skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Mongols were a proto-state. The fact they didn't have a permanent territory means nothing. They had an hierarchical structure. The only thing that was different was that other "states" realized it would actually be much profitable and safer to sit in one place and tax the shit out of their own people (and possibly those they conquered) instead of running around the globe and robbing everyone indefinitely.

I think the mistake you are making is thinking that it's either a modern state which gives you certain benefits or some sort of medieval anarchy situation with warlords and lots of random violence. How about when you have 3 or 4 major protection agencies. You may think of them as governments, but instead they work within one country and everyone is free to switch to one or the other at any time. Those agencies sell laws to their customers want, resolve conflicts and enforce property rights. Why do you think such a competition would be worse than having a monopolist who doesn't even live by its own laws (Example: senator did cocaine? made a mistake. A regular person did cocaine: jail). Try to understand that the word Anarchy doesn't mean what you've been told it means. Anarchy simply means no state, but it doesn't mean no rules.
I worked on the YouTube ads team (Adsense for interactive media, or AFIM) for a while.

The people on that team saw themselves as helping to create the replacement for TV, and part of that job was to create a model that paid the expense of hosting and distributing video, with all the associated infrastructure, as well as allowed for content-creators to make money--basically to make it a viable business. Ads are the primary means of making that happen, but they've experimented with other methods too.

They care a lot about the user. To contradict another poster, they don't show ads at every opportunity; that's not the Google way, and they have detailed data on exactly how many ads you can show people before they stop watching videos. They also strongly encourage advertisers to use skippable ads--they make users happier and they encourage more interesting ads (it's also not entirely true that advertisers don't have to pay for skipped ads).

The only thing worse than YouTube ads are the non-Google attempts at video ads. Google's UI and targeting are 10x better than the competition I've seen.

(It's been over a year since I've worked on AFIM, so my info could be out of date.)
Yup, juvia: https://github.com/phusion/juvia (Ruby)
DROP TABLE consultants; Ltd
You can also check the community FAQ here: http://piratepad.net/JollaFAQ
I wouldn't say it's a scam per se, but it could become one really fast. Right now there are 15 bitstamp employees, what's stopping any of them from taking the money and running?
Because staying alive is the level you inarguably, absolutely cannot go below. It's a rock-solid place to start your argument from, and build upwards.
Juvia is an open source, Rails based, commenting system.

https://github.com/phusion/juvia
there is no such thing as a scrypt ASIC yet
"Constant time" is still wrong even in the approximations. Constant time means O(1). But your comment already refers to a running-time complexity dependence on several parameters of the input, such as the size of the observable universe.
Xcode Breakpoint Wizardry
Is work necessary? Yes, insofar as someone has to expend effort which can be converted into providence of basic needs.

Ok, fine, so long as someone else expends that effort, not me.

-- people everywhere
I'm not criticising AIXI, I'm just pointing out that calling it "constant time" is about as wrong as you can get, in the world of time complexity. Especially for AIXI, but also (less so) for an approximation like AIXItl.
Tried CSS hands on today, the result is this.
An effort for 4 hours in learning and trying web.
There can be an option to move to Poland, Czech Republic or check options via internal company transfer.I don't know where you live, but there are some large outsourcing companies with offices in Poland so you can probably apply to work for them in your country and then move on via internal transfer.
How is the top curved portion (that "cable to mine" connects to) affixed to the gear and thus the other half of the cable? I can't tell from the picture. If it is simply connected to the gear axle, won't that block the sweep wire from passing through?
I agree with you in general, but sometimes automating simple tasks like vision are coordination are much more complicated than a automating a complex cognitive task .

Hell we had tools doing part or whole medical diagnosis and treatment recommendations for a long time ago, some more accurate than the average doc.
Looks quite interesting, but I can't help but admit some of these Web 3.0 solutions are getting a bit ridiculous nowadays, especially when it comes to data storage and processing.
Yup, slavery was quite useful in advancing the human race for a while there. We don't like it today for moral reasons, but Leibniz would not have discovered calculus if he spent every day in a field somewhere, and it was slavery that bought him the time to do it.
Quite an elaborate rationalization for simple whining about taxes.
Ask HN: Is there any VCs or Angel Investors in Morocco I can pitch for an idea?
I'm not talking about censorship, I'm talking about piggybacking the efforts of your opposition to get your message across. And when we are talking about a company that has been delivering advertisements for 10 years (I'm not kidding), to the point that during the protests there has been a total media blackout happening, probably because they were afraid of losing money, the fight is really not fair.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_Romanian_protests_against_...
$20 per day = $600 per month

Isn't it worth looking at creative ways to go around this 10 instances limit?
For me, i visit a google-ad website once, or click an ad once, it starts showing up EVERYWHERE. Examples: Leap Motion, and one other vacation site that lets you book hotels in Maldives. Heck, what ever happened to RELEVANT ads? Why not show me more cool tech products?
+1 for off-the-shelf blogging engines.

If you're going to install a commenting software locally, static hosts like Github and S3 are out of the question already. So you might as well take advantage of a complete blogging engine. If you don't like WordPress/PHP, just pick something else.
Alexandre Passos has an excellent editorial selection of NIPS 2013 papers (along with some comments) on his blog at [1].

[1]: http://atpassos.me/post/67560831508/nips-2013-reading-list.
The teeth of the wheel are holding on to it, and it looks like there are always two teeth inside the top.
It would help if they just listed the UTC offset, actually. I know my own offset but not for every other timezone there is.

Apparently it's UTC+5:30.
China Telecom accepting Bitcoin for a Samsung phone promotion
How is the result in Scala/Java silly? I'd say it's perfectly intuitive to most people that you can concatenate non-strings to strings using that syntax, via an implicit conversion of the non-string operand. You could do the same thing in C++ with operator overloading, and the unnecessary difficulty of building strings in C++ is probably one of the pet peeves of most people, and certainly something hard to explain to beginners (who will probably try "5" + 5 and be very very confused when the result is garbage instead of "55").
The dark side of deflation actually.
You have to put all the licenses of the parts you distribute in the same file where you put your license. You have to specify in that same file by names which parts are covered with which license. If you have Firefox, type about:license. You'll get a huge file where every license is precise what covers (only small selection here):

Apple License

This license applies to certain files in the directories js/src/assembler/assembler/, js/src/assembler/wtf/, js/src/yarr, content/media/webaudio/blink, and widget/cocoa.

Copyright (C) 2008, 2009 Apple Inc. All rights reserved.

Redistribution and use in source and binary forms, with or without
....

Apple/Mozilla NPRuntime License

This license applies to the file dom/plugins/base/npruntime.h.

Copyright © 2004, Apple Computer, Inc. and The Mozilla Foundation.
All rights reserved.
Isso. https://github.com/posativ/isso (Python)
Hey

You mention sales 'call' I am assuming this means face-to-face and not as in call via phone?

My opinion:

1. Use professional cold caller to book appointments
2. You seem to have done a good job doing the sales calls in person, why not keep this up until you reach MO RR of some level eg $5,000
3. Then employ a hot sales person with a proven track record, give him a decent basic but an awesome commission structure

If you don't want to pay a basic then look at giving any new salesperson all of the profit 100% for the first three months of a new customer. If you are certain they will be around for 12 months then you will get the biggest share but this will drive the sales person to get as many RR clients as possible.

Money talks with good sales people.

Keep on keeping on

@scottsbarlow
Why not ?

It's already possible to do surgery without cuts in some cases , using an ultrasound beam to kill cells you want to kill[1]. The doctor just needs to choose which area needs this, using an MRI machine that looks into the body in real time.

They claim remarkable results , and very fast procedure time, and immediate release to home after surgery.

And one could imagine software optimized to choosing which cells to kill, So this work could be fully automated.

[1]https://www.solveforx.com/moonshots/yoav-medan-ultrasound-su...
Ok that's pretty damn cool, I didn't know that was possible. But the car vibrations might still be too much noise, and I don't know if it's possible to automatically remove the noise like that.
> The true business of people should be to go back to school and think about whatever it was they were thinking about before somebody came along and told them they had to earn a living

This made me think of a world like Neal Stephenson's Anathem, where a portion of the population chooses to separate themselves and focus purely on education. Their lifestyles are essentially monastic/akin to $30 per day. Part of me wishes an option like that were more prevalent/acceptable in our society.
Modular Robotics
As a side note, be wary of competitors in East Europe, Asia, and other countries with electricity costing by several factors less.
Yes, it's UTC+5:30
Oh Stallman, such a character. Some of these are legitimate concerns, some just gave me a great laugh. For example, weigh these two against one another:

> Facebook deleted a statement by a human rights group, then said that was a mistake. That Facebook invited the group to post the statement again — instead of undoing the deletion — demonstrates arrogance.

> Facebook permanently records everything you do, even what you look at, even items that are "deleted".

Never attribute to conspiracy what can be explained by ineptitude! Either Facebook is an evil omnipresent observer, permanently recording everything…or some representative goofed up and they can’t undo the deletion of the data because they actually deleted the data.

But hey, if he wants to avoid Facebook and recommend against it, that’s fine. We should all make our own value assessments and our own decisions about privacy concerns, though. Just consider that Facebook’s occasional privacy blunders might be…just that.
Is YouTube even profitable yet? A few years later, despite being one of the most visited websites on the internet, it still was at a loss I think.
Finn here. If you consider the Finnish way the correct one, then it's "yolla" (or "yoh-lla"). To be clear, the "o" is short, and doesn't bend towards "u" like it would in "yo mama so fat".
Jeff Atwood's new venture is aimed at this space and is open source: http://www.discourse.org/

You can see it in action if you visit the BoingBoing forums (http://boingboing.net).
How are trends like online learning and online work afect the situation there? surely you can make reasonable money using those.
Path of Exile's patch post mortem
Interesting info.

> they have detailed data on exactly how many ads you can show people before they stop watching videos

Anecdote: YouTube caused me to install AdBlock. I'm not anti-advertising, but the amount of ads shown on YouTube videos reached a tipping point for me sometime earlier this year. I'm not ad-intolerant, but it seemed to be showing me more ads per minute than on regular TV shows. Of course that's just perception.
"We're continuing to over fish, over build, over pollute,"

ok...

"under service people at the doctors office, and under deliver on educational goals"

Hold on - these two do not fit with the previous three. Neither is about too many people but rather about not enough percentage of skilled doctors/teachers.
From the article: "As of midnight UTC on May 29, 2011, the rate is USD 8,30 per bitcoin."

Assuming he bought at that price, it's worth roughly 120 times as much when it hit $1000/BTC.
You have two options (there are more but let's not make this decision harder by throwing more options in)!

The first is to throw all of your money into investing in bit coins. You could do it right now. You then sit tight. Next challenge - when do you sell?

The second is you approach this in a lean way. Say if you have $10,000, you might buy $1,000 and then monitor this daily for the next 30 days - you then have some personal and realistic idea of which way your luck is flowing!

You could also setup a spreadsheet and pretend you have invested all of your money and track this - day 30 how are you feeling looking at the results?

I would also look at the likes of litecoin which is also showing some growth.

Best way, do it. Minimise the risk by testing it. 30 days is a great way to test.

Don't forget we're 90% wrong most of the time about everything - hey but that's ok!

Keep on keeping on

@scottsbarlow
LuaJit 2.0 is out after many years in prison

The Day I Saw Van Gogh’s Genius in a single line of JavaScript

Are mass shootings really random events? A look at the performance of Google Chrome

Chinese Hackers Infiltrate New York (Not Just At Toll Booths)
My problem with the exchanges is that they are not transparent, the people behind them are either unknown or rather incompetent (how many snafus has MtGox had in the last 3 years?). So as an European I have to send funds with SEPA to some unknown entity in UK/Slovenia/Bulgaria AND provide all my private information? Meanwhile, the owners could take off any day tomorrow with the BTC and the information.

BTC exchanges are operating in EVE like territory, the only reason to trust them is because they have not run away with the money YET. Ironically, this benefits MtGox the most, who despite/because of the ridiculous withdrawal limits have managed to stay in the business the longest.

The only exception that I would be willing to trust is Coinbase and that is only because of YC connection, and that is no guarantee either but the best for now.

BTC will only take off for the masses, when there is a reputable company offering banking/trading services with BTC.

Localbitcoins have to do for now, but is not something that scales very well.
I'd rather pay a monthly subscription to YouTube than see the amount of ads they show. Instead I've installed AdBlock. Now they get 0 revenue from me.

Games on app stores have figured this out: many of them have "Ad supported" or "Paid" versions. Why can't Google?
why is scrypt more robust to ASIC competition? Isn't it just a matter of designing another ASIC that does this?
That's truly interesting but food productions is really only one tiny part of the problem, and we also already kind of have mass starvation. I mean not in the developed world, but there are plenty of children that die either of plain outright starvation or of having extremely weak immune systems due to malnourishment. I'd imagine that the number of children that die every year from malnourishment in 2013 would be a pretty staggering figure in 1850.
Starting up? Read this
Sky Drone FPV  - Digital Full HD Drone Camera System over 4G/LTE
Excluding the UK. It's still expensive to send money from the UK to another EU country.
Email form doesn't have csrf verification and fails... hmm will have to check again tomorrow.
Discourse is pretty nice, but it's not exactly the same as Disqus.
> 1) Bitcoin's recent dramatic increase in value. (LiteCoin's value is heavily correlated to Bitcoin's.)

No, actually, Litecoin's value is very different from that of Bitcoin and in the last week or two it skyrocketed from being 0.015/BTC to 0.05/BTC and back down to 0.04/BTC or so.

As a result of your post, in just 2-3 hours, the spot price on AWS went to $0.20 per instance.

An interesting economic effect of this - prior to your article, the mining profits were flowing to the miners who figured this out on AWS. After your article, the profits are now flowing to the reserved instance owners instead. Bastard.
XDM: eXtendable Download Manager
Reading this:
http://aws.amazon.com/ec2/pricing/

seems like price has increased to 0.65(?!) per hour. That doesn't sound profitable.

edit: never mind, didn't notice this was about spot instances.
Size of the observable universe is constant. And maximization by exhaustive search requires touching every possible state. So yes, it is O(1). This is explained in Marcus' Ph.D. thesis, I believe.
It would be interesting to try some new ideas that advertising over the internet allows. How about an option for users to consume a few minutes of commercials in a row, and then get X number of videos ad free? Or allowing users to influence the ad selection by manually entering an interest/disinterest list.

Could be alot more flexible than the television model.
There's a very useful mining profitability calculator here: http://mining.thegenesisblock.com/

If you plug the numbers in you'll see that to all intent and purposes, private mining for BTC is now useless unless you invest in a USD$5K+ ASIC mining rig and even then the rewards are not guaranteed as the overall network difficulty (how hard it is to find a block) keeps jumping every few days (see http://bitcoindifficulty.com). Basically, you'll end up underwater if the value of BTC drops from its current high.

I also missed the BTC mining boat and instead have decided to mine Litecoin (working on the assumption that a rising speculative tide floats all ships).

Litecoins use a different hashing algorithm (scrypt) which is designed to prevent a mining arms race and keep it feasible for CPU miners to continue finding blocks.

I joined the liteguardian.com pool 5 days ago and have three servers mining (each has an Intel Xeon CPU E31245) and I will have made 1LTC tomorrow. At the moment 1LTC is trading at just over $40. It was $6 a week ago.

Another option which I discovered yesterday is http://www.kraken.com - they appear to be a fully fledged FX platform that allows margin/leverage trading on BTC. Risky though unless you know what you're doing (I don't).

Edit: have just sent you an invite to the liteguardian pool in case LTC mining interests you.
Cleanest CSS spinner, ever
I am not a big coffee drinker, but I think people who are into their coffee might like to know where exactly your coffee is coming from, if it's fair trade etc. So this is some information you might want to put on your landing page.

Also, maybe make it a bit more obvious what countries are eligible for deliveries? Currently I can only see this information in the drop down when placing an order, but making it a bit more obvious might help. For example, I would not expect to be able to get this in Belgium, so would be inclined to think just after looking at the landing page "Meh, sounds good but I bet it's just for the US/UK", close tab.
Bitcoin equals price of Gold
Boing Boing (http://boingboing.net/) is using Discourse ( http://www.discourse.org/ ) as commenting system.
Personally I find myself looking at these and thinking "Why?"
Spot instance price is rising at about 2 cents/hour. By 11AM UTC, it'll be unprofitable.
Congratulations on launching and good luck with your startup! While I am not a huge fan of Aaas (Anything as a Service) your prices seem pretty low compared to what I could find on Amazon so I would say that when I will need coffee I will definitely try this!
> If he had been taxed at any higher a rate, both companies would have failed.

I don't follow. Taxation applies to personal income and corporate profit.

A company on the margin of bankruptcy isn't making profit, so they're not 'losing' money in tax.
Ha, and I tried to include only titles that sounded as obvious jokes. It's getting harder and harder to tell real from Onion-style stories.
I would tweet @jonnym1ller who founded maptia.com they were TechStars Seattle then moved to Morocco

http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2013-10/11/startup-of-th...

I wouldn't be too concerned with finding an investor in Morocco though, look at Africa, Europe or any country specific startup programs...

I know you missed the submission date for Startup Morocco comp http://maroc.startupcup.com/

And don't forget good old Angel's list - here are loads of angle investors living in Morocco https://angel.co/morocco/investors

Keep on keeping on!

@scottsbarlow
Yeah it's a lot of nonsense. There are some singularity believers, that's for sure.
Yes but that still makes your browser unique, isn't it?
Three Charged Over FA Computer Hacking
Three men have been charged over allegations of computer hacking at the Football Association, Greater Manchester Police have said.

Dean Mohareb, 30, from Woodley, Stockport, has been charged with perverting the course of justice and unauthorised access to computer data.
Some work is neccessary, labour not so. (absolutely speaking)

In our current society basically everyone has to work to earn money, to then buy such products on a more-or-less free market. We are able to produce more and more goods with ever less work. That's great on the surface, but wrecks the system, because:

- Experience shows we can't really split the remaining work evenly, so some people work a lot, and some are unemployed. But people can only really participate in the economy if they do labour (and get money). It sucks for them to be unemployed, but they also fall away as consumers, which hurts the whole economy.
- Stuff only ever get's done when labour is applied. (If I could produce and sell something with no human work, everybody else would do the same, and it would have no value. So, in the equilibrium that's not going to happen.) In a sense, labour is the secret engine of the economy. At the same time, you're trying to reduce the amount of labour needed, because it's expensive and cuts into your profits. All kinds of instabilities arise from this contradiction.

In the end, we'll probably have to transition away from capitalism to something better suited to our modern realities of production, whatever that will be. An unconditional basic income would be a first step in this direction - acknowledging the fact that we need less and less work, but we still need to feed the same number of people.
China Telecom Now Accepts Bitcoins
Also, ads in middle of a video are much better than ads at the start of a video. Some times it becomes ridiculous when the ad length is 1/4th of video length (though most become skippable after 5-10 secs).
If you compress the entire universe in a pixel, which color would it be?
White?
BoingBoing.net is using it as such: Comments for an article (http://boingboing.net/2013/11/28/giant-cat-sofa.html) are automatically a thread on the forum (http://bbs.boingboing.net/t/giant-cat-sofa/15233)

Not yet very much integrated, but that shouldn't be a problem given the REST API of Discourse.