11cm since 1870s'
Who has gotten two years for that and lost the appeals?
2009: 'A bird dropping a piece of bread onto outdoor machinery has been blamed for a technical fault at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC) this week which saw significant overheating in sections of the mighty particle-punisher's subterranean 27-km supercooled magnetic doughnut... As a result, temperatures in part of the LHC's circuit climbed to almost 8 Kelvin - significantly higher than the normal operating temperature of 1.9, and close to the temperature at which the LHC's niobium-titanium magnets are likely to "quench", or cease superconducting and become ordinary "warm" magnets.'

[1] http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/11/05/lhc_bread_bomb_dump_...
The government pays AT&T to place its employees in drug-fighting units around the country. Those employees sit alongside Drug Enforcement Administration agents and local detectives

If the government pays your salary and you are embedded in the DEA, you are a government employee. Saying these people work for AT&T is patently absurd.
Okay, I think I see what you're saying about the decryption binary blob. With all this Ed Snowden stuff, it would not be unreasonable to have some suspicion of any network-software that has a wide user base. Netflix-app would be a good place to have a government backdoor...

Then how do we deal with piracy? Is piracy even a problem at all? I guess if iTunes is selling music without DRM and not falling apart, then we think TV-shows/movies can do the same?
> The USA poverty line is some 20x world median income.

Check: median --the middle of the range. Not the average value.

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

Quote: "The median of a finite list of numbers can be found by arranging all the observations from lowest value to highest value and picking the middle one"

Therefore the USA poverty line is not 20x the world median income, because the world median income is roughly half of Bill Gates' income. (Technically it's (H-L)/2 + L, where H = highest income, L = lowest income.)

> If you're making more than twenty times what the top of half the people on the planet are ...

Wait, that's not the median, that's the average (or mean). They're not the same. In a symmetrical distribution, the mean and median are the same, but most distributions aren't symmetrical. Personal incomes are most certainly not symmetrical, anywhere in the world.

So when specifying median or average, be sure you know the difference.
Should an entrepreneur be running the country? #auspol
This is why the idea of a basic income has taken off within the futurology crowd (including myself).

We have to do something about these folks and fairly quickly because it will be upon us soon I think.
It seems pretty clear that the mobile operators are the biggest commercial organization threats to personal liberty. Their only real competition is the banks.
Meet RegExpBuilder: Verbal Expressions’ rich, older cousin
Hygiene is much more about 'health' than it is about body odor. Several examples:

- brushing one's teeth (minimizing decay and tooth loss)

- properly washing one's hands (minimizing the spread of disease)

- having toilet facilities (http://www.satoilet.co.za/projects/)

http://www.wordnik.com/words/hygiene
I wonder if you could do it as an MVNO.
Doing the checks on landing doesn't address security though (rather than just drugs), so the airport checks are definitely pointless from that point of view. It's to show the public that politicians are 'tough on crime', even if they're not entirely committed to actually improving anything
Python also has a `StopIterationError` that is raised to signal the end of a `for` loop, which is not exceptional at all.
UPLab is not a “slight tweak” of CIELAB. It’s a lookup table for going back and forth between CIELAB and a slightly rotated version of Munsell space, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Munsell_color_system
Thanks for the feedback. I agree that as my goal was to keep things simple and clean, moving options into Advanced section does make sense. Will do that in next release.
If you haven't already seen The House I Live In, I recommend watching the documentary online. It will change the way you think about drugs and the United States' prison system. The movie doesn't focus specifically on technology, but it explores the by-any-means-necessary approach to law enforcement that helps facilitate things such as the Hemisphere Project mentioned in the story.

Trailer: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a0atL1HSwi8
SSI (disabled from birth) is $600 a month. SSDI (disabled after working for some time, generally 10 years) is $900-$3000 a month. Food stamps top out at $200 for an individual and a little more than $600 for a family of four. Section 8 (housing subsidies) is based on a complicated formula but in NYC can amount to a $1800 subsidy for a family of four.

People on SSI + Food Stamps + Section 8 + Medicaid certainly aren't living the lifestyles of the rich and famous, but their effective income at PPP is comparable the median household income in a country like Czech Republic or Portugal.
So how exactly would this be funded? Double taxes?

The rich would never pay anything more, the mid/upper would be squeezed.

Also: Deficit, debt and looming likelyhood of austerity strategy.
It's not unlike how you get to use Facebook "for free", but in reality you're feeding them information.

Guaranteed Minimum Income could be seen as a way to ensuring everyone is able to express their purchasing desires with less distortion from necessity, and that you're paying them for that "social service".

Idk.
Verizon to Buy Vodafone - Now the Largest Carrier in the World
Another day, another peek behind the veil of large scale (institutional and codified) data abuse.

We don't have to put up with them poking their fingers in our lives for much longer. We can build around them. We can make them irrelevant. It'll take a more concerted effort than building social networks for cats (where you spend four years of your life posturing about "changing the world" and "being successful" then the next day you cash out for big acquihire fake-success bucks).

Stop studying $FAD_OF_THE_WEEK and go back to your math and ML fundamentals. Play around with it. Build good things. Then build bigger good things. Build good things for good people.
?? There are only 2 regional bells now, and one of them is called AT&T.
The Haskell solution is to decompose the problem into the pure and impure parts while using types to eliminate a number of these. Then you end up with general classes of exceptions which can be handled using pure Maybe types, perhaps, in various locations as appropriate.

Resource availability (Is the network up? Is the connection to SQL up? Can we find the server? Did I just try to access the session but some other idiot clear it?)

Incomplete response (Did someone just turn off the SQL machine half way through the query? Have you just terminated me as a result of a deadlock?)

Result semantics and types (Are there any rows? Did you return a Null when I was expecting a value? Did you return a float when I was expecting an int? Did my value just overflow? Did you just return 0 and I tried to use it in division?)

Translation to intermediate language (Did the SQL compile?)

Assumptions about remote state (Do I have rights on this table? Did I just try to call a method on an object that is in fact null?)

Smart code handles these all separately. It's crazy to try to bundle them all into one function.
I met the founder of a successful service that builds landing pages for people and he said that startups aren't actually very good for them as they fairly quickly either go under or get a real site.

Most of their business is for things like real estate, people running seminars, more small scale types of business than the kinds of sites you typically associated with landing pages.
Neat site!

// declare foo as pointer to function (void) returning pointer to array 3 of int
int (*(*foo)(void ))[3]

That's actually a great example to throw at Go's syntax, which if you read from left-to-right, is perfectly one-to-one with the english:

// declare foo as pointer to function (void) returning pointer to array 3 of int
var foo *func() *[3]int

http://play.golang.org/p/1b48cjmZbx