skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I have never heard of any public highschool that views Atlas Shrugged as critical reading

It's (been) required reading at West Point, amongst other places in the US. High-school reading lists are probably poor indicators: Plato, Nietzche, and Kant would be Atypical if not unheard of (if that is your standard).

Atlas shrugged has other interesting reasons to read it, however. Its main theme is actually dealing with assholes at work. Academics are embarrased by it, because its filled with "non-collegial" behaviour. But that just means they don't get out much.

Economics as a field which assumes opportunistic and deceitful behaviour are non-events. Atlas Shrugged is a great reminder of the fallacy in that. A typical Economist would consider Rand a "Crackpot", for using opportunistic and deceitful behaviour as basis for an empirical philosophy. But consider that lawyers get paid to write contracts to mitigaet the very dangers that economists assume away. Your Lawyer will tell you...never trust an Economist...theyre all crackpots and live in Ivy towers.
=D

As a side bar, have you actually read Nietzche? I think academics (and a few of his old landlords) would consider him more of a "crackpot" than Rand. Clearly Rand and Nietzsche have nothing in common? Perhaps other than its the lie that tells the truth.
You're wrong and I wrote a simulation to prove it. To repeat my original assertion, the probability of winning if you switch is (N-1)/(N(N-2)). For N=4, this equals 3/8. Run the following simulation and you'll get roughly 0.375, as my formula predicts.

http://pastebin.com/i89M4GZU
The paradox is interesting to discover and discuss errors in reasoning, but we should agree from the start that any proof that one should always switch (or that any behaviour could increase the expected gain) is flawed.

This can be easily proven by:

1. Taking at face value that choosing an envelope is random.
2. Adding a second player that is given the other envelope.

In that scenario, any reasoning that leads one player to always switch would apply to the other player too. Both players would swap their envelopes. Clearly, the expected value for both cannot go up. Thus any reasoning that mandates switching /has/ to be wrong.

(If you have issue with adding another player, instead assume a parallel universe where the player chose the other envelope.)

The error in reasoning is usually to assume that the envelope contains X and then reasoning about X/2 and 2X. In reality, the envelopes always contain X and 2X. When you actually use the parallel universe version, clearly one has X and the otehr has 2X. Nobody has X/2 (nor 4X, nor any other expected value your theory may come up with).
K&R C Programming, Quantum Books, Cambridge, MA
Full text -http://bjsm.bmj.com/content/early/2013/09/03/bjsports-2013-0...
I could just as easily argue that it's wrong to include redundant semantic information. If I were to begin using double commas,, should everyone else alter their reading habits to accommodate my affectation?

Do double commas serve some purpose other than a presentational quirk? Double spaces at the end of a sentence have semantic meaning distinct from a single space, as shown by other replies.

I think for your argument to make sense you either need to show that double spaces don't have any special distinguishing characteristic at the end of a sentence, or allow that they do, and double commas to as well, but we're better off without them. Otherwise, I don't really see a relation between double commas and double spaces at the end of a sentence.
$40,500 is a lot of money for a public school district. This kind of spending really feels like a game of whack-a-mole to me. There were two suicides in your school district? Ignore the underlying factors and and go straight to "social media," because that's what all the buzz is about today, right?

It's a shame that given the serious shortage of public school funding in California that spending is done in such a myopic (and frankly, stupid) way. If you really want to build a better school, is adding excessive policing the first thing you should do?
"In-app payments on iOS and Android are the one place where paid snacks exist at scale... (There are individual games that generate over one billion dollars per year from in-app payments..." Holy shit. I never would have expected that much revenue from game phone apps, post-play.
Apache has had an FAQ about this for years that deals with exactly this issue:

http://www.apache.org/foundation/license-faq.html#PatentScop...

Almost every company that has adopted the CLA (which is a lot) takes this view.

This is essentially a non-issue in practice.
Celebration honors Belmont-Redwood Shores Little League team
In my original version of the post I had intended to argue for a geometric mean, which was sort of a joke, as it only works where f(x) is a constant k*x. So the statement "A false resolution follows, first to spot the problem..." appears in the post. Upon seeing this an enterprising and intelligent person may have clicked "reply"

While writing this I realized that inverting the definition of A gave a different resolution based loosely on operator theory, and posted that instead. A couple minutes later I realized the mistake and changed the beginning to refer to the first to spot "a" problem.

The argument you've presented is good, but you have attacked the well-foundedness of the problem itself rather than the logic I've applied. I'm not sure if you get the cookie.
Long-lived keys should not be unprotected in memory/execution environment of general purpose hosts.

I'd take an RSA 2048 smartcard before an RSA 4096 on my Mac.
This is about the ASF Contributor License Agreement, not the Apache License itself.
How a Relationship Dies on Facebook
Well, with the distribution I gave it could be $2 (with probability 1/2), or $4 (with probability 1/4), or $8 (with probability 1/8) etc. That distribution doesn't have a maximum.

For a simpler example, imagine tossing a coin and counting the number of tosses it takes you to get a head. There is no limit on the number of tosses it might take, it just gets less and less likely as the numbers get bigger. We could get any positive integer and there are an infinite number of integers.

Similarly, the envelope problem has an infinite number of possibilities because there is no maximum amount that could be in the envelope. The article doesn't specify the exact odds of any given amount showing up in the envelope so I gave some specific odds that demonstrate the problem.

Probability theory still works when you have an infinite number of possibilities but it has a few subtleties that aren't commonly taught until undergrad. One of those is that the expected/average value of a random variable doesn't always exist so you have to be careful when reasoning informally.
Right you just need Apple's private key. That should be easy, and not compromise the integrity of the whole system at all.
https://gist.github.com/tedtieken/6567112

Run the simulator and you'll see, the ev is 3x/2, regardless of switching behavior.

Feel free to modify if you think I've innacurrately conceptualizer the problem.

Also, please excuse some non pythonic names, I'm writing the code on an iPhone.
i like asana alot
It's the same thing of root/intermediate TLS certificates. You basically store the root in the safe and keep the intermediate online, so you can use it sign stuff (eg: generate certificates for customers' domains). If the intermediate is compromised, you revoke it, get the root and generate a new intermediate.
The alternative is a regulated market, where I trust a government entity, full of humans who are vulnerable to the same forces of corruption, incompetence and greed, to give me accurate information and not be bought and paid for by private entities and thus used by private entities to give them even more influence and power.

Also, in what context are we dealing with a free market here and how is it relevant?
Spamming your websites in comments isn't the solution to having multiple accounts hellbanned from submitting.

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=npguy

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=newnpguy

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=newernpguy

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=newestnpguy

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=brandnewnpguy

https://news.ycombinator.com/user?id=nevernpguy
>This will filter out and miss the really nasty children (who'll just use networks with privacy)

Well the obvious solution to that is to outlaw privacy.
Goddamn, what does it take to get a cookie around here? :D
> Starting something with the goal of disrupting an existing industry is like becoming an actor or singer with the goal of making it to the Top 10 charts: both types of efforts are doomed to fail because they focus on the wrong thing.

Charts are a poor analogy. Top 10 charts are dominated by commercial music, with artists of proven track-record or backed by big labels. Very few artists manage to be both "disruptive" and commercial successes. Even solid albums are something from the past, now all production and advertising gets focused in making one single "stick". Everything is rigged to make "being famous" a objective.

So, no, focusing on making the best job possible (like a real artist) doesn't guarantee your success, quite the opposite. At most, guarantees good critic's reviews.
No one suggested buttons where links suffice.

On the otherhand, if you think a bolded link is a good replacement for an action button like "submit", lets agree to disagree.
For anyone who enjoyed this and might like to look at similarly themed pieces (impact of social media / internet communication on relationships) - the following might be of interest:

* Catfish [movie, USA] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1584016/

* Black Mirror [series, UK] - http://www.imdb.com/title/tt2085059/

Both a little on the bleak/dark side, forewarning!
In-app payments accounted for 76% of total revenue in the App Store.
I don't have a problem being invasive per se, but if we eventually change the environment such that we have a very difficult time surviving (which seems a realistic possibility the long term) then I'd say we're a pretty poor species.
> I bet he enjoyed his time there

We call this "vacation". Our leave policy is plenty generous to take things like this into account (unlimited sick, unlimited unpaid, and 4-5 weeks paid).

This policy is about long-term remote work. For short-term things like that, it's not worth the hassle of working at all.
The last sentence is somewhat questionable, except at the top universities. Only at the most grant-successful universities does the overhead actually break even in recouping the extra outlays universities put into research. Examples: construction of research-specific laboratory facilities, co-financing of expenditures they wouldn't have otherwise undertaken (many grants require co-funding), increased salaries and hiring packages caused by bidding wars for faculty who have successful grant-getting records, department backstopping of PhD stipends when a large group has a dry year grant-wise, salaries for grant-writing assistance and research-support staff, etc., etc.

The former Dean of Georgia Tech's College of Computing reached a similar conclusion: http://innovate-edu.com/2011/05/18/if-you-have-to-ask-ten-su...
The article mentions the Apache ICLA (Individual Contribution License Agreement) and not the Apache License v2 as stated in the title.

For further information about the types of Apache license:
https://www.apache.org/licenses/
Freedom online: A tragic death, libel, legal threats, and reddit's /r/bicycling
Where can you get a trustworthy smartcard?
Yup, I actually have a license for it and currently using it with MonoGame. It's also quite nice for native development as well with how they tweak the APIs to be more C# like instead of Java (plus async/await).

I didn't recommend it since it isn't free, but it's well worth the money if doing cross-platform apps (they also give students a reasonable discount). If initial cost is a concern, Scala would be my alternative choice.
Pax's actions silenced others -- are you referring to his tweets or did he do something else?
If one potential solution to free market problems doesn't work, that doesn't mean that the problems don't exist, aren't free market problems, or don't matter.
That does seem to address the matter. IANAL, but I would expect that a court would take the published FAQ entry into account if the question were ever raised, given that the ASF is here interpreting its own agreement.
But as the article points out, the typographers claim otherwise.
Indeed, status symbols generally depend on one criteria, namely the ratio of marketing to availability. Lots of marketing and little availability makes it a status symbol. Less availability and little marketing makes it a novelty.

See for example red spinels vs rubies. These aren't food but they show the same dynamic at work. The most famous "rubies" in the world are actually red spinels, but because they aren't marketed heavily they are seen as second class gems.
They're sharing frustrations, emotions, connecting. Just because someone is trying to share a feeling doesn't make what they're saying instantly vapid. I thought it was great.
Modernity, Madness, and the History of Neuroscience
> I guess there's a commercial reason for this

I doubt that's the case. I bet you that if GitHub were to break out their revenue by plan that the vast majority comes from business plans and GitHub Enterprise. I would be astonished if any of these customers would ever export their dormant repositories for storage.

I'm sure that it's just a matter of them prioritizing this vs. the million other things that are on their backlog. As with most other software companies, your best bet would probably be to start emailing their support with requests for it so that they know it's important to the community at large.
Terence Tao has some interesting writing on the interplay between rigour and intuition:

http://terrytao.wordpress.com/career-advice/there%E2%80%99s-...

Nevertheless, this problem is interesting because people tend to trip up on the maths. The actual behaviour, even in simulation, is very unintuitive (the mean gain from swapping envelopes does not converge to zero over time, and in fact does not converge to anything at all but oscillates wildly). It's a good introduction to the subtleties of probability theory in non-finite spaces.
So this posting is by someone who thinks software patents are a good thing and still contributes to open source software? How does this cognitive dissonance work out? Is he not aware that many open source licenses have exactly such terms in order to fight software patents? This isn't something new or outrageous.
Venturing just a little further than the title, into the first paragraph, we come across a (large, boldfaced) edited addition to the effect that "All of this applies to the regular Apache License (v2) as well".
I don't believe a single stated "No" in the FAQ will be very meaningful, except to point out that even the creators of the license failed to notice the loophole.

Edit: Also, the fact that the interpretation can exist and is in written form is what suddenly makes it an issue, at the very least for anyone going forward. (IANAL)
Can't comment on trustworthiness but Kernel Concepts sells a nice OpenPGP smartcard developed by Werner Koch, the GnuPG guy.

http://shop.kernelconcepts.de/product_info.php?products_id=4...
> After they got really aggressive about signing me up as a "watcher" to repos.

You may want to turn off auto-subscriptions to repositories you have push access to: https://github.com/watching
What you really need is something like LateX which adjusts the space following a full stop dynamically. This causes problems like detecting a full stop sometimes (consider something like St. Olaf which will look funny unless you tell LaTeX not to do this!)

The fact is that the extra spacing makes stuff easier to read. It isn't usually 1 space vs 2. I think LaTeX uses more nuanced rules than that.
Time management versus Bandwidth management
Why does anyone link to cdixon posts?
Social media monitoring is a huge industry at the moment, which I can say from first-hand experience. Lots of businesses, individuals, and organizations want to know what is being said about them or their field.

Even though no company providing these services can have perfect coverage (not even a perfect coverage of public internet communications), or perfect accuracy (generally it boils down to what you can express with search facets and boolean expressions), they can very aggressively sell the capability to people and organizations, because the 'idea' makes sense, and the fear/need is genuine - maybe there are relevant good/bad things happening out there that we need to know about.

I think this may be the real story here: there are private companies incentivized to sell surveillance of public communications, regardless of end-result quality for the customer, and education is just one of many places where that is relevant.

I don't think this is going to change - we now take for granted that search engines can see what is on the public web, and the same will become true of public social media -- although these tools are (generally) not yet as well known to the public as Google web search.

I'd personally really like to see distributed and private social communications technology to take off, so that this kind of legitimized spying becomes near-irrelevant, and I think there are big opportunities there - but we're not there yet and there'll be some interesting ground to navigate in the meantime.
Giving a perpetual royalty free license to anything you may ever patent for the rest of your life because of a subtle loophole in a license that people aren't generally aware of is, IMO, new and outrageous, irrespective of the utility (or lack thereof) of software patents.
The original statement of the problem says you're offered the choice before you open the envelope. I guess I was sloppy about the $20 assumption too. As for the case you do know, I still feel wrong about the conclusion that you should switch, but I can't formalize it.
I really think this kind of drama is off-topic for Hacker News. There are too many posts about twitter celebrities getting angry at each other and then trying to involve the rest of the world in their stupid fights. I mean the 120 char limit basically makes it certain you will be misunderstood, taken out of context and that the only way to get attention is to post extreme soundbites.

Sorry to single this submission out. I just want less "blogosphere news" on HN and more technology articles.
How to Build the Miraculous Talking Glove
I should have clarified, I meant kidnapping for money, like the Lindbergh situation. Taking a little kid and leaving a ransom note, hoping to get money from the parents. That almost never happens in the US today, in large part due to the Lindbergh kidnapping. The FBI mades that sort of kidnap an extremely high priority and got quite good at solving such cases, to the point that in the US - unlike many other countries - it is not in any way a sensible business opportunity.

(In Mexico, on the other hand, it is a major business opportunity.)

The vast majority of "missing kid" events you hear about are related to custody battles - the noncustodial parent runs off without permission of the court. There are also a few (though it's quite rare) events of the sort in that list - usually teenagers or adults abducted for sexual purposes.

> There are scores of kidnappings in this list, and it only covers ten years.

There are 26 kidnappings in that list, but nearly half weren't in the US - it includes events in Baghdad, Columbia, Spain, England, and various other places. The 15 events in the US in ten years establish that it happens at least 1.5 times a year in this country of 313 million people.

Meanwhile about 1,000 americans per year are struck by lightning and 100 of those are killed by it. So kidnapping even of all varieties is an exceedingly rare event that we are in all likelihood WAY too afraid of. (In the US, anyway)
This article does make a point about what to do. It gives a set of solutions for global warming that are more in line with what keeps humans alive. After all, if we do what the laws suggest : go below the carrying capacity of the earth for human population, the human population should drop to ~ 10 million to stop global warming, and the remainder should live without so much as heat from a campfire. Needless to say, striving for that is cruel, useless and completely insane. Just like the previous followers of Malthus were.

Instead the article argues we should use the tactics that humans have always used for survival to compensate global warming:
* introduce a species that solves the problem for us. Right now the most efficient co2->o2 species are ~3% efficient. The difference need not be big, by the way. If we introduce a form of algae that's 3.2% efficient into the oceans, global warming will reverse in about a year. Note that some theories say that earlier in the planet's history, there were such more efficient species, which should mean they can easily come back without intervention and may suddenly solve out problem for us. The same goes for trees. It would not be a huge adaptation for trees to become more green, although it would take more time.
* find another fuel to burn (e.g. a more complete switch to uranium, or solar panels. Although solar panels still necessitate competing with nature, which is bound to have ecological consequences if the usage goes up. Both pose the problem of moving the fuel around)

I would like to add that somehow the UN's policies and all the "green" policy efforts have moved the world away from nuclear power, and into coal power. Whatever the green movement is doing, it needs to learn that there are consequences to decisions. Moving away from nuclear means coal power plants. Why ? Look at the energy prices. Moving away from coal means nuclear power plants. Until this is understood widely, the green movement will continue to make things much worse by insane unconditional opposition to anything that doesn't completely satisfy their demands, including the demand that there can't be any impact on their lifestyle. I find it very weird that given such horrible results, the movement has any standing in society at all.

Btw: I hate sl. Too many type errors and I didn't know how it can be interrupted until a few months ago. It takes quite a while to pass on the screen on a 30" monitor.
https://gist.github.com/CalvinCarmack/6567168

$1500308 500308/1000000 0.500308 never switched
$1500301 500301/1000000 0.500301 always switched
It didn't do much to boost sales of the Atrix. The fingerprint reader doesn't do much to boost security when passwords are ultimately still being used. You don't need someone's finger when the account you are signing into still has inadequate security measures to begin with.