skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>> But it _does_ work to our benefit.

No it doesn't. It works to the benefit of the ruling class, which, coincidentally, is the group of people who set the system up in the first place, and still control it today. Sure, its members come and go, but the power structure stays in place.

>> Sure, innocent people are mistakenly jailed

Mistakenly? -Rarely, if ever. Most of the time they know exactly what they're doing.

>> But overall the system works, and throwing your hands up in defeat

What defeat? I thought you just said the system "works"? -Where's the defeat if it's working properly and thus, everything is fine?

>> instead of trying to influence the system is certainly unhelpful. You won't start a revolution by kvetching in online comments, maybe you should try writing some letters sometime. They really do read them, and respond to them

Wow, you're so naive. Check out the other reply to my comment above, where someone said he's figured that it doesn't work. When Obama or whoever gets elected through receiving and using millions/billions of dollars of campaign contributions (ie. "bribes"), who exactly do you think he represents?
Card exchanges love more data. You'll get much better cost rates and acceptance rates the more data you provide, and the more you get from the card the better. Or checking against typed in data. This is why we still use swipes at all instead of just taking a picture of the card.

Converting magnetic signal to audio is a decoding and conversion. There may be more down the line, but it is still one step that can be called that.

Similarly, there are plenty of pet projects out there that harvest the audio jack for power, like running an IR LED. You are just plain wrong on that point. There isn't any issue playing sound out while recording in.
Linux-based TOR gadget protects IP identity
December 9, 1968 Douglas Engelbart did something what I believe was a huge leap into the future. He didn't just invent the mouse, but the whole experience and interactivity with a computer which was unheard.

Do that sort of things still happen today? Of course new things get invented and new ways to interact with media and a computer such as Leap Motion, Myo - Gesture control armband, Siri, and I'm sure there are tons of other examples out there. But they seem to be what in Engelbart's presentation was the mouse, just a part of the larger picture.
A basic understanding of the physics of electricity will give you helpful insight into countless things in your everyday life; you likely don't notice this because you take such a basic understanding for granted. For example, understanding resistance current and voltage will allow you to reason about the efficiency of different sort of light bulbs (the package will give you the numbers and tell you it is good, but consumers are rightfully wary of what packaging tells them), understand how electrical heaters work, reason about their monthly power bill, etc. Knowledge of how electricity works, particularly home wiring, can save lives. Hell, just understanding what a circuit breaker is for and how to use it has the potential to save lives (and you would not believe the number of shoddy low gauge extension cables I have confiscated from my grandmother...) Even figuring out how to jump a car battery becomes much easier if you understand what you are attempting to do.

Meanwhile, since you and I can both code, we naturally inflate the importance of it. If we could not code, we would still get along in life just as well as the majority of the population (which by most reasonable accounts, is "just fine"). Basic computer literacy is much different from the ability to code, and this is only becoming more true year after year.
Every kid should be able to learn this stuff and should understand why they would want to. If we have more kids programming in 2013 then I assure you by the time they are in a position to take your job they will deserve it.
I would be happy if just the Obamacare website developers would learn to code.
How EgotisticalGiraffe was fixed
I don't think the GP intended to be hostile. I think he's saying that people should learn some coding (more than they do now), but not necessarily as much as many others are suggesting (less than a CS grad does).
Entire BBC Story (incl. final close-up) shot by Drone
I hope you're joking .. what if they are happy on their team and don't want to be moved?
What part of life isn't performance art?
I frequently disagree with the president, but he really hit the nail on the head with this one. I've been saying for a while now, if we were to replace high school and college foreign language requirements with a computer programming language class, you would propel America way ahead of everyone else (more-so than now) in terms of industry and innovation, and do wonders for the economy, all within a decade.

Think about it. Teachers, scientists, psychologists, poly sci majors, doctors, all with basic computer programming abilities. With the ability to build efficiency into their work. That would be so immensely powerful, the investment would be untold dividends. Way more than memorizing spanish vocab for a grade and then forgetting it.
We have a fundamental problem in Silicon Valley: there are not enough places for people to live in.

Transportation is your problem, along with NIMBY regulations (fought-for by limousine liberal hypocrites) that prevent proper growth. Silicon Valley is not Manhattan, with its daytime population density of 170k per square mile. It should not be expensive and congested. It's just badly planned, with a lot of regulatory corruption keeping housing scarcer than it should be.
Hmm... underpantsniece.com...
> I'm sure that if NYC could collect a 40% tax rate and implemented programs focused on its own issues

NYC has an income tax on top of state and federal income taxes. It's based on NYS taxable income. For example, at $65,000/yr you'll pay $2,047 + 3.648% of 5,000, for a total of $2,229.4[0].

0. http://www.tax.ny.gov/pdf/current_forms/it/nyc_tax_rate_sche...
To be fair, stuxnet proved that some government agencies could create code to break things; healthcare.gov is already broken, so they don't need help from the stuxnet team.
Wow. No chargebacks? I know almost zip about BTC but this seems a bit dangerous for the consumer, though VERY merchant friendly. If BTC goes mainstream, do we expect a middleman-type escrow service to arise for everyday purchases?
When you're poor, $100 is a tremendous amount of money.

When you're poor, homeless, and don't own a car, moving refrigerators is not practical.

When you're poor and living in a nightmare hole of a shelter, your nice new fridge might well be just taken from you.
Once in a lifetime, water flowing underground.
"You didn't code that!"
The payment processor (eg BitPay) takes that on. Markets are still razor thin by fiat currency standards, but are 10x to 100x thicker than a year ago. For example, buying 1.5 million USD instantly would raise the price about 4% (using just one exchange, Bitstamp)
Why Life Does Not Really Exist
Functional Reactive Programming in ELM
Can someone explain how the keying system works? What is the secret information a user needs to decrypt messages addressed to them? What prevents a 3rd party from decrypting those messages? What is the 'key'?
Givewell (http://www.givewell.org/) is focused on providing the best ROI. It doesn't necessarily fulfill the emotional aspect of personally volunteering and interacting with whom you are helping, but if your main concern is actually helping people, it's your best shot.
There was a prolonged dip in the price in this weekend, and I was wondering if this had an effect. There've been many large Bitcoin transactions recently, especially on Bitcoin Black Friday. For instance, Amagi Metals apparently sold $900,000 worth of gold and silver for Bitcoin using Bitpay as their processor.

That alone is currently a significant volume to liquidate. Enough to move the price 4-5% on some exchanges. Bitpay only takes a ~1% fee, but I assume their exchange rate is padded to absorb some of that risk. They may also sell bitcoin off the exchanges, which doesn't have a direct impact on the price.
What happens when everyone has a high paying job?
Let's cut to the chase: surveillance is a symptom of a larger root issue. These major companies aren't attacking the government surveillance problem out of concern of their users, my guess is that they are getting ready to make a data power-play against the government.

So essentially, the privacy concerns of people are being used as a ball between players, but the people are still going to get kicked around.

Until we address the almost complete corruption of the institutional structures that we consider to be foundational of this country... well, I don't know what's going to happen, but I'm pretty sure it won't be pretty for the serfs ahem I mean citizens.

The checks and balances system is almost non-existent. The executive has power over the other two branches, and the supra-national corporations have power over all three. The justice system is a farce, the SCOTUS are likely compromised, and oversight of intelligence agencies is almost non-existent. Resource wars loom on the horizon, what I call the shadow players like Zbigniew Brzezinski are encouraging a return to the tripolar world, and all this as wealth disparity increases amazingly fast.

Surveillance is not about security, it's about control. The question no one is asking is, "Why?".
Announcing Suro: Backbone of Netflix's Data Pipeline
I'm not dismissing it, I'm just saying I think the best thing would be to ask on a case per case basis, "what do you need most help with?" I see this as a sort of systemic problem with nonprofits and other causes nowadays -- sometimes the most obvious step (asking what they need) is neglected.
HOGgles: Visualizing Object Detection Features
I agree. It wouldn't hurt for SV to allow some focus on fixing local issues. Housing being the most important problem in my opinion.
This guy might be a VC that I can actually like.

His point on terrible equity allocations is spot-on. If you're giving a dime and a half (0.15%) to your first employee engineer, at a valuation of $5 million, you're not going to get someone good.

If you account for equity at-valuation, bad people become cheaper if you're a startup but good people become more expensive (i.e. you'd have to offer $75k per year of equity to make up for a $40k salary drop).
according to blockchain.info (https://blockchain.info/charts/estimated-transaction-volume?...) seems like about 150 000 bitcoins a day are being traded. So I assume liquidity is already good enough for almost every business.
> Remember that the cables that they use were paid for with public tax money. The private companies are selling back to us the infrastructure that we already paid to build.

Actually unless I was misinformed, they are selling back the unimproved infrastructure that we paid them to improve. The whole situation makes me so furious and there's nothing I can do. Mesh networks, I guess. I need to make some friends along a line from here to a backbone.
I get what you're driving at, but the analogy doesn't quite work.

We want software to perform functions and we don't care about the amount of lines of code to achieve this. We also want our government to perform functions, and law is how they achieve this.

Your stance would make sense if we were in a state that didn't need improvement.
you can repeat this method of assigning tasks until eventually the individual, old or young, rich or poor, begins to focus on their own on How things work rather than What they are.
I know where you're going with this. It's possible to ask the converse question: what happens when everyone has a low-paying job?

The answer is that deflation must occur. Home prices must fall, etc.

The problem is that deflation is incredibly painful, more painful than inflation. Activist labor is highly inflationary, which in today's debt-overburdened environment is exactly what we (meaning about 99.5% of the population) need.

You can make shoulda-coulda-woulda arguments about how we got ourselves into this mess with too much debt, but there's two problems with that. The first is the pragmatic fact that we are here and that populist-driven inflation is the least painful way out. The second is a bit deeper. One thing that's becoming clear from history is that "trickle down" economics does not work. Money does trickle down, but it trickles down in the form of debt. Why engage in entrepreneurial ventures or pay higher salaries when you can lend money at interest with less work required on your end and more assurance of repayment? There's a direct balance sheet correlation between the rich getting richer and everyone else going deeper into debt, since the savings of the rich become the debt of everyone else.

I am not, by the way, advocating "socialism" in any dogmatic sense. That IMHO is another discredited dogma. I am advocating pragmatism in lieu of a better idea, since I think all political dogmas are discredited at this point. If you don't have a systematic approach to solving a problem, the only choice you have is between winging it and doing nothing. Doing nothing here will lead back to feudalism.

Edit: one more point: Silicon Valley folks have a distorted picture of the rich. California's neuvo riche tech elite are not in the mainstream for their class. In short, your rich people are better than everyone else's rich people.

The mere existence of folks like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos shows by virtue of comparison that the vast majority of their socioeconomic contemporaries are merely lucky gamblers who have rationalized their ascent as meritocratic via survivorship bias. If being in the 1% were truly meritocratic we would have a ton of Elon Musks launching a ton of world-changing ventures all the time. Instead we have a bunch of mediocre rich people putting their money in dumb Wall St. funds that do nothing with it but buy government bonds or create more debt (and me-too herd-driven bubbles) for the masses.

Heh... I guess another solution would be much smarter and more creative rich people. :P
> I think its important to note the distance between "knowing how to code" and "becoming a programmer."

Sure, except we talk all the time about how bad hiring practices are in our industry, how bad we all are at discerning talent. So I don't really see this being a positive thing for existing developers (increasing supply and pushing wages down), though who's to say we deserve the situation we're in presently?

Large employers in this company would like to have labor costs reduced, especially for costly positions like software development. I'm not saying that is necessarily a sinister thing, but things like this should be thought of in the context of reducing labor costs. That's all it is, I think --as opposed to fancy notions about democratizing technology and so forth.
In other fields we recognize that there is a bifurcation between the knowledge required by practitioners of that field and the base level of understanding from non-practitioners. A 'good driver' isn't expected to know about ignition timing or the stoichiometric ratios of various fuels. For first aid we ask people to learn CPR, not to do '1 hour of surgery'. We expect people to know countries and capitals but not GIS maps. I feel like we haven't drawn the line between user vs creator as clearly in technology.

It is accurate to say that more computing knowledge is needed in the general populace. The power of computers/technology is limited by the human operators in most scenarios. But how do we focus on building better operators? Where is our line drawn?
Would there be a better quality video available anywhere? I've always thought that of the one single copy we do have floating around the net, the quality is garbage. I wanna read the text!
Iwi Locations - IT Works Interactive
I'm only guessing here based on what you said and what little knowledge I have, but you're talking about SaskTel in Saskatchewan, right? Others who find it interesting might want to look into them.

From what I have heard about SaskTel's cellular service, I'm jealous that more provinces haven't adopted the model. Of course, crown corporations are not always so rosy; a few provinces over, we have the mess that is BC Ferries.
Why HVF only writes "big" checks
I'm not sure Freedman is trying to make a theoretical argument that you can't extrapolate marginal price per share into total market cap. What struck me here, but what the author fails to point out directly, is that the implied value from preferred stock does not equal the implied value from common stock.

In the snapchat instance, he's highlighting a preferred stock deal that has 1. liquidation preference and 2. interest. So they effectively have a deal with components of both long and short options (i.e. they get a gain with exits above $3bn, but no loss unless the exit is below $100m), and a bond (~8% interest on the $100m as long as they don't default).

So you can't take what is effectively a $3bn strike price and say that's the implied value of the preferred stock deal, because it's not. To get the true implied price, you'd have to dissect the valuation of each option, bond, and stock component of the deal. There are standard methods to value each component, but don't expect the start up media to do the calculation for you.
> Java is pretty high performance, usually on par with C++

I'm not convinced. Java I/O is far form perfect, and Kafka is probably very heavy on I/O side.

> and usually faster than e.g. Go.

That's strange, since Go to some degree was intended as replacement for Java without having Java's downsides. Why would Go be less performant?

I'd be interested if someone would write such framework in Rust though. C++ is of course a default expectation, but usage of Java somehow surprises me in this case.
>> You need to try harder if you want to convince people their government and their freedom is a lie.

Where did this idea come from? :p .. You're on to something, by the way. It's almost as if you were already kind of convinced yourself.
Hmm... I thought it was relatively decent to sound out, just like "wrinkle" but with a "cl" sound in front. I thought it was a play on "clink" like clinking glasses or making a brief connection in celebration.
You can do clever things with BTC to make them reversible in cases where reversibility is nice. First, you can implement a centralized PayPal-type company that clears after X days to implement chargebacks. Boring, but easy to understand and effective. The clever way to do it is with M-of-N transactions, http://www.bitescrow.org/

PS. When I order from Amazon, etc. I trust them. I get 2% back using bitcoins (from Coinbase.com (-1%) -> Gyft (+3%)). I like the 2% discount more than the credit risk of Amazon not making me happy at the end of the day : )
Donated and got my company to do a 2:1 match.

Anyone know how often they update the total? I didn't see it go up.
I feel like a lot of these headlines lately are extremely gimmicky given the high volatility of bitcoin prices. These companies are just straight converting BTC back to USD which in the long run does nothing positive for true widespread adoption of bitcoin as a means of exchange.
In countries with VAT, considering Bitcoin a commodity would make it unusable as means of payment. When paying with a commodity (gold is explicitely excempt, but not silver), the transaction is legally considered as two purchases. The seller selling the car to the buyer, and the buyer selling the Bitcoins to the seller, thus triggering two taxable transactions under VAT law and effectively doubling the tax rate (e.g. from 8% to 16% in Switzerland). It is obvious that this would be catastrophic for Bitcoin when competing with other means of payment.

Edit: note that there also is some middle ground. For example, Germany considers Bitcoin as means of payment for VAT purposes without declaring it a currency or commodity.
Exactly that. I've been using a variant of that on the Guardian site for a while and it makes it so much better: http://www.systemed.net/blog/index.php?post=18
As of January 5, 2014, the pdf for this book will be available for free, with the consent of the publisher, on the book website.
The joy I find in programming is no more a reason to encourage people to learn to code than the joy of plumbing is a reason to encourage people to learn to plumb. People can find joy in nearly anything, that isn't something special that coding brings to the table.

Power and leverage? Yes, coding gives you those things, in certain domains, but I do not buy the argument that teaching coding is the most efficient way of teaching these things. Trying to use coding to teach critical thinking, logical reasoning, and basic troubleshooting would surely work, but we have these things built into language and fields that is already designed to handle it first and foremost, without the material distraction.

Very few universities start their CS programs off with something other than vocational drudgery that would be pointless for anybody who just wants those nice side effects of learning to code.
Poverty is incredibly sad, and I understand the desire to want to take some direct action to fight it. And of course, if you want to volunteer your time, you certainly can and I'm sure people will be grateful.

However, for those with in demand, high value skills like people HN, I suggest you focus your time on using those skills effectively. You can do more good by just earning more income and donating money to good charities than donating your time.

To illustrate this point, consider this extreme case -- what if a young Steve Jobs had poured extra energy into serving soup at a local church to the homeless and had not gotten Apple off the ground? Yes, he would directly help hungry people. However, he has created so much wealth by forming Apple that not only does he have far more money that he could give away, but he's also created an entire company of employees with more wealth that they could also choose to give to charity.
Sadly this doesn't always work. We have a similar system here in Italy (Telecom Italia own pretty much the whole phone network, and it's forced to rent it to other ISP, at a low price because it's considered a monopoly).

Fine, yes? No. The other ISP just rent less bandwidth than they'd really need, so they can't offer a decent service (during peak hour it's very easy to get less speed than what you'd get with a 56k).

It doesn't help that we don't have a cable network too, so we're stuck with the phone one. This mean low theoretical max speed (20mb down and 1mb up, with adsl2+), and the signal get really bad as soon as you get a bit far from the central.

Now, this is (very slowly) changing, the bigger ISP are starting to get their own infrastructure and some big cities are starting to get cabled in FTTC (no FTTH because "or copper network is good enough" [sic]). I've also the feeling that I won't see FTTC anytime soon, even if I live ~10km from Milan.

There's also to say that there isn't really any interests for high-speed internet. Last I've heard, only 15% of the people reached by a 20/1 connection buy it (preferring the slower 10/1 or 7/480k, which cost respectively 1€/month and 5€/month less).
This presentation was on par with the likes of Gutenberg's press, whoever first smelted metal, Einstein's relativity, and a handful of other simple concepts with singularity / black-swan level impacts. Great improvements & refinements occurred to be sure, but the base concepts were utterly new and staggeringly impactful.
Bitcoin definitely favours the merchant/receiver in this aspect. Escrow can be used where desired, though it probably won't make sense for all everyday purchases (escrow for a cup of coffee over the counter is probably a bit overkill). The upcoming payment protocol in Bitcoin 0.9 explicitly allows the merchant to issue refunds if he wants to.