skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Rights" are the repackaging of religion for the secular age[1]. I know this is controversial because it is heretical, but consider the correspondence. Rights have no physical existence, only a social existence. Rights only matter through the exact same mechanisms that the wrath of Allah matters - if enough people believe in it and are motivated by it then it has force. In the past, Christian missionaries spread religion to the world with books, words, charity, and occasionally the sword. Today, the post-Christian West spreads human rights to the world through dollars and bullets (the carrots and sticks of foreign policy).

By imagining new human rights, a corporation marks themselves as a member of the ultra-religious, sort of the pharisees of our day. Not only do they obey God's commands, but they invent new commands to follow and by this show off their righteousness. Yes, this stance is made to atone for the sin of making profit - which is a minor sin in the West - "it is easier for a camel to pass through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to inherit the kingdom of God" after all. Do not be mislead, liberalism (including the "classical liberalism" of Locke and Jefferson) is Christianity without God. Jefferson's Bible makes the point explicit.

Making new human rights is good business. A college education became a human right sometime in the last 50 years and today over $200 billion is spent on tuition each year in the USA alone. Yes, it is disingenuous, but also quite clever, for a corporation to position their product as a new human right.

Even the negative rights (freedom of speech, rights to property, etc.) require the positive right to protective services for those rights to have meaning. If we examine the history of such rights, we find they are rooted in English tradition. Essentially the modern idea of human rights is an idealization of 18th century English law. But "human rights" philosophy gives that law a mystical existence and rightness aside from the specific historical balance of power that led to its creation.

[1] What follows is ripped straight out of Nietzsche and Moldbug. Grazie, signori. I can recommend Moldbug's masterful trilogy on Idealism, which includes the weird new atheist religion-like philosophies:

a) http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/04/why-do-...

b) http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/idealis...

c) http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/2007/05/our-pla...
You talk about technological progress and innovation as something contradictory to any sort of predictable process iterating on an existing product.

This isn't always the case. A lot of new innovating ideas are incorporated into existing systems and products. Whether something stands alone by itself or not is a packaging question- not a judge of how innovating something new is. A key new feature in a complex system can solve large long-standing limitations and have huge impact.

Rather than only working on new interesting ideas as side projects, you can incorporate time to experiment with new ideas during a shipping cycle. Prototypes and answer a lot of questions in a short amount of time, and those answers can be incorporated into planning for new features.

Predictable process doesn't have to stifle innovation- and can create a forum for new innovating ideas to be discussed and executed on well.
Yes I bet the author came from the German system where if your pigeonholed at 14 or so as a "technician" level at school your social mobility is very restricted.
But what you save in speaker cable you lose on hearing aids, surely?
It's always been a gamble. If you achieve even a modicum of success or notoriety, your "drop out" status becomes incredibly valuable. You're a trailblazer, a rebel who blew past convention on her way to glory.

If you fail, you're an arrogant idiot who thought she was too cool for school.

What's fascinating about Holmes is that she's a drop out in the biotech/health care realm. This has long been considered a protected area, one where heavy education is a must, as lives are on the line. Founders are expected to be PhDs or MDs with decades of research and/or clinical experience.

Holmes has a decade of experience, and no degree. This is going to be a lot of fun to watch.
Ask HN: What exactly can NSA feasibly do with Encryption
I am not an expert on encryption. I would love it if someone in the know, with encryption background could clear up for me a few things:

1. How feasible is it that NSA can brute-force or attack in other ways commonly used encryptions, like once used by Tor or TrueCrypt.
2. How feasible is it that NSA can brute-force intercepted SSH traffic?

It's not like I have anything to hide, but I am curious about how safe those protocols really are. In the recent days there have been reports assigning NSA almost God like code braking powers, but based on what little I know about encryption, some of the reports sound a bit overblown to me.

So, if you are an expert, please impart your knowledge on the rest of us ;) Thanks!
I want something that can do the opposite of this. I have a bunch of old photos that are messed up where the bottom half is pink or offset or something else. I just haven't had the time to dig into the spec to figure out how to undo it.
I thought the article mentioned both sea turtles and humans (China, Japan) as consumers of jellyfish.
This is something Canonical should have considered before developing they're own display server. The community attitude from the start seems to generally be "we won't carry support upstream", so this doesn't seem unreasonable.
This is interesting in terms of information theory. When you compress information you are basically figuring out the pattern behind something, and encoding that pattern instead of the entire image. For example, PNG which assumes that pixels are more likely to be the same or similar to the pixels above or to the left of them. So you only have to encode how much difference each pixel has to it's neighbors, rather than the entire value of every pixel.

If you were to randomly corrupt a highly redundant format, like a bitmap, it would just change a few pixels. On more compressed formats like JPEG it seems to affect the entire image, and in very specific ways (mainly the color of every block of pixels after the point that was corrupted.)

If you corrupted a perfectly compressed image, it would give you a different image entirely, possibly of something very similar. I.e. if you had a image format very good at compressing faces, corrupting it would result in a different face entirely, not randomly misplaced pixels or colors. And the face would be similar to the original, maybe with stuff like a different nose type, or an extra freckle.

The corruption is revealing what kinds of assumptions it is making about the content.
What? Due to the Curry-Howard Correspondence, mathematical proofs are in fact very precisely executable: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curry%E2%80%93Howard_correspond...

There may be lots of room to improve the "UI" of math [0] but I don't see how you could desire more power or verifiability than what modern mathematical proof systems offer.

[0] http://worrydream.com/KillMath/
Apparently, the Soviets were too, working on something like Cybersyn, but didn't complete it -- http://bit.ly/15br831 (ru.wikipedia.org)
You could also re purpose that old content by updating with further thoughts and a new URL. Similar to what they do on "48 Hours" or with "60 Minutes" on CNBC "we last ran this story in..." [1] Just throw a coat of paint over it and let everyone feast.

[1] Analogies are just repackaged ideas.
http://dp.la/
When I see this all I think is that these are the requests from lower level agents who have to fill in paperwork to get their data. I just cannot now believe that upper levels of the intelligence agencies do not have complete and total access.
Here in downtown Reno they're 9am-5pm Mon-Thur and 10-5 on Sunday. That's basically post office style hours (ie when everyone's at work or in school) with the added bonus of being closed Friday and Saturday. That's pretty awful.

http://www.washoecounty.us/library/libraries.html
Scientists develop 'uncrackable' quantum encryption networks
Thank you for writing this. I hadn't taken the time to look at the usernames among all the negativity in this thread and realize much of it was from the same person.

Side note when looking at your profile: looks like both hnofficehours.com and hackernewsers.com are down/no more? Dead links.
I wasn't there so I'm not comfortable relating the specifics, his comments about it indicated that people who had offices sort of disconnected from the rest of the population.

Can you say more about the challenges of people moving behind you? I felt similarly but it had more to do with whether or not people would correctly interpret what I was doing / not doing. So for example I'll read something from a different subject to pull my brain out of an endless loop when I am not making progress on a problem. Is that goofing off? Sure it might look that way if you didn't ask but if you did ask you would get the full story. So can people own up to asking? Or do they run with their assumptions?

As a manager I like to know that folks are making progress against the things they are responsible for. Sometimes they have milestones, sometimes not, so I spend some time trying to understand that progress. If there is little progress and a lot of web surfing, that is a useful conversation to have (trying to be more productive). But if someone is spending their days checking in excellent code and leaves TMZ up on their monitor I'm totally fine with that too. It reminds me of an anecdote.

So my daughters had this tendency to do their homework in front of the television. At first glance it looked like more "TV watching" than "studying" and the conversation we had was about results vs consequences. I didn't care one way or the other if they spent time watching television, as long as the priority was to get their work done. The consequences of not getting that work done occurred whether I approved or didn't approve. But I was also quite clear that it was their choice and so there aren't any excuses for poor work if it is done while watching TV, its just the indicator that you can't really do both and expect to do good work. Conversely if you do both and your work is fine, then that is totally fine.

If I can develop a level of trust with someone that they realize what I care about is that they get done what they say they will (and that getting done both a reasonable amount of work and at good quality levels) then they also understand I have no issue with them apparently "goofing off."
Does anyone else see the "-The Management" comment as having more than a tinge of sarcasm? I think people are taking it a little too seriously.
I have come up with a lot of ideas to solve business problems, but I am reluctant to implement them for the concern that selling to such businesses would be a far more difficult problem than simply creating something that works better than what they are currently using. Business often make stupid decisions based on relationships with sells people or brand recognition more than merit of the solution. Of course, this problem exists in the consumer space as well, but the market is so much larger (everyone is a consumer, not everyone makes decisions on what solutions to deploy in a business).
Obscure program?? It happened all the time in the 1930's. If you couldn't pay your tax bill, your property was auctioned off on the courthouse steps.
>> the Clojure IRC channel

What's the full address?
Here is something that might interest you : https://register.blib.us [ If you own PDF ebooks ]
I don't think I mentioned any technical reason? Allocating developer time is generally a management decision.

If anything, Intel has already put their resources into Wayland and the lack of any good technical reasons for Mir's existence probably played a large role in their decision.

I don't see why this is so shocking really, many other projects in the Linux graphics stack have already said that they won't be supporting Mir upstream any time soon. At this point, I'd be more surprised of hearing a project supporting Mir than the other way around.
Pretty sure this is still circumventing an anti-piracy measure, so falls fowl of DMCA.
Scheduling my college classes in Matlab.
That book is on my to-read list, yet I don't know what to think of a book that starts like this: http://i.imgur.com/rSc0fpw.png
It appears that only Hitler can kill Hitler, and perhaps, Chuck Norris.
There's diagnostics for all which is working on paper based diagnostics. They are so cheap , that they target them for the third world. And they only need a blood drop.

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/09/27/health/27paper.html?pagewa...

And this site also looks interesting:

http://www.mf20.org/
tl;dr:

AG: Is there any way to distinguish a false memory from a real one?
EL: Without independent corroboration, little can be done to tell a false memory from a true one.

AG: Could brain imaging one day be used to do this?
EL: I collaborated on a brain imaging study in 2010, and the overwhelming conclusion we reached is that the neural patterns were very similar for true and false memories. We are a long way away from being able to look at somebody's brain activity and reliably classify an authentic memory versus one that arose through some other process.
Not everyone has the same preferences. I'd definitely prefer a one-person office without a window to any open office space.

The room in your photo would look a lot better to me just by replacing the overhead fluorescent lighting with some incandescent lamps and putting some art on the walls.
that may be due to where they learned, I am doing a HND in computer science and we are learning C# and nothing else...

before i began i knew (well enough to make use of) C, vala and a small amount of lisp and PHP
Public Libraries : State of America's Libraries Report 2013
Honest question, what's the difference between 'appear' and 'apparently' to you? As far as I use the words, one of their meanings is identical.
People are hungry today. How to reconcile that with a long-term approach of husbanding genetic diversity?

Being careful is an 'elitist first-world' precisely because you aren't hungry today.
Libraries do curate their collections, but they serve a lot of different people and they more closely accomplish their mission by having the books 10 different kinds of people want than by having just the books one person wants.

If they seem to be falling behind on book replacement or addition, it's probably for financial reasons. If they are woefully out of date or off base in a particular section (computer science is common, sadly), then they could probably use your expertise. I help pick finance books for one library.

However, public libraries ultimately expect people with particular and/or extensive interests to be able to search the catalog and order books through inter library loan.
hah! http://glitcher.korny.cc/ -- i made this a couple of days ago as well :p
Being watched makes electricity users consume less
And yet I still see people saying "no, how dare you compare government to a bunch of thieves?".
Beautiful photography, I'm hooked before even reading a word
My method for doing this involves writing gibberish into or deleting content from a jpeg opened in HexFiend

http://ridiculousfish.com/hexfiend/

It's very trial and error, but the results can be fun when you screenshot each progressive glitch and then gif them together to get stuff like this:

http://24.media.tumblr.com/4d77ff1ee75c119a03cac1eb90952505/...

Neat that someone automated the process, though.
> Actually, it is something only some cultures practice.

> Consider the possibility that you simply do not understand their goals, and are thus unable to perceive them.

The ability or willingness to inconvenience yourself at the present in order to achieve something in the future is really a very basic thing. Hence my comparison to the absurd "ability to drink water without drowning yourself". You are accusing them of having a ludicrously extreme shortcoming.

This is all nothing more than "mexicans are lazy, germans are great engineers" wrapped up in the trappings of academia.
"All because he didn’t pay a $134 property tax bill." [1]

What is the scope of the problem here?

Ok:

"Others weren’t as lucky. Tax lien purchasers have foreclosed on nearly 200 houses since 2005 and are now pressing to take 1,200 more, many owned free and clear by families for generations."

Out of home many?

"The retired Marine sergeant lost his house "

Obligatory "and he was a good guy who fought for his country" added in for extra emotion (in addition the picture of course of a respectable citizen).

All this is sad and most certainly an interesting read. But it seems more suite for Taibbi in Rolling Stone.

Would be nice if in addition to writing emotional appeals they enlisted the help of someone (say a think tank) that could do further analysis and come up with some suggestions as far as reform that are backed up by research and in writing.

[1] Noting that this dates back to 2006 and yes if you ignore simple notices bad things happen. Don't pay your insurance bill? You won't have insurance if there is a fire. Etc.
True investigative journalism is a remarkably expensive process with little chance of recouping overall costs. Even after the initial draft, an extraordinary amount of fact checking and editorial requirements/standards are applied to the piece. Some of it's for reputation reasons and a lot of it is for legal reasons: slander suits aren't cheap.

I hope papers start providing full 'Credits' to what goes into a piece so as to better inform the reader how many people in the chain it takes to arrive at the final copy.
Can someone point me to the laws and regulations that allow this? Someone who owns their home completely (with no mortgage) can lose the entirety of the home due to unpaid taxes? Even if the value of the home far exceeds the tax debt?

This is mindboggling to me.
So could anyone suggest a nice book for a High School student (I know basic algebra, but no Calculus so far) to learn math? The school system is not very good here, so I have to do some of the learning by myself.

I have looked at Concrete Mathematics by Donald Knuth, would that be complicated to understand?
That makes sense. I'm not sure positive rights such as the right to a lawyer, or the right to police protection, are fundamental human rights. If you draw a distiction between positive and negative liberty a la Kant [1], you can argue that only negative liberties can be basic human rights. Sure we have a right to legal counsel, but that also implies a duty. What if no one in the city wants to be a lawyer.

[1] http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/liberty-positive-negative/
You're probably right. Dinner to me falls into the same category. Just as there's nothing wrong with a beer or a glass of wine with dinner, there's nothing wrong with a cold glass of Coke by the pool. It's the failure to socially recognize the dangers of excess in sugary drinks that's problematic.
This might be also of interest to ebook lovers: https://register.blib.us (A Privacy friendly platform for accessing and searching your books from anywhere).
> Both companies have pragmatically mixed progressive ideas with more traditional ones such as encouraging internal competition and measuring performance.

Apparently the author and his editors failed to notice that he has already disassembled his straw man before he starts attacking it...
I agree the doom and gloom is tiresome and poorly substantiated. That being said, the phone market is not the same as the music player market.

The iPods segregated themselves among different use cases and different needs. The Shuffle was always pitched as the "active" iPod (see: the clip on the back), the Nano the everyday iPod, and the iPod Classic the one for the serious enthusiast who needs enormous storage above all else.

The smartphone market lacks such segmentation. Everybody wants a phone that makes phone calls, receives texts, and runs apps. There's not really any room to segment price-wise except to simply make the same thing but cheaper.
Queue up the Ayn Rand acolytes in 3...2...1

It's not a coincidence that this is happening to mostly elderly people who otherwise own their properties in the clear, people who are often burdened with serious health problems.

There is a simple fix. Require the liens to be paid off when there is a change of ownership. The city knows what it is owed, and that it will get the money eventually. If the city needs the money today, it ought to be able to borrow the funds (not all that different that accounts receivable factoring). Throwing people out of their homes over small amounts is inhumane.
Oh, come on. Apple's been selling low-cost iPhones for a few years now. They're called 'the last two years' models.' (http://store.apple.com/us/buy-iphone/iphone4)

On top of that, for years now, gallons of ink have been spilled over hand-wringing about how Apple needs to go downmarket. And now, apparently, we have handwringing over Apple 'going downmarket.'

All this proves, I think, is that articles about Apple generate page views.
Islam has the most fair rules against Interest. The Quran says:
Chapter 2 - Baqarah - Verse 275: http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/quran/verses/002... (Read the next 10 or so verses)

and

Chapter 3 - Verse 130: http://www.usc.edu/org/cmje/religious-texts/quran/verses/003...

"O you who believe! Devour not usury (interest), doubled and multiplied; but fear Allah (God); that you may (really) prosper."

Some more quotes:
http://www.answering-christianity.com/yahya_ahmed/riba.htm

Allah (God) has declared war on those who take interest: http://www.hilalplaza.com/islam/Interest.html
The DC local government is somewhat remarkable in how corrupt it is. It seems like every other day some major political player gets indicted for corruption of some sort.
What's wrong with public-key encryption a la PGP? Assuming your keys use A LOT of bits I don't think a brute force attack will succeed in any reasonable time. You should be able to trust a public key if it has been signed by several trustworthy people. (I'm sure crypto fans could come up with a list of "trustworthy key signers".)

PGP (and GPG) is open software. It's all pretty simple compared to the algorithms developed just for crypto. Isn't (open, simple, tough-to-crack) the sort of thing you want?
Yes, the world is ending! Just regular conspiracy theory BS, which ironically does have some valid points but the conclusion is absurd.
We are soon past the need for genetic diversity. That is just a word for 'random crap we found when civilization began'. We're way past that, we're designing our ecosystems continent by continent. We're designing our food. We've increased yields 100-fold over the pitiful weedy strains found in nature.

Its just futile to suggest returning to some idyllic imaginary past where nature provided for us. ITs never done that. Its tried to kill us any way it can for any reason or no reason. If a plant could increase available nutrition to its seed by making it poisonous to humans, killing us and growing from our corpses, it would happen in a blink.

We've entered an age of engineered food (and engineered everything else too). Its up to us now, however it turns out.