skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is sad. Very sad. The only explanation is that so many Americans are so spoiled by the nation's past success that they became so vain. I mean, kids are naturally inquisitive. Given the right nurturing, kids should love STEM. Heck, they should be obsessed with STEM because STEM subjects are full of wonders. Yet, what do kids nowadays think cool? Having access to alcohol and drugs is cool. Bullying people who take studying seriously is cool. Sports jockeys who think nothing is important other than their games with another high school are cool. When hearing people enthusiastically talk about technology, making a face as if he just ate s*&^t is cool (just like the stupid and weak Jesse did in the finale of Breaking Bad when Walt explained what "exothermal" meant). Whining about STEM are being too "hard", too "boring", too "irrelevant", too "nerdy" is cool... And tell me the parents didn't have very bad influence to the kids.

I find this phenomenon puzzling. STEM is foundation of the modern civilization. And it is Europeans and Americans, after all, who have largely advanced modern science, technology, engineering, and math in the past hundreds of years. I can tell fascinating stories about the great minds and great achievements for weeks. Yet, the great history, the great subjects, and the people who love STEM are being looked down upon by American kids? What.The.Fuck.

It was not like this in the country where I grew up, though. In our country, STEM are cool in school. Seriously cool. Teachers, kids, and especially parents take studying of STEM seriously (though to be fair, the parents took every subject seriously as they cared about grades too). Biographies of famous scientists are popular readings. Names like Archimedes, Newton, Curie, Paulin, Ernest Lawrence, and so on are household names. No one in my school got despised because he or she studied hard. That would be absurd to even think about. That's why I was initially bewildered by Paul Graham's Why Nerds Are Unpopular.

And what's the result of all these? Straight-A students couldn't pass a community college's placement math test, as reported by NYT a couple of years ago. I don't what could be worse than such drama.
The guy doesn't exist. The whole article is a work of fiction. Pando must be desperate for traffic.

> After dropping out of college, the Man took a job in high-frequency trading when he was 20, where, he claims, he made a killing.

Are we supposed to believe that a person who dropped out of college, with no computer science or programming background, is hired by a hedge fund or the proprietary trading desk of a large bank to help develop their HFT software and algorithms?
I think that these icons should be animated, this will make them much more user friendly.
Starting Up a University
This argument is a variant of the Yuppie Nuremberg Defense, courtesy of Thank You For Smoking.

1; You know what you're doing is wrong.
2; Everybody has a mortgage to pay.
1; Ah, the yuppie nuremberg defense.
I'm not sure why general and special relativity are called like that. Special relativity is about movement and how that causes length contractions, time dilations and a change of mass of the moving object. General relativity is about how mass (even at rest) dilates spacetime. So general relativity is about black holes and worm holes and how space itself maybe "moves". There is no speed limit on how fast a region of space itself can move in relation to another region, thus it is ok that the universe expands at a speed where two regions are "moving" away from each other faster than the speed of light.

So if you could move space itself you could implement FTL travel, because this is not movement at all in the sense of special relativity. Some scientists say one could do that if you could create matter with a negative energy density, whatever that might mean. I think our understanding of the universe does not exclude the possibility for such matter, but it doesn't predict it either. So unless new discoveries are made that lead to new theories that predict such matter FTL is in the realm of wishful thinking.

That's what I could piece together from various (non science journal) news publications and YouTube videos (by PhDs, aimed at laymen).
The costs of punishment almost always exceed the cost of the individual action. The question is the cost of enforcement in total versus the prevented cost in total, including both the costs that would be caused by this guy and the costs that would be caused by others that are deterred by the credible threat of enforcement.

Having said that, I am extremely sympathetic to the notion that NYC markets may be over-regulated, and have mixed feelings about the notion that evasion is an appropriate way to deal with that. I don't necessarily think this guy should be in prison; I was narrowly answering your question: "[W]hat possible benefit would prison be here?"
How is this a HN content?
You want a doctor who defers to your judgment as a non-doctor?
I think you missed words 2,3,4,5 in his post.
if a 15% hotel tax is what steers you away from one of the world's preeminent tourist destinations, I'm not sure that you were going to add much to the local economy.

(To be a little less snarky, the microeconomics of the situation indicate it's probably not that damaging. Your hotel stay is probably less than half of your costs of visiting, so a 15% markup on that component alone doesn't raise the overall price of a trip very much.)
As well as Smith, I am reminded of Bastiat:

“Socialism, like the ancient ideas from which it springs, confuses the distinction between government and society. As a result of this, every time we object to a thing being done by government, the socialists conclude that we object to its being done at all. We disapprove of state education. Then the socialists say that we are opposed to any education. We object to a state religion. Then the socialists say that we want no religion at all. We object to a state-enforced equality. Then they say that we are against equality. And so on, and so on. It is as if the socialists were to accuse us of not wanting persons to eat because we do not want the state to raise grain.”

-- Frédéric Bastiat, The Law

The problem in the US isn't capitalism, it's that the government interferes extensively in the economy. It is rational, if not moral, for the wealthy to expend effort and resources to gain political power rather than spending the same effort and resources on providing goods and services.

Building a society is the responsibility of each individual who values it. Using government force in pursuit of that goal leads only to the co-option and disenfranchisement Simon complains about.
Finsher's "The Social Network" shows some real Perl code too. In several scenes with monitor closeups - downloading images via Perl calling wget from Harward dorm websites.

hacking scene: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=odOzMz-fOOw
There's no FreeBSD port called "devscripts", perhaps you meant devel/checkbashisms
To be fair, there are a lot of other ways to "make a killing" in HFT which are not developing software and algorithms for hedge funds or large banks.
Küchen Schneidebretter für den Weihnachtsman
> Nearly 90 percent of high school graduates say they’re not interested in a career or a college major involving science, technology, engineering or math

I see a great problem in a society that shifts its focus from value-adding activities like research and development towards zero-sum activities like law and management. We clearly need both, but in the long run, innovation is what ensures future.

I read somewhere that this is accompanied by a demographics shift, where middle class, white Americans are shifting even more strongly away from science, technology and math and towards business and law. As a culture, this is troubling.
This is not a serious article at all. There's essentially not content. It deserves downvotes.
Manhattan has somewhat limited space for new construction.
Well actually how it works is X knows that Lord Y hasn't got a position in the government at the moment so the funny hand shake club[1] gets together and comes up with a new position. In this case the Ministry of Nudges with chief nudger, a whole staff of public servants, a budget, and a whole pile of expenses like duck houses.

[1] masons, Eton alumni etc.
The article left out a number of very good scientific reasons why lucentis and avastin are not bioequivalent and should not be subsituted.

I found it especially misleading that they used anecdotal evidence to claim that the cheaper drug is equivalent in function and safety.

That said, Genentech is on the wrong side of the PR angle here and unfortunately for them, some internal documents got exposed which make them seem less than angelic here. If the cost differential of producing the drugs really is small, then they don't have a strong position, because it makes them appear as if they are using one of the drugs as a profit center to fund future R&D.

Anyway, the article really glosses over stuff, but you'd need to spend about 5-7 years getting a PhD in pharmaceutical chemistry, plus working in industry for a few years before you understand the business and science of what genentech does.
Particularly when the cheap drug isn't FDA approved for the treatment in question.
Hotel law was absolutely created to regulate people renting out their places. The early working-class hotels were owner-occupied tenements with short leases. Hotel regulation was written with that picture in mind.

And I simply cannot believe you compared hotel regulation to the institution of slavery. It is not just in-apt, it is totally inappropriate. You should feel ashamed of yourself.
I think you meant 28 and 31
Must be nice to go through life believing you're entitled to ignore externalities that cause discomfort to others, or not pay for public goods that you benefit from. Keeps things simple when you just have to worry about getting what's yours.
Caucasian and non-Caucasian. Easy.
Groupon hasn't gone bankrupt yet?
I was surprised by that as well, but there may be some explanation. For example, he was a teenage hacker and had connections - through his family or other. So maybe he knew someone at a high frequency trading hedge fund who saw that the guy could code, and gave him a chance.

I agree that it's a bit far fetched, but IMHO it's plausible and I wouldn't be surprised if more than one person had already landed a lucrative job in the financial sector that way.
Top Regrets in Life by those About to Die
It seems unlikely. The genetic diversity was already created. Even when people report "we cannot detect any cancer cells in this person's body, so they're cured", they aren't saying there are no repositories in the body that harbor some resistant cells, whcih will then go walk up the exponential growth curves every aggressive tumor always does.
The speech appears flawless at first read.

It comes from the FODI about a month ago which summarizes to (sorry if this offends) a more interesting TED than TED.

http://fodi.sydneyoperahouse.com/

If only I could subscribe to a RSS feed of FODI speeches...
Does this require a writeable, user-accessible file on the computer where the browser is installed? (versus, e.g., a gateway computer the user controls that can run openssl, the proxy, tcpdump and the packet filter)

If yes, how would the NSS solution work if the user is browsing from a device that hides and even tries to deny the user access to the filesystem, like one of today's smartphones or tablets?
CES 2014: What To Expect From The Biggest Tech Show of The Year
Zinc finger nucleases are effectively obsolete; CRISPR systems do the same thing, but you don't have to develop custom proteins- just supply the approprately synthesized complementary DNA.
Seriously. A focus on the positive sum is just about the entire point of Atlas Shrugged. If the industrialists (who had been making a bunch of money) left a zero-sum game, the others should benefit!
IMO we shouldn't have to jump through hoops to be able to commit. Let people commit whatever they want and then run tests to decide if you want to merge in their branches.

The workflow should encourage people to commit early and often to safeguard the work they've been doing as much as possible. It's very frustrating to lose work because it wasn't in the git object store.
She was probably right about the systems she used. I clearly remember be stunned, and initially not believing, that any one person, even a sysadmin, would have such broad access to systems at the NSA. It goes against everything that intelligence agencies have learned about compartmentalization of information and "need to know" access controls.
Jurassic Park. If for nothing else than the 3D file browser being an actual SGI file system visualizer, rather than some hollywood 3D UI.
So is it a Hack that this news featured on HN?
"and suddenly Walmart won't distribute it, there are a lot of other ways to sell mousetraps"

You are forgetting though (in this Walmart example) that Walmart provides volume. And volume drives down your costs. A big customer may very well be a necessary evil that you can't avoid.

Manufacturers are also known for selling the same (or slightly different or even inferior) product through multiple channels in order to drive down costs. (And example might be Sears private labeling washing machines manufacturered by Westinghouse).

"Demand Media made was creating a lot of crappy content"

Agree with that.
> Assuming that the GPL is fully representative of Stallman's views,

What does Stallman or his views have to do with it? The GPL is a document that is interpreted by judges and juries, not by Stallman.

The text of the GPL itself makes no distinction between software or other things that can be copyrighted. GPLv3 even changes its language to make it clearer that it can be applied to non-software things. For example, it defines "source code" as "the preferred form of the work for making modifications to it". What this actually means is up to the aforementioned judges and juries, but for a movie, it's conceivable that the preferred source for modification is indeed the 3d models, the original reels, and so forth.
I just thought he was referencing something I was not familiar with, not paraphrasing something I was.

> are you playing some kind of semantic game ... because if so, i'm thinking you might be keith alexander?

You are reading too much into my question. Sometimes a question is just a question and there's no need to pitch a battle over it.
AAP (Aam aadmi party)'s performance is unprecedented for a 1-year old party taking on national parties that were 50-year old with far more money and resources. Its a stunning debut for the AAP!
Perhaps more relevant to HN, Arvind Kejriwal graduated from IIT (Indian Institute of Technology) which is somewhat analogous to MIT in the Indian context. He then joined the administrative services.

So he is a techy turned bureaucrat, turned activist, turned politician.
>Current laws, for example, include a tax that goes directly to the Javits Convention Center — a place scant numbers of New Yorkers have ever visited.

And yet which brings thousands and thousands of visitors to New York (with spending and lodging money) yearly. Move the Javits Center to Jersey and the surrounding hotels, restaurants and immeneties suddenly have very little reason to be there.
"Entrepreneurship fits him."

No, sounds like easy-to-pull-off arbitrage models fit him.
"shitty news" is definitely different than shitty content (of the type that Demand produced).

"shitty news" has entertainment value. People read shitty news because it's entertaining. If it's not accurate that is not the same problem as crappy instructions on how to fix a leaky roof (where the goal is to solve a problem not be entertained.)
You seem to be separating the activity of executing a program from the program itself. There's no reason a program cannot be constructed which takes arbitrary data and we feed data to programs to get other programs. So what's "mere data" in one system might bbbe executed by another.

While a recipe card might not constitute a "program" in most contexts, if you construct a cooking robot, the same data is now magically software because the robot could use it to cook. So the line you are attempting to draw between software and data is merely that of the limitations of what the system can process.

And all programs are ultimately processed as data by the instruction loop within the CPU. For example, I can construct the "non data" program of 0x20FE (unconditional branch to its own start on the 86HC11, i.e. 10 GOTO 10). The CPU unconditionally fetches the instruction at the instruction pointer, then executes it. In this case, it increments the instruction pointer by 2 while reading it, then executes and decrements the instruction pointer by 2, endlessly looping over the same data.
> some people remember not to stab their co-workers in the back when they go to work.

> detect that tendency to treachery in advance.

The downvotes might be because you seem to equate whistleblowing, an act of conscience, with treachery.
Virtual supermarket in a subway station
Refreshing to see such a clear and reasoned repudiation of the usual naive 'free market is king' nonsense.
This needed to be shared, thanks for putting in the effort !
[ I was thinking of writing a similar piece myself, but you just DID it ]
A simplified version of this experiment: http://www.thetoasterproject.org/
That's hilarious. I wish I could've seen her reaction.
The shell is closely tied to running commands and the exit code of commands make up the true/false values. "return 0" in the main function of a C program means "no error" which is interpreted as true by the shell. Different non-zero return values signal different command (program) specific error states.
Theres actually 2 other HUGE winners in these Indian elections:
1. The Election Commission of India that galvanized 60-80% of the voters to turn out (normally its 30-40%). 70% women voter turnout. 90% 18-29 voter age turnout
2. Youth voters < 29 yrs of age

India will see 500-600 mln voters turn out in May for the LokSabha elections. The US could learn 2 lessons from all this:
1. How a true democracy with 60% voter participation works
2. You can send a man to the moon but cant have a woman President. How do other countries integrate women politicians and why it works
Please, visit Istanbul sometime. It follows those rules pretty closely. But don't just visit the historical districts -- visit the neighborhoods where there's a random skyscraper in the middle of otherwise low-rise residential. Nearly everyone gave up on building attractive buildings.

There is a character to a city, and it is easy to destroy the things that make them worth living in.
The polls are conflicting, but this one says Americans think he's a whistleblower: http://www.quinnipiac.edu/institutes-and-centers/polling-ins...

Also, when you have a concerted effort by the administration, congress, and the security industrial machine to pariah Snowden, then it affects the polls. Without the smear campaign, we'd be united.
I've been making tourist apartments available online since 2001, long before Airbnb (a competitor for me) even existed, and I never heard anyone in any city ever complain about tourist apartments, be it Prague, Venice or Paris.

What happens is that a certain, usually small, percentage of residential apartments is made available to the tourists.

Each apartment means about one/two less hotel rooms.

Hotel rooms take space too, they are not floating over the city.
They often replace old residential buildings to build hotels effectively taking away space from residents who are pushed out of the city.

So we may say that tourism takes space in the center, not apartments.

I didn't hear much complain about this neither, as tourism brings money and, if anything, they want more of them.
It seems to me that NY has a very specific situation so Airbnb may be actually harming the residents, I don't know, but in general Airbnb is not doing anything particularly new in Europe, where apartments for short term rent have been existing for long time.

The hype is all about "rent from another human being" but the reality, and I guess most of their business in Europe, is simply providing a better platform.

Maybe NY regulators could look at Prague or Croatia to solve the problem.

[edit: formatting]
I think it was a good speech, but because it was so emotional, and not rational. In fact, he was dismissive of any arguments as anything other than his own. To call all other forms of thought juvenile, and simply say "we are either together or not" sounds like the content of a great political speech, not a well articulated debate.
>"I don't treat Snowden as a hero, and I hope no one else in the United States emulates him..."

The inevitable corollary is that you'd rather we all still be completely in the dark regarding our government's activities.
This is definitely the best hacking clip: http://youtu.be/u8qgehH3kEQ

four hands on the keyboard...
There are a few places listed, for example in California, that are actually registered as hotel/hostels and pay city taxes and advertise multiple rooms. Though, I don't see they should be on AirBnB in the first place (my view is that if you are a business you should not be on AirBnB).
It would be interesting to see a breakdown of who pays for what in the development of a needed drug. For instance, how big are the tax credits for R&D? How much of the testing is subsidised or outright paid for by taxpayers?

And of course: what proportion of drug development is to replace high earning drugs for which the patent protection is expiring. (ie "solved problems").

I am not convinced that the drug industry needs patent protection. I have a gnawing suspicion that we have reached a point where it might be a better idea to just remove patents and see where the chips fall.
What I found most interesting about the article was the complete lack of any idea of the patient paying for the drugs. The word "patient" literally does not appear on the first page, throughout the rest of the article, it only occurs in references to studies, except on the last page, were we find "many decisions are guided by whether the patient’s insurance covers the entire cost or just a portion."

It seems that patients aren't agents who have any involvement in anything, in the authors world. They're just objects to be pushed around by insurance companies, doctors, and drug makers.

Regardless of the details of these two drugs, right there you have the problem with health care in America.
Manhattan could re-zone to permit a great deal more construction, but it is unlikely to happen.

First, residents strongly oppose it.

Second, much of the transport system is maxed out. Building more housing or office space would only overburden systems operating at capacity. (e.g. the west side highway, fdr drive, lexington avenue subway line are all unusably crowded)
Thanks, indeed this needs to be shared. Glad you liked it.
While I think your final statement is rather vitriolic, I do agree the article styling him an "entrepreneur" or "disrupter" is ridiculous.

He is a step or two above a drug dealer. That's about where I would land him.
Exactly what I needed, thanks a lot for that.
me: This whole affair stinks. Hmph.

Official state organs, chime in.

outlet: "blah blah official boo hoo blah blah"

me: Quick, where is my tin foil?
The built in app only allows podcasts from their catalog.
Warning, this won't check the code you're committing, it'll check the code you have in your working directory. You need to stash all non staged changes before running the tests.
> The only thing I felt a bit dissapointed about was to see a couple of open source projects use snippets of my code without any form of acknowledgement.

Does the original code have a free license? It seems like it doesn't, so these free projects taking the code could be violating the original copyright.
O, if only he had linked to the Mises Institute a few more times!
Design Patterns Can Be Evil
How many of you own and love your Macbook Air now?