skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is not about the US. Those of us who live in the rest of the world and pay taxes would also like companies like Google and Apple to pay tax in the countries they operate in.
We all observe that people differ in height. Not greatly, the range is about 50cm wide. Of course height affects certain abilities and can have major impact on self esteem, but these days this is just a societal factor: There are no important activities left where a short person could not perform just as well as a tall person.

I don't understand how people struggle to transfer this simple truth to mental abilities.
"the fine art of sticking to the letter of the law but totally bending the spirit of it"

This is spot-on.

One of the best examples in recent memory was the so-called "F Duct" that was featured on McLaren Racing's MP4-25 car in 2010.

For those that are not aware, FIA sporting regulations strictly prohibit the driver from controlling the aerodynamic characteristics of the machine, for example, via electronic controls on the steering wheel or levers in the cockpit.

However, McLaren came up with a system that allowed the driver to block an air flow duct with the driver's leg. This permitted air to be channeled in an "on demand" fashion, such that the rear wing would stall and result in reduced drag. This allowed the car to achieve an advantage in the straights.
Congralutations! :-)

(And the program is IMHO clearer than the C implementation)
Weather data is the most exciting thing in the world right now. There are hundreds of millions of internet-connected barometers right now, all over the planet, that did not exist just 2 years ago!

I can't wait for an accurate weather forecast!
To put some actual numbers to it from a quick Google search

Number of US Households from 2010 census - 114,800,000

Times $30k per household - $3.4 trillion

Total US Federal Government Revenue 2010 - $2.163 trillion

Total US Federal Government Spending 2010 - $3.456 trillion
Aren't prices going to rise to what maximum people can afford?

If they do not control prices, rent will go up because profit can be made, food, clothes, etc.
I didn't know there was a new study. Thanks for linking to it.

It looks like there's a meta-study too: http://www.eis.mdx.ac.uk/research/PhDArea/saeed/SD_PPIG_2009...
The idea of a basic level of income isn't that it goes away once I find a job that pays the same or more, it's that I'm always guaranteed that base pay. If I take a job that pays an additional 2800 per month, then I'm grossing 5600/mo.

I don't think there's any reason to believe that low paying jobs will just go away, and more reason to think that the people who want nothing more than those low paying jobs will take them.
An old remark was, without rules, auto
racing would soon become about as exciting
as watching the jets land at JFK.

Another point is, mostly sports are sold
as drama, that is, about human characters
the audience can identify with, characters
taking on challenges. So, see
lots of pictures of the drivers, that is,
the characters in the drama, and commentary
about the characters, but next to nothing
on the engineering of the cars. So, what's
the bore/stroke ratio, max piston speed, max
RPMs, number of valves per cylinder, valve
spring design (last I heard,
they don't use
metal springs and use compressed gas instead),
intake boost
design and pressures, intercooler design, fuel
injection design,
fuel chemistry,
clutch design, transmission design, suspension
design, etc.? Don't hear much about those
details!

So, it's not sold as a competition or lesson
in engineering or the old "improve the breed"
but as human drama.

So, have rules to deemphasize the engineering
and just let the drama show. On with the show!
You dont have to trust GNU/Linux, in fact you should distrust it as well, but it is safer and better than Windows according to record so far, since you have many more independent security solutions and can customize it to your liking, and we have seen Stuxnet, NSA_KEY etc...

You can modify the kernel so much as to make any existing 0days unpractical for your particular installation. You cant do that with windows kernel. For linux, you can remove all the drivers not really needed for your particular computer, and prevent modules from being used.

If you're really paranoid you must go with ArchHurd or HaikuOS, those extremely small OS not many have heard about yet NSA to have devoted time for 0daying them or inserting backdoors. But definitely not go back to Windows.
It was interesting reading this after having finished reading Bertrand Russell's, "In Praise of Idleness." [1]

It always struck me as odd that the ghost of the Protestant Ethic is still haunting us to this day. There are plenty of reasons why we can and should work less and still enjoy the benefits of a decent, modern life. And in spite of our advances there is a pervasive belief that we should work more.

I think this will be a very good thing and I'm interested to see how it turns out for Switzerland.

[1] http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
If you're worried that illustrator files are too proprietary, you should really consider working in postscript. illustrator will deal with properly handwritten postscript just fine and it's a mostly straightforward graphics dsl (especially if you're mostly doing icon design). plus, it's easy to convert to a pdf or rasterize it using any number of readily available tools.

if your concern is that the tools for creating OTFs and TTFs seem to be opaque, i would suggest you look at the UFO[1] specification which represents a font as a folder containing a series of glyphs which are, themselves, a highly domain-specific hybrid of svg and postscript. the AFDKO [2] added support for UFO last month(!), so there seems to be traction on that front. fontforge, natch, has supported ufo for quite a while.

the problem with picking on fontawesome is that for icon sets to work, they usually need to be consistent and it's hard enough to get people to agree to code style guidelines, much less visual ones which are wayyyy more philosophical.

in any case, if there's a takeaway it's to look at UFO, it will at least provide you with a free and transparent workflow, but how you manage that workflow will still be a challenge.

If you (or anyone else reading this) want to work on this problem, i'm happy to talk offline since i've been doing a ufo fork of fontawesome for work lately and have accumulated some domain knowledge on that front.

[1]: http://unifiedfontobject.org/

[2]: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/opentype/afdko.html
That's a good idea - even though I'm in the middle of the project, and the project is big enough where a plan of the entire project wouldn't be feasible, I can at least do it for the chunk I am working on right now. I think just being explicit with my tasks would be a huge step. Right now everything is vague and kind of just in this "idea soup" in the back of my mind. Every time I pull out the next idea to work on, I realize I had all the wrong expectations the whole time.
What about having two computers, one connected to the internet, one disconnected. Then develop and install two custom services - one obtains the required information, e.g. the trading data, from the internet or sends data to the internet. The other service runs on the disconnected computer and communicates with the software actually using and producing the data, probably in the form of a proxy server.

Finally connect both computers using something simple like a null modem cable and make both service communicate over this link using a very simple proprietary protocol. Assuming the disconnected computer is not already compromised before you start using the system and you have not been extremely sloppy when you designed and implemented the two services, it should be quite hard to compromise the disconnected computer.

One way would be to find valid data (passing the protocol checker in the receiving service) to be transferred from the connected to the disconnected computer that triggers a bug in any data consuming software leading to code injection and execution which in turn sends secret data over the null modem link to the (compromised) connected computer. That seems to be a quite a complex attack to me, especially if the data traveling over the link is something simple like stock price time series which enables very simple protocols and thorough validation.

To avoid some classes of bugs, e.g. buffer overflows, in the services linking both computers I would implement them using a managed runtime like .NET. This will of course expose the system to vulnerabilities in the underlying runtime.
Where Will Tech Billionaires Come From?
> Does anyone on HN see ads when they search for [what is bitcoin]?

Yes: http://i.imgur.com/2iFv7Yf.png
Albert Einstein is already well on the way to being a legend.
'Iron Man' suit being developed by US Army
A quick summary of the primary physiological benefits of going Paleo
Daniel Domscheit-Berg (the same guy who wrote the hit-piece book on Assange and worked on "The Fifth Estate" movie) destroyed those leaks in an apparent attempt to sabotage Wikileaks.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daniel_Domscheit-Berg
http://www.smh.com.au/technology/technology-news/wiki-war-35...
An interesting and honest window into a product launch. Nice to see real analytics data, too.
I got 11 out of 12 of these before I stopped in amazement. I felt like I was guessing a lot but I kept being right... clearly branding is a subtle but powerful force!

Oh by the way, you should totally package this as a smartphone game. Based on all the "identify this logo" games out there, it could definitely go viral. Plus it should be easy to program. ;)
A good reason for using a non-linear tool such as this, is that you're able to layout your points (slides) on an infinite canvas, and make use of that specific layout to better explain how each point fits into the whole structure.

For example, I've used impress.js to fan out from a central idea along different lines of work, each line being punctuated with different slides. The cool thing is, you can make a virtual overview slide that shows the whole clickable canvas.

I've also used the layout to embed images resulting from intermediate algorithm stages directly inside those stages in the diagram.

Besides that, and the flashiness which is definitely nice to have, your presentations are in an open format that's not locked to a specific vendor. (this is coming from someone with more than 10 years of academic presentations in powerpoint, which I now have trouble re-using due to almost 100% Linux everywhere. LibreOffice Impress 4.1 can display them, but much is lost in the conversion :)
Where does it come from? His anger at any attempts of editing out parts of the cables is well documented by different people he cooperated with:

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/magazine/30Wikileaks-t.htm...

"He was angry that we declined to link our online coverage of the War Logs to the WikiLeaks Web site, a decision we made because we feared — rightly, as it turned out — that its trove would contain the names of low-level informants and make them Taliban targets. "

Also, I would go as far as to say that his deputy's trip to KGB HQ in Minsk was totally unnecessary.
That doesn't seem plausible. He could non-specifically say "don't use Windows. Ideally use [some stock linux distro] or investigate other unix operating systems that can be configured for safety." That wouldn't really give away anything.
Some links about that "pigeons" thing would strenghten your article. I had to google the term to understand what it meant - a national political pressure campaign about taxes that backfired in terms of reputation, am I right?

When reading the article I just skipped that particular point thinking it was some kind of inside joke I didn't get.

One thing I'd like to know about Paris is how non-French-speaking-friendly the startup scene there is. I'm Dutch, my French goes as far as "je m'appelle une baguette". I'm weary of moving to Paris simply because of my experience that the French are, well, less comfortable communicating in English than the inhabitants of some other countries around here, even among the higher educated.
The code for the C implementation is incredibly verbose compared to the code for the JS implementation.

JS: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...

C: http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u64/program.php?test...
So what?

This was the initial way Pascal and Modula-2 were developed. P-Code and M-Code were their bytecodes.

This didn't prevent most compiler vendors to introduce native compilers and use those bytecode implementations mainly for bootstraping purposes.

Writing compilers is not that dark magic thing many think about.

Well, except when targeting x86 processors, maybe. :)
Can anyone go into the detail of the impact ,if any, of this?
A Day In The Life Of A Professional Photographer
only works if you immediately fire all top and middle line manages in the aquired company, lest you import a hostile culture and a lot of foreign politics.

HP buying EDS, Atos buying SBS - if you ever talk to employees on the inside you'll hear about what a big aquisition means.

Big Pharma is better in this, buying others is a key market tactic. Pfizer's handling of the Pharmacia merger is a great example of how to do it - go in hard, literally destroy everything in the target.
This webcomponents stuff is pretty neat.

The css, html, and js code are all in one place,
e.g.,
https://github.com/eduardolundgren/google-maps-element/blob/...

This will probably make creating websites easier to manage...
if everyone has base income added to their income (or as a sole income), wouldn't that raise the prices all around since people will have more money to spend?
If I read this benchmark right: v8 regexps are faster than TCL regexps.

Hardly surprising.
@a is probably an alias for @all (https://github.com/search?q=%40all&type=Users&ref=searchresu...).

[edit 1] @everybody seems to return every user

[edit 2] @everything seems to return ... everything.

[edit 3] @qdfhsdfjsdqjrekle seems to return everything. Ok. It's a bug. :>
In fact, court rulings have upheld that once a standard becomes a law, the SDOs DO forfeit their copyright. "The law can't be copyrighted" has legal precedent dating back to the 1800's, and was most recently upheld (specifically with respect to building codes) in the vase of Veeck vs. SBCCI:

http://www.studentweb.law.ttu.edu/cochran/Cases%20&%20Readin...

That's why Malamud hasn't been sued by the ICC, even though he makes their primary publications (The International Building Code, which every state uses some flavor of) freely available.
The medicare-for-all is the end game of what's happening now. All the key architects of ACA have voiced their support for single-payer as the ultimate goal.
Sure. The error in your reasoning is that you greatly mischaracterize his point, which is that the concept of the natural-born "10x programmer" is quite destructive.
> Everyone knows that the NSA spies, but having all the physical proof of exactly what happens helps the cause doesn't it?

I guess that is why anyone who mention said knowledge was labeled as conspiracy nut and tinfoil hat. /sarcasm

Please lets not rewrite history. People did not know that US diplomats was used as spies, or that NSA planted bugs in EU buildings, or had secret deals with mail and social networks that gave them privileged information under secret terms. People did not know about secret assassination lists.

Surely a lot of people suspected things, but knowing is an other cup of tea here.
Eliminating administrative overhead would be a saving, but it's unrealistic to expect those savings to fund a substantial part of a basic income by themselves.

Social Security and Medicare comprise a large majority of social spending in the USA. SS-OASI has overhead costs of 0.5%, and Medicare has around 1%. That's owing to them being unconditional, outside of age. Even their less efficient brethren aren't that bad: SS-DI is around 2%.

Medicaid is much higher (~6% I think) because it is so targeted and is really administered by 50 different agencies on top of the feds. But after that you get to programs that might be super inefficient but just aren't big enough to generate the huge kinds of savings we might want.
I guess, I mean, I love software development and even if I were at home I would be doing it. Also, if I were leaving my day job to start my own business and I... wanted time off before doing it, I would be very concerned I was making a bad decision.

Anyhow, I've been fortunate to have jobs with awesome PTO. With 20+ days of PTO I didn't see the necessity of going a few weeks without a paycheck.
To the V8 team and the implementer of the testing program.

Disclaimer: I had anything to do with this, I just thought it was interesting enough to post it.
>My point, and you can take a basic econ class to learn such info

Oh well, if you learned it in school then it must be true!
I'm pretty sure Google's lobbying is focused on issues such as Internet Regulation, Software patents, and antitrust. You'll need to provide some evidence that Google is lobbying for tax shelters.
If the landlord uses identical locks on all the apartment doors, he can't turn around and complain that turning over the key to the apartment being investigated would open all the doors.

As for the instrumentality of the crime, even though it's Lavabit's SSL key the government's contention is that Snowden made use of it in his alleged crimes (by for example encrypting leaked data with the public half of the key for transmission to lavabit's web to email gateway, where it would ultimately be decrypted by lavabit using the private key, and then emailed to the a recipient.) Suppose a criminal rented a car and used it as a getaway vehicle and then returned it. The police could get access to the car for forensic evidence from the rental company, notwithstanding the fact that the car belonged to the rental company who was not accused of any crime.
Probably better on balance, but not strictly better.

On the one hand, it gives you greater security when used perfectly. On the other hand, it has a cognitive overhead, and a worse failure mode (you forget that you've left it writeable, and won't have the light to give you feedback).

So even better would be a hardware lock for writes and a light indicating when writes happen.
Ironically it is a result of modern encryption that separating things from the internet is so difficult. If every app sends data over an encrypted channel it makes it much harder to audit what exactly it is doing. You can't impose rules if you don't know what the data is or where it will end up.
Its not a "brilliant plan". Pretending that Bermuda "owns" your profits is borderline fraud. It may well be illegal too but no one has yet challenged it, though France may do.
Syria chemical weapons monitors win Nobel Peace Prize
this reminds me a lot of what a lot of radio personalities who deal with personal finances recommend, the system which you do your banking on should only do that and nothing more.

While such a system is obviously still connected to the net, you reduce your risk by running a discreet set of software.

To be totally safe you would need a room which protects from emissions escaping it. Back in my service days we had system isolated as such simply because you could be monitored through walls.
But qubes did issue a security advisory , talking about a security bug in VT-d/VT-x hardware that only intel can fix. For someone like schneier who want to avoid the NSA , maybe qubes is not enough.
Well to be honest,

d = {}

is absolutely not equivalent to a map of int to a vector of ints. Sure in javascript, you can indeed use an object as a map, but you are lacking the type safety that the C++ version provide and all the nice API. Also, in C++11, you can shorten it with auto :

auto whatever = new std::map<int, std::vector<int>>();

and to be fair with the js, if you want it as short as possible, you could use a using namespace statement for std (although not really recommended) :

auto whatever = new map<int, vector<int>>();

or maybe not use new :

map<int, vector<int>> whatever;

I don't think it's that bad. But sure, any dynamic language will be less verbose that a static language because, well, you are removing information...
I was thinking more about 'acquisitions of a fundamentally different business'.

Mergers of very similar businesses are a little different.
This touches on the issue of why companies have amassed such huge reserves and seem unwilling or unable to spend them. Clayton Christensen (of Innovators Dilemma fame) gave an interesting talk at the RSA last month[1] where he described a possible reason for this. Unfortunately only the audio is up but they do often have video so perhaps that'll be there soon as the slides were very important.

The high-level summary is that in order for companies to develop market-creating changes, they need to be willing to make long-term investments with high probabilities of failure. This hasn't happened because the incentives of the management of the company are to provide short-term results which means they choose to only deliver incremental improvements or cost-savings as it has a greater improvement in the short-term on share prices and their remuneration.

He went into far more detail - listen if this sounds interesting to you.

[1] http://www.thersa.org/events/audio-and-past-events/2013/the-...
>If no one will do a job that pays less than $2800 per month, then how will those jobs get done?

Then we will have to pay more than $2800 per month (or the job simply won't get done, which isn't necessarily a bad thing).
The SSA's budget is like $12 billion to oversee over $750 billion in social security payments (1.6%). Medicaid's administrative overhead is about $16.5 billion to oversee $288 billion in payments (5.7%). See page 69 of this PDF: http://www.hhs.gov/budget/fy2014/fy-2014-budget-in-brief.pdf.
No this is not V8 performance beating C.

This is V8 calling a regexp library written in C++. C just happens to be using a different library that is slower.
I'm more-than-a-quarter-less-than-half Lakota (one of the early peoples to settle North America). I tell people I feel that pictures steal a bit of my soul. It has nothing to do with my heritage, but people generally accept it.
Wait a minute, are you complaining that too much money is spend on ham sandwiches? Your counterexample suggests that this money should be better spent on another war on the far side on the planet?
To understand how this works for a relatively normal country (like Canada): Imagine having an expense that is HUGE for your government. Like easily the biggest expense that they have. Larger than healthcare or the military.

Then cut the government around that. School lunch programs, cut. Welfare, cut. Old age benefits, cut. Even some parts of healthcare get cut, like having someone care for you for free when you are bed ridden (since presumably you would be able to spend a portion of your money on hiring a personal assistant). Imagine laying off 30 to 60% of people that work for the government in a "knowledge worker" role (ie, administrators, not trash disposers). Completely scrap science grants and arts subsidies. Increase taxes slightly. Etc.

But for all that sacrifice, we insulate our economy from political turmoil of the continued mechanization of the economy. One day most people won't be working. I'm not 100% convinced that BI is something we should be doing right NOW, but I'm pretty sure we'll have it in 50 years or less.
Almost all of that goes out the window for targeted attacks. For general safety, you just need to be a little bit better than the average computer user--the money is in simple reliable attacks that hit broad swaths of the public.

But for targeted attacks you need to have near perfect security.

Edit: You're probably still gaining by leaving the beaten path, but if you're exposed, and someone knows what you're running and has the resources to create custom exploits, that won't help much.
Proof That Brand Loyalty is One-Sided