skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Thanks for pointing out the early Chinese phonetic effort, I remember reading it about in the excellent The World's Writing Systems by OUP.

Resisting efforts to broaden literacy for the masses is also cites as the reason why the Ancient Egyptian hieroglyphic writing did not evolve much over the vast time period (first inscriptions around BCE 2800, last inscription dated to CE 394, that's more than 3,000 years!). Specifically, although they did have 24 uniliteral signs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Egyptian_uniliteral_signs#Unili...), which they could have used as an alphabet they never did so.
It seems worth mentioning specific books by name, since lists of lists don't help people differentiate the great from the good. Algorithms by S. Dasgupta, C.H. Papadimitriou, and U.V. Vazirani looks really promising as an introductory algorithms textbook. I wonder if anyone has experience using it in class?

http://www.cs.berkeley.edu/~vazirani/algorithms.html

I wonder a little about that text's status as a freely available draft and whether it would be kosher to distribute the pdf if that site disappears.
This is becoming my biggest concern about these Basic Income plans, too.

Giving this amount of money to every person in Switzerland would total almost half of the country's GDP.

Even if you exclude children and get the total amount down around 30% of GDP, you're still right around the total amount of money that the Swiss government takes in in a year.

So to get this basic income with no new taxes, the Swiss government would have to abandon all its other obligations. Or, put another way, to fund this and still function at the same level, the Swiss government would have to double its tax income.
The contrast with Facebook couldn't be more stark.

Google is advertising the change extensively, and they explain it in simple English.

Google lets you opt out.

And if you were already opted out, they retain that more restrictive setting without you having to do anything.

I personally don't want to be an unpaid shill for anybody, which is why I refuse to create G+ or Facebook accounts.

But I have to recognize that Google's approach is far more open and honest than Facebook's.
It is quite stabilizing.

The fact is, our .gov is doing a pretty shitty job as far as social contracts go, and the incentives for playing nice only exist once you've bought into the thing wholesale and are doing quite well for yourself.

Given the way we treat felons, the poor, and the ill I'm rather surprised things aren't boiling over sooner.
Do you have a link? It's hard to search for this stuff without just getting links about advertising on twitter.
Broadcasters Petition Supreme Court in Aereo Case
Congratulations on the new job. I'm sure that sitting in front of a computer all day like some kind of fleshy office appliance was getting really old - oh, wait.
Yep, that's probably it.
To the people running this Kickstarter I want to say: don't give up. It does seem like it won't fund at this point but the concept could be re-formulated. Certainly the interest is present!
We want average joe to know that bikeindex.org exists and we want to give people a way to prove they aren't selling stolen bikes.

If you had indexed the bike you would have proof of ownership.
Yes, it is a smart model. However consider that the process of the unravelling of idea may be much more important that the data communicated about the idea to VC. Even if founders wanted, they couldnt transmit all the data about the idea.
Since they are like $40 on Amazon, I'm selling them here: http://www.ebay.com/itm/321226528853

I think it will cost about $7 to print it and $5 to ship it (free shipping is included, internationally as well I believe) so this is about what I expect my cost to be.
How is this worse than other Kickstarter projects? (serious question, this seems as legit as any to me)
> Yes, and I'd say they are even harsher than for creditcards - i.e., return cash first and ask questions later.

That's how it works with credit cards as well. You're always debited before you're even notified of the chargeback.
Tim Worstall at Forbes makes a very different assessment of the ruling [1]. He concludes that news portals might now be liable under all the different laws of their readers different jurisdictions.

I'm quite doubtful that the international laws would work that way. But maybe someone with more of a background in law can shed some light on these differing opinions? Might there actually be reason for concern for every web page operator who allows comments?

[1] http://www.forbes.com/sites/timworstall/2013/10/11/every-web...
"it's the time and resources to connect with local governments (so police can search the database too)"

To me, "Law Enforcement: register here with bona fides to get separate access to our database to search." isn't as time or resource consuming as "send us on a tour of the US to tell police and bike shops in person", or the stretch goal of $65,00, which is "send us on an even bigger tour of the US..."
Even if they are, they are bound to use it in ways, or during times that allow them to pass checks. If everything was flat out allowed they would use stuff that would never pass those tests in far higher concentrations.

While the deaths due to complications seem to be overblown in bodybuilding circles and the overall safety of performance enhancing drugs seems to be rather high it leaves to wonder if that would still be true if athletes would just use everything there is out there. Seeing that bodybuilders probably don't care about endurance, power, nutrient retention and the thousand ways the whole oxygen and glycogen supply chain can be screwed with.
Clojure has done a lot in this area on both the server- and client-side.
https://plus.google.com/settings/endorsements?hl=en visit here and disable it simple !
Why the heck would you engrave anything in your bike? Just making it impossible for thieves to sell a stolen bike should be good enough... any seller should simply ask to see the registration information and make sure it matches with seller's ID. No need to engrave anything. As for the person who lost the bike, you're out of luck! Any smart thief would be able to disassemble your bike and sell it part by part if any single part were engraved to begin with.
Shifting the burden to congress is absurd. Congress is a finite set of people with finite time to consider tax laws while lawyers for corporations far out number them in time and effort. Such an adversarial system is inherently in the favor of corporations. They should be responsible for following the intent of tax law.
Huh? That's exactly what we do solve - we offer a search that is easy to use and isn't tied to a specific region.
> Ultimately D doesn't force a fundamental change, but as one learns to use the language, the result is a fundamental change.

Right. One can do a line by line translation of C++ to D, but idiomatic D can be very unlike C++.
Gladwell responds: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
My only gripe with datetime and time are the organization of it. I can never remember whether it's datetime.datetime.now or datetime.now or time.timedelta or datetime.timedelta, and so on.
Actually, on reading the updated Kickstarter project, I feel I need to amend point 3, the "region specific recommendations" of the stretch goal are "send us to even more places around the US to talk there".
Liftware Launch Video - spoon for people with Alzheimer's
Fun Twitter dialogue between Washington Post and a crazy Ted Cruz defender
On Venus, it snows metal
So, I like the idea of reducing bike theft (by virtue of making it not profitable), but I don't see the whole picture yet.

I have more than one bike (yes, I'm one of those dorks) and I would be fairly upset if one of them were stolen. But I also have their serial numbers logged at home, in a safe place, so that I could report that to the police if one were stolen and I'm certain that after doing so... nothing would happen. I'm guessing that if you see your bike get stolen and can somehow stop the thief that having this proof is useful to the police (who can hand it over to you). But 5 minutes later, once that bike is going... I'm guessing the police can do nothing.

So this helps by targeting the buyers? How many stolen bikes are really stolen to bike shops? I would think that a junkie wandering in trying to sell a carbon wunderbike is going to have much luck. And if it's targeting the end consumer... well, I would probably check this registry, but I'm pretty certain that a dozen other people won't.
Bike shops already do this in some places. In the UK and Japan at time of purchase you can register your bike with the police and it's handled by the store themselves. Both countries use the serial number imprinted by the manufacturer.

If there is indeed a problem of a lack of registration at point of purchase in your area, have you considered bringing this up with the cops, the shops and the politicians?
Its quite trivial to follow their brand guidelines.
> Why do you say that spending boosts the economy?

Because the economy is the whole set of exchanges of goods and services, and spending is economic activity.

> investing boosts the economy (by increasing productivity - Keynes never modeled that, go figure),

Actually Keynes directly considered not only that investment produced future gains in output, but how those gains changed with additional investement in the same area. [1]

> and spending reduces the potential for investiments

How? If spending by A to acquire a good from B decreases A's funds available for potential investment, it does so only by increasing B's funds available for potential investment by the same amount.

[1] See, particularly Book IV (commencing with Chapter 11) of The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (1936).
Bike Shepherd doesn't solve the central problem of bike registration - how to register people who don't know about bike registration. It also doesn't offer a way of verifying used bike sales.

That is what makes the Bike Index different - we work with shops to register people's bikes for them, and we offer a way to verify bikes that you sell.
It would only make sense if some languages were dangerous but allowed you to do your job, and others were safe but did not allow you to do you job. That is not the case. If we really need a bad analogy to be able to discuss our profession, it is more like telling chefs to stop using knives coated in grease, and start using knives with good grips.
There might be a future when you earn money playing real instruments before real people. I remember Zappa's "You can't do this on stage anymore' area.

Real instruments of course include computers these days, as long as people are interacting with it (i.e. 'playing')
I have my Facebook settings fairly well customized so that I only see updates from my closer friends. My point was that "several friends" is not a meaninglessly small number for a social network.
I feel like this is just another dumbed down space-aliens-lazors-whatever browser game where the progression involves waiting for the next day or spamming forums with an affiliate registration link. I'll pass.
>Every pattern, layer, feature or tool that you introduce in a project, makes it more complex,

That really shouldn't be true.

A pattern is simply a commonly used way of solving a common problem. If you're picking one that make it more complex, then you've picked the wrong pattern. The reason that I could do the example I talked about in my original post in 10 minutes was because it was a bog-standard design pattern designed to solve exactly the issue that the software needed. Amongst the many reasons why it took the developer 2 days was the fact that they had to pretty much reinvent this pattern from first principles.

Equally, if you're introducing a tool that doesn't simplify something that you'd need to do/build manually then you shouldn't be introducing that tool.
I'd give to a kickstarter that was promising some innovative design of a bike alarm that's difficult to disable, personally. Solving bike theft post-theft seems improbable to me, aside from making it much much more expensive (by drastically increasing police effort and fine levels for it). I feel like a registry will never be much more than a half solution.
Add to that the 15th Arabic letter ض [http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D8%B6] cannot be pronounced in any other language to the point that Arabic is sometimes referred to as the language of ض.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arabic_alphabet
If you know how to read people this all comes out in an interview. If somebody lacks integrity there will be many red flags.
Anyone else find it ironic you cannot +1 that page?
"Beyond a reasonable doubt":

"So, you're claiming that this bike, which has a frame number that matches the one reported stolen, is in fact a different bike with the same frame number, one on which both producers neglected to brand in any way shape or form, and that you have no record of purchasing..."
Actually, now that I'm doing more reading, things can be a bit more confusing.

There are a few approaches to solve this problem - in some cases a negative income tax is applied, and in others the government actually issues a 'citizens dividend'.

Neither case necessarily mandates a 1:1 decrease in benefit as your other income sources go up. It all depends on how things are structured... someone with a significant monthly income could have a high enough tax as to effectively remove the base payment, where a particularly poor worker may not lose any.

And unfortunately I don't speak enough French to read the petition, and none of the sources in English I can find actually spell out the details.

Poor reporting wins again.
Don't they have another browser around for dealing with the rest of the world though? It's not like many modern sites are going to render correctly on IE6 these days...
So you publish a PUBLIC negative review, with your name and photo, and then you're surprised it this same review appears somewhere else (in ads, this time)?
"That said, I just went ahead and opted-out"

Right, that's my problem. Here's something that's been bugging me for some time, and that applies to all services that turn in features by default: do they do it because they believe most people will want this feature, or do they do it because that's important for their business and they hope that most people won't bother to turn it off / won't know the thing is turned on. Note that I'm not being cynical here, I'm honestly wondering which it is.

So to go back to our specific case: why is that thing not turned off by default? When google created gmail, they didn't say: "look if you want to use google now, you will have to use gmail too, that's how it is". Gmail was simply great, so people adopted it. If this new feature is so great, people will see it and turn it on, why force it down on the user?
Here in Canada, you need to write an exam in order to legally call yourself an "engineer" – it's a protected term.
Suppose one does not want to marry the JVM. Why not Lisp?
Or if you're suddenly going from your walking pace to 20-30-65-75MPH, you probably aren't the fastest human on the planet. You got on a bus and forgot to turn the darn thing off when you reached your bus stop. Just like most of the tracking apps have an "auto-pause" feature for when it looks as if you're taking a breather, they should have a settable max point where it will break the activity into a separate segment when you're clearly going faster than you can make yourself go.

Also, skip the UI sugar for the main purpose - TRACKING - of your app. If I want a map, I'd click over to the mapping application to see where I am. It should start quickly and start recording quickly, possibly notifying me that while it can trivially determine my location from the wealth of Wi-Fi signals permeating the campus, it's going to throw up a modal d-box and demand a click from me b/c the GPS doesn't get an immediate fix when they turn it on until you've made three taps into the program.
Hey guys, I'm the OP.

I have an iPhone/Macbook because I'm the technical co-founder of a web startup. I love technology and want to use technology to change the world. I try to stay up-to-date so I can understand what current technology is capable of. I understand that most minimalists don't love technology. That why I called it "modern minimalism" instead of "traditional minimalism".

You guys have a lot of questions and I'd love to answer all of them. I'm thinking about posting a video FAQ about modern minimalism. Would anyone be interested in that? I want to share everything I can with you about my lifestyle, and I'd love any feedback you guys have on how I can improve my lifestyle. I'm also interested in hearing about your lifestyles, as I respect and admire the Hacker News community a lot.
The numbers need to all be on the top tube and highly legible. A serial number on the bottom bracket is almost useless because it will be covered in muck. A number hidden on the rear drop out is obviously useless. A number under the seat is also too hard to read. It'd be nice if the frame manufacturers fixed this.
I don't follow this argument. You are suggesting that the rate of females leaving the major/school is exactly proportional to the grade they get.

I don't believe anyone would quit a school/major because they scored a little bit lower average. This might be possible if they all happened to be near the threshold for failing but I doubt Mudd is this strict.

Also everyone is well aware of affirmative action, so even if their grades were worse they would not think they would not be able to compete for the same jobs/academic positions.
My initial reaction to this was to pick it apart, but really, that would be stupid of me since it doesn't deserve it. There is value in the piece and it was a nice story. Congrats as well.
OTOH, even with someone with high ethics, there can be a clash of expectations without an explicit agreement. So you are best off with someone of high ethics with a documented explicit agreement.
I would start by reading, not so much for source material, but for getting a feel for what structure and style works. See how other authors handle pacing, character development, exposition, etc.

(About me: English major turned programmer)
No. The as the national government becomes stronger, the separation of powers among the national, state, and local governments (federalism) becomes less pronounced.

So when a big national laws change (maybe nation-wide healthcare reform passes or a new ruling on campaign financing is handed down), you don't have the option of moving to another city or state if you don't like the law. This means that the stakes are necessarily higher and conflicts will be more pronounced.

In other words, good fences make good neighbors, and our fences aren't as wide or tall as they used to be.
That's what we're doing.
1. It's a violation of "Kickstarter cannot be used to fund e-commerce, business, and social networking websites or apps."

Diaspora was a social network.
Beautiful.

Sidebar: IMO Balanced are doing everything right, and people are noticing more and more. All the open stuff Balanced does is accumulating incredible good will, and we all know that helps with incredible passive customer acquisition, n.b. Twilio. I think we'll look back in a year or two and see that Balanced wrote a new chapter in the book on growth.

Very bullish on these folks.
I'm a big supporter of the GBI (see my comment history), and I think developed countries are going to all need to adopt it at some point for a variety of reasons. Reading this and a few other related articles on the Swiss experiment, I couldn't find information about the following, which I consider pre-requisites for a GBI system to be effective:

- Union strikes for non-safety related issues have to be made illegal. You don't get to strike for higher wages when there's a GBI.

- Hire/fire policies need to be made completely at-will, with pretty much no exceptions.

- The minimum wage has to be eliminated (generally won't matter, since the GBI will bring the wage of "bad jobs" up, rather than down.)

- The rest of the welfare system will likely need to be largely dismantled. The person answering the questions in the article seemed to conflate "public schooling" with welfare, which should be decoupled; things like schooling, health care, etc. should not be touched (and should not be considered welfare - they are regular public goods.) If the Swiss have things like TANF, Social Security, SNAP, WIC, etc. - those will probably need to go.

- Opt out. Any person who doesn't want to take the money (because they already have plenty) should be able to refuse it.

I'm glad to see a country starting to experiment with this, though. It's the only way forward in a world where the need for human labor is going down every day.
Challenge accepted!

\u0052untime r =
\u0052untime.\u0067\u0065\u0074\u0052untime();
//println(r.availableProc\u0065ssors() +", " + r.freeMemory());
//r.exit(1);
//r.halt(1);
When your biggest complaint about your full-time employment is that you are too sedentary, you are in a much better place than millions of other people.
LightTable 0.5.5 released
Have you seen Draft [0]? It seems fairly close to your concept of "github for writers".

[0] https://draftin.com
Whether or not it's effective, most content providers demand it and most customers don't care. Rather than repeating what everyone already knows, we should be talking about how to change that. Making the case to content owners that DRM gives companies like Apple too much leverage is one way; making the case to consumers that DRMed content is worth less is another.

Wasting time on purity tests, though, doesn't seem to be worth the time.
So another standard for the next project to ignore in favor of creating a new standard?

Hmm.
Not to mention it won't prevent crime at all.

Lots of people will buy stolen bikes off craigslist, knowing they're stolen.

Others who are in doubt will still buy stolen bikes off craigslist because they will never learn about this niche website.

And thieves can just file off the serial no.
Shouldn't G+ users be paid for this?
Enjoying the myriad little mysteries we call "bugs" is key to being a good programmer. Bugs that we create are opportunities to understand the system better - it's a signal that there is behavior we don't understand.
Does anyone have experience with self-hosted FOSS solutions for WebRTC based plugin-free video chat?
Okay, but if I report my Trek 9.9 with serial number XYZ as stolen, it doesn't really matter if Cannondale or Walmart Bikes or whomever also uses a serial number XYZ, does it?

And if uniqueness is somehow important, then the idea of local governments having some registry is just as bad. My road bike would have four of these silly municipal numbers on them from four different municipalities, about to be five. I can't imagine that this number is any more unique amongst municipalities as it is amongst vendors.
I just did and I'm amazed out how incorrect their guesses are. If I should have been worried about privacy invasion, I'm not anymore because they seem to have no clue about me as an individual. Sports? Wow. "Shooter games" what? I don't even really game outside of things like Chess on Andorid. Huh.
That's not exactly how this works. This only shows positive reviews that you've made for the product, not all of your reviews.
Is there a lot of demand at the registrar's office for intersectional gender theory courses? I haven't heard of strong demand in that subject, but I normally avoid administration buildings.
Haha you're right. Point taken. I don't have a citation for that one. It's just an opinion I've formed based on my personal experience. I don't know if anything I've said will work for anyone else, but I know that it seems to work for me. In the future, would you suggest I make it more clear that I'm just expressing an opinion when I say stuff like that?