skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> The purpose of copyrights is to create a marginal incentive to create

Income is not the only incentive to create. Many are drawn to the impulse that Eddie Izzard calls "creativist": rather than making things in order to make money, make money in order to make things. Currently, copyrights and markets are the least-worst way we've found to enable these creations to bootstrap, but if we can do better, we should.

> unless you have fantastic levels of productivity such that you can have very high output with very low labor input

The combination of robotics and software make a high-output/low-labor future highly probable, if not inevitable. How long it will take until Basic Income is affordable is debatable.
Feedly hijacking ad referrals in RSS posts
Google's future: microphones in the ceiling and microchips in your head
Arguably, we've moved beyond purely disciplinary societies and into what Deleuze and others called "Societies of Control". One of the arguments there is that while disciplinary societies tend to have centralized enforcement mechanisms and ways of normalizing subjects into one single type of ideal subject (the ideal student, prisoner, patient, etc.), in control societies, things like shifting levels of access and networks of enforcement in which we police each other and ourselves become more important. There's a great, very short article by Deleuze talking about it [1]. Nonetheless, getting folks started on things like Discipline and Punish would be nice.

https://files.nyu.edu/dnm232/public/deleuze_postcript.pdf
Idea to MVP in 20 Minutes
Perhaps I'm naive, but I never understood why a despotic US President would need all of these weapons and vehicles. I mean, they're a nice convenience, but they're complete unnecessary for a takeover.

My thought would be that you just need the presidency and maybe six high ranking military officers. You then declare a presidential address where you announce that you're declaring yourself dictator for life. If anyone objects, you'll nuke Moscow. Of course, Russia will respond by annihilating the entire US, so objecting to the take over is essentially a death sentence.

Let the citizens have their guns. They can't shoot an ICBM.
People trying to assert their own control isn't going to fix the government, it is just going to change who is in control
The companies condoning the torture are publicly traded companies which are legally obligated to maximize profits. So it shouldn't come as a surprise that this is happening on a massive scale. They only ways we can stop it are to create new regulations (the ones there today are ignored and the government is not staffed to enforce them) or for the public to stop buying from companies who torture animals. Both scenarios seem pretty unlikely to me, so I am not sure what to do.
Not really. You can't purchase karma. Or rather: karma that you could purchase with dollars and use to gratify someone or incentives a task would be akin to a specialised currency.

Or: money is tradable karma.
Earlier investors usually have the option of reinvesting (at the new valuation) in order to maintain their proportion of the company. Typically, they also get the same terms (which tend to propagate to all the investors in the round.) This is why taking shitty terms early on can damage you, even if you think the 5x liquidation preference you took on that $1 million A round "shouldn't" matter. On its own, it's only $5 million, but you're likely to face MLP (and participating preferred, which is also horrible) in all future rounds.

Founders and employees do not get to reinvest. Typically, when a VC-funded company is allowing employees to buy more equity is the last time to take that deal (it means the company is cash-poor and in bad shape). General rule: unless you're a founder, avoid taking the other side of any deal with VCs in it.
> Aesthetics matter. We walk farther when streets feel safe and interesting. People who live in central New York or London typically walk between a third to a half mile to go shopping. That’s a four- to 10-minute stroll.

I don't think aesthetics is really the main point. Older cities like New York and London aren't designed for cars. High rise buildings don't have parking for every home / desk so it isn't an option to have that many cars in the city.
Curious as to the approach of pulling a project local Go distribution instead of using the default. Is this to ensure Go version compatibility?
MS shares information with intelligence agencies and usually before MS has even delivered a patch.

On top of it, when we analyze government malware, we don't see some weird calls to rand_s. We just see a few zero-days, exploits for known issues, or just plain-jane trojans.

Why compromise rand_s, which could help our enemies and cause a public outcry, when you're sitting on a mountain of zero days?

Also, windows is not closed source. MS shares source with governments, universities, etc. I think functions like rand_s are well understood and there has never been an MS backdoor for the government.
I give my card to the cashier, they swipe it, I then wait for a receipt to print, wait for the cashier to hand me a pen and the receipt, sign the receipt, hand it back to the cashier with the pen. If they're doing it right, they compare the signature to the one on the card, but in most cases I am then done.

versus

I wait for the onscreen prompt, I tap my card, hear a satisfying beep and am done.

It's pretty obvious the difference.
The idea that there is a small cabal of powerful people who brought the economy to its knees while enriching themselves through their knowing and active malfeasance is a fairy tale.

To ethically prosecute people you have to competently and in good faith believe they have broken specific laws. And you need to know the actions, and how specifically they violated the law. An unfortunate outcome is not sufficient.
How so? Has anyone ever pulled the RAM sticks out of their computer to check that the entropy pool looks like they expect it to? Did they then verify that the L3 cache on the CPU had the same contents? Or did they simply ask the suspected backdoor CPU if the very memory it was just suspected of tampering with was clean?

If you're going to open Pandora's box, I don't think you get to pick and choose what hypothetical backdoors to take out. It's particularly odd to only select the subset of backdoors that you can easily defend against.
Speed mainly: it's unbearable on my machines. But maybe I'm a niche market: cheapskates with 5 year old laptops.
Yeah, I'm definitely not blaming people for making small talk or being interested in me. If anything, it's on me to steer the conversation towards other things - something I'm actively working on doing.
That's the catchy title, but the article is really about density and transportation by car. There's a nice diagram describing how living in the suburbs reduces the number of places in walking distance, but in that diagram the house isn't even on a cul-de-sac. The thesis is actually that cul-de-sacs increase driving distance, because the places where they are used tend not to have any walkable destinations.

This makes it possible to actually connect useful mass transit to the suburb, which as the article explained, people will use if it's there.

The article says that people in midtown take MARTA to the grocery store... I can confidently tell you that this is incorrect at best. People in midtown drive their car to Whole Foods on the way back from their 15 minute reverse commute to work in another part of town. They will later walk to a local restaurant, bar, the park, or a local grocery or retail store, but it is rare that they will use MARTA except to get to the airport.
Spooky Connection: Wormholes and the Quantum World
That's great, but if you can't literally write out explicit answers to each of my questions, and explicitly in sentences identify why your parents disagree with you, then you don't know what you're doing and you're just following the crowd. If you can't explain it, you don't know it.

Imagine you were actually trying to convince pg to fund you after he said 'I think you'd be a better founder if you finished college first'. What would you tell him?
> The combination of robotics and software make a high-output/low-labor future highly probable, if not inevitable.

Sure. But the future is, you know, different than the present.

> How long it will take until Basic Income is affordable is debatable.

Some level of Basic Income guarantee is affordable now. What varies with productivity is the level at which Basic Income is sustainable.
By non-residents do you mean non-drivers?
Completely agreed. The selection of good, humanely raised meats at most supermarkets is basically non-existent, and as you say it's basically impossible to tell where it came from. I think better and more rigorous labeling laws would solve many problems.
It's fairly easy to send USD online if you own a credit card and bank account, but receiving money is a whole lot harder. It's also harder to do it with the degree of anonymity that Bitcoin provides and without the risk of your payment provider freezing your funds or banning you from using their service.
FWIW, you linked to a book format which has embedded technological controls that contribute to being at the mercy of authoritarianism.
On OSX I highly recommend YouView[1]. It streams H.264, and CPU usage during playback is 1/3 of what the browser player uses. I guess it really inconsequential unless you are on a laptop. On a laptop it's a difference in 1-1.5 hours of battery life.

[1] https://mrgeckosmedia.com/applications/info/YouView
Elsevier does not have copyright of these papers! The authors do.

This is not true for the vast majority [1] of papers; for most articles published by Elsevier, the authors have to sign away their copyright first. What the parent says applies only to papers published "open access" by Elsevier. Both the links posted by the parent talk about Elsevier's policy for this type of publication. To publish an article as open access, authors [2] have to pay nontrivial sums to Elsevier [3]:

For open access articles a fee is payable by the author, their institution or research funder to cover the costs associated with publication. Fees range from $500 - $5000 USD. Visit the individual journal homepages for specific pricing information.

Elsevier uses the term "subscription articles" for "regular" articles (where one doesn't have to pay this huge fee). For these regular articles, the authors have to sign away their copyright as part of a "Journal Publishing Agreement" before Elsevier will publish. Here is some sample legalese from a recent such agreement [4]:

I hereby assign to Elsevier Inc. the copyright in the manuscript identified above (government authors not electing to transfer agree to assign an exclusive publishing and distribution license) and any supplemental tables, illustrations or other information submitted therewith that are intended for publication as part of the manuscript (the "Article") in all forms and media (whether now known or hereafter developed), throughout the world, in all languages, for the full term of copyright, effective when and if the article is accepted for publication. This transfer includes the right to provide the Article in electronic and online forms and systems.

I strongly suspect that the number of articles published "open access" by Elsevier is a minuscule fraction of their total publication, just because there are not many academics who have that kind of money to spend.

[1] Admittedly, by my own reckoning; I couldn't find relevant publication numbers online.

[2] Or their funding agency, e.g., the institute/department/university/country where the authors work.

[3] http://www.elsevier.com/about/open-access/sponsored-articles

[4] http://sage.math.washington.edu/home/wstein/www/home/liangzh...

EDIT: Formatting.
Have you not wondered or even humbled yourself to consider that perhaps your own view is more short-sighted than the posters?

Yes, I question myself often. The purpose of this post was to get some outside perspective, and start a discussion of how best to keep this a site for high quality discussion. And I don't blame the posters: I'm sure I've posted things that others find off-topic.

On the flip-side, presuming you like HN as it is, I'd ask whether you've considered that its current state is not the result a "natural evolution", rather the conscious curation of numerous previous parties. That is, if we are where we are due to frequent flagging, what are the consequences of stopping?
I don't even see any advantage for Parallela in embedded devices compared to something like an AMD Temash.
Micropayments is a really tough business. Basically it's too risky. Chargebacks are often anywhere between $15 to $35 per transaction.

When you earn a small percentage of a $5 transaction, which a sender claims to have sent by mistake (or he/she requests the money back due to different reasons) 2 things happen:

A. You lose your % of $5

B. You get charged $35.

Not a pretty situation to be in when you are scaling and about 15-30% of your sales get charged back.

Bitcoins are irreversible, so at least they mitigate your risk as a micropayment provider (or as a seller).
> Last time I checked, the elections did not significantly change policy

What makes you think that people want a change in policy, in some substantive sort of way? There is a reason that third parties in the U.S. are ridiculed: most people don't agree with any of their positions. Few people are far enough to the right that they want to get rid of the Department of Education like the libertarians, or far enough to the left that they want to revive the power of the labor unions, like the greens. People who opposed Iraq turned around and exerted the President to get into Syria.

> The US has the highest per-capita rate of incarceration in the world, mostly over Prohibition.

An interesting aspect of the original Prohibition was that it was, at the time, perceived as a triumph of Democracy. It was deeply intertwined with the women's suffrage movement, and succeeded despite the enormous power, money, and influence of the alcohol manufacturers. It succeeded despite the fact that at the time, the federal government derived 1/3 of its revenue from liquor taxes.

The drug war is bad, sure, but it's a sign of a misguided democracy not an authoritarian regime. I grew up in the suburbs in the early 1990's, surrounded by soccer moms shrieking "just say no!" This year was the first time since 1969 that a majority of Americans supported decriminalizing marijuana: http://www.politico.com/story/2013/10/marijuana-legalization.... Not ending the drug war, just decriminalizing the most harmless of the drugs. And not "likely voters" but a group including lots of young people who won't vote to effectuate that policy. You can't look at the drug war and call it some sort of failure of democracy, a slide into Stalinist despotism.

> And the millions we have killed are mostly in other countries that do not respeck our authority.

There is a big difference between killing people in other countries and killing people in our own country.

> to demand that banks everywhere in the world comply with its tax regime

Doesn't seem unreasonable, considering that banks everywhere transact with or through the United States.
Our pricing model was broken. Here's how we fixed it
Thanks for sharing, Ivan! Me and Nathan Bashaw launched Product Hunt publicly last week. AMA!?
What's funny to me about the suggestion to move is that the very people who have the greatest ability to actually move to another country - upper-middle class people with college degrees - are the ones least affected by these issues.
OpenGL stems from the same people who brought about Linux. And they're still arguing about OS variants.

Meanwhile, Microsoft is a much more fluid experience for the gamers and developers. Also this is the difference between DirectX and OpenGL.

Microsoft has revised DirectX numerous times in the amount of time it took your "awesome" community to argue their way up from OpenGL 2.0 to 2.1.
(sorry, might be incorrect in that versioning, I categorize OpenGL in the same poo pool as Linux; snobby home-coders that can't agree on anything)
They do not want immigrants, they have problems enough with the ones they got recently
Okay, I used the wrong word. My point remains unchanged. Animals, in their various are not capable of enough intelligence or self-reasoning to be considered thinking beings requiring equal protection with people. It is not morally wrong for a human to hunt animals, farm animals, use animals for labor, or keep animals as pets.

This does not make it right for a human to deliberately cause harm to an animal for pleasure or entertainment. I also would consider trophy hunting to be immoral if one leaves the body to rot.
The author is making a false assumption; I work for one of the largest companies in the world and we have quite a number of age 40-50 year old people in individual contributor roles earning healthy (low six figure) salaries.

I personally know plenty of people who are 45+ still working as programmers.
From my experience, walking for 45-60 minutes in addition to my daily routine (the items mentioned by other posters already) add up to about the 10,000 step goal.

I try to bike to work every day and/or walk about 5km in addition to anything else I do (work, lifting weights, etc).

I don't measure (anymore). I just try to move my body as much as I can when I can.
Underground parking provides plenty of avenues for people to own a car if they want. However, these cities are so well connected that it doesn't make sense to own a car because it's easier to walk, and given the option, people wouldn't want to navigate streets if they have the option of walking to work or shopping.

Cul-de-sacs on the other hand are the signature of urban sprawl. If you live in a cul-de-sac, odds that walking to shopping isn't very convenient. You also probably have a car, so why bother?
Same here. I keep hearing that platitude, and have yet to come across a company that will cough up the numbers. I've decided it's one of those things that sounds good on the face of it, makes sense, but isn't really true.

But your final sentence is the best advice: treat the options as a potential windfall, but don't otherwise factor them into your decision.
13 Plead Guilty To Attacking Paypal Server
Chicago nails this. The grid road network throughout the entire city means there is regular N-S and E-W bus service every half mile or so. And there are business districts in pretty much every neighborhood.

This happens is areas of low housing density (single-family homes in Jefferson Park) and high density (high-rises in Lincoln Park.)
My son writes programs using Python's turtle graphics, which reminds me of the Logo programming I did on my Vic 20 as a kid. Yesterday he was writing the same "input a number and then draw a polygon with that many sides" program I did a long time ago.
A related experiment: http://www.zeit.de/datenschutz/malte-spitz-data-retention/
Srinivasa Ramanujan, Mathematician
This story reminded me of the Boston bombing and it's "lockdown" (read martial law). Didn't Boston have one of these APCs roaming the streets during its martial law. In that case it's really a show of force against the "civilian" population than to catch terrorists.

Why the hell does Ohio State need an MRAP. Are they going to actually tell us that the terrorists might roll in with tanks or APCs. Or maybe the terrorists will be running around with APCs in full combat? No.

Geez, is anybody even questioning these clowns about these acquisitions.
If you're a beginner, stick with python, or matlab.
> It also helps that it has been proven to work in eliminating gender bias.
> Another unsubstantiated claim.

Sorry, I thought you could your own searches. If you can't be bothered to do your own research, and can provide any sources of your own, why should anyone care what you got to say?

any, for the incurrable lazy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z6NvCH7A8Vs and https://wiki.gnome.org/GnomeLove/Mentors

> Sweden apparently tried gender-exclusive classes

No, they did not. They added a simple rule that said: If a person enrolling in a class would become a minority in that class, then that person deserve some preferential treatment. The end resulted was that over 80% of the time this rule triggered, it was a white male, trying to enter a white female dominated class room.

> That article actually proves you wrong...

Apprently a lack of reading skills...

The article ends on:

>> Few people question the need to eliminate racial and sexist barriers that exclude minorities' and women from full participation in society. Preferential treatment programs may be one means toward this goal. But these programs also raise ethical issues that direct us to consider their potential benefits and harms, the justice of compensating groups for past harms and present disadvantages, and the fairest way to distribute the burdens of compensation.

And it talks about what those temporary measures where designed for:

>> First instituted in the 1960s and 1970s by employers and educational institutions in response to pressures from civil rights groups, federal legislation, and court rulings, preferential treatment programs seek to rectify the effects of past and ongoing discrimination against women and racial minorities.

And last:

>> Nor is it clear that even those minorities and women qualifying for preferential treatment benefit from such special consideration. Recent studies reveal a high dropout rate among minority college students admitted under affirmative action programs. At U. C. Berkeley, for example, only 45 percent of black students admitted in 1984 had graduated by 1989 compared to 73 percent of Anglos. The high rate of failure that follows the award of employment and educational opportunities to minority individuals unprepared to meet the challenges of higher education reinforces feelings of inferiority among members of these groups.

they are not beneficial, and they do not work.
Remake bank tech with Standard Treasury as engineer #5
How did you determine this list? Just curious.
I am glad you have thought about it it to this extent. It is always reassuring to see that the relevant point have been thought of, and that there is at least a provisional plan to deal with them. This gives me a fair amount more confidence in what you are doing.
You should read http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/2006/07/separating-programm... (or the linked paper, if you want something heavier).

Maybe everyone can learn to code, but the research says that a portion of the population (on the order of half) isn't wired to think that way, and at least would take orders of magnitude more time to learn (if they can at all).

I'm by no means claiming that this segment of the population is more or less intelligent than the rest, but to make claims like "everyone can learn to program" is to ignore the realities of the classroom.
Poor treatment of prisoners of war is not equivalent to imprisonment of political dissenters. The only American citizen ever held in Guantanamo was captured in Afghanistan fighting against the U.S. and was transferred out.
If only there was some party out there that could protect us from things like this. Possibly even insuring us in the case of something going really wrong and the person holding our money loses it all. They could also establish rules that anyone holding money would have to comply with in order to be certified as safe. Wouldn't that be grand...