skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I consider myself a left-libertarian, and I strongly support a basic income. I'm also a supporter of some amount of public health care.

In theory I support the elimination of taxation and a purely volitional society, but I recognize that such a thing is likely a very long way away. What we have now is not even close, and trying to shoehorn it into that vision prematurely will not work. That kind of moral futurism should not blind us to chances to radically improve human life here and now while working pragmatically within the bounds of the political realities we have.

One also must ask the question: given that the abolition of force and fraud is a moral long term goal, what sort of society would we want to build that would be likely to evolve in that direction? I don't think crony capitalism with fascist tendencies and no social safety net seems like what you'd want. Seems like that would be more likely to regress back to feudalism... which is exactly the historical path that we seem to be on. Regression to feudalism takes us further -- much further -- from that goal.

Seems to me that the precursors to a volitional libertarian state are radical reductions in violence both within and between nations, a highly educated and healthy populace that is capable of taking care of itself, and the abolition of caste systems (e.g. sexism, racism, classism, guild systems, etc.). A basic income is a step in that direction.
"Why don't we teach effective exercise, sports, and fitness in schools?" We do. It's called gym.

Maybe you had better gym classes than me, but mine were tedious and boring and turned me (along with most other "nerds" in my class) off from sport until I reached high school and discovered weight lifting. I always liked Kelly Starrett's motto of "all human beings should be able to perform basic maintenance on themselves" and I wish that point was more emphasized during physical education.
Big Data, Big Bucks: Palantir Valued at $9 Billion
Theano is for compiling mathematical expressions to CUDA, it doesn't implement any deep learning itself. If anything this may be comparable to pylearn2.
what if the keys are OTPs?
Google Now Is Changing The Future. The Era Of Anticipatory Computing
I did this last week in the three days before Thanksgiving. I got stuck at the bootloader. Oops? :)
Why would Google keep a copy of your mail if your account was deactivated for 6 years? Isn't that asking a bit much considering you were the one that broke the ToS?
In that case, we need to keep our keys on the client side.
"If anything doesn’t feel right, or just to make (3) more careful, use low-level counters to make sure that the amount of instructions executed and other such details makes sense given (2)."

This is explicit support for confirmation bias.

See Feynman's discussion of measuring the charge of the electron in Cargo Cult Science:

"Why didn't they discover the new number was higher right away? It's a thing that scientists are ashamed of—this history—because it's apparent that people did things like this: When they got a number that was too high above Millikan's, they thought something must be wrong—and they would look for and find a reason why something might be wrong. When they got a number close to Millikan's value they didn't look so hard. And so they eliminated the numbers that were too far off, and did other things like that..."

http://neurotheory.columbia.edu/~ken/cargo_cult.html
Wait, how many people back up their gmail account?
Morrow poised to regroup in 2014
The culture of "napping = weakness / laziness" is still so prevalent in the US workforce. It's frustrating - because it's not logical, it's just pretty deeply ingrained.

I set up a (rather nice) nap room at my company's office and I'm the only person who EVER uses it. It turned into a storage room. I sent articles about the virtues of napping - the studies - the benefits - the facts - to all of my employees, and nobody seems to care. I _still_ get an eye-roll when I head off to the nap room in the middle of the day for a 20-minute power nap.

Meanwhile, the employees in the office just head to the espresso machine and down shot after shot to keep themselves lit up. It's so odd - I can explain 100 times over how I get all the benefits of caffeine (and MORE) by taking a 20-minute nap, and they just don't seem to care. Deeply ingrained, hard-to-change views.
You don't see yourself as evil, so no one should call you evil?
This reminds me of Mike Monteiro's talk, "How Designers Destroyed the World". http://vimeo.com/68470326

He was talking about web/industrial/etc designers, and this is talking about engineers. It doesn't matter what field you're in, the moral of the story is: Be cognizant of how your work affects the world, and be prepared to say "no" to requirements that will likely affect others negatively.
Taboo Your Words (2008)
Were any games written using PSGL?
> determine that it only communicates via value-passing channels (which courtesy of my previous restriction, can be analyzed by simply looking at what channels are passed in at startup time, and some analysis of the types of the channels),

That would preclude sending interfaces over channels (along with any other existential or mutable reference type), because the type system doesn't know whether the interface is closing over shared state. Not being able to send interfaces over channels would mean that channels would be restricted to only one kind of type, because Go doesn't have discriminated unions so interfaces are the only way to perform type-switch. Those goroutines would be so restricted as to be almost useless.

You cannot just bolt isolation on after the fact. You must design your language for it from the start.

That said, Go's race detector is very good and it's awesome that they focused on getting first-class support for runtime race detection so early.
The essence is that the people who built the unethical NSA tools most likely did not consider the things they did unethical, so calling on people to be ethical as a response to the NSA leaks only work if "ethical" is understood as "you can't build surveillance tools for the NSA even if you personally believe it's ethical".
"the virtual currency that has soared in recent months and made fortunes for some, plunged"

Yes, the virtual currency that soared from $100 to $1200 has plunged down to $1000.
I don't know anyone that backs up their gmail account. I'm sure many people here do, but I am fairly certain 99% of users do not.
Brett Martin from Sonar had a good piece about this: https://medium.com/p/72c6f8bec7df

For me I also had that initial fear/disappointment when competitors launched but I realized over the past few years that my biggest competition was the better version of myself, executing on my same vision.
That's Zoe | Life Advice: Gratitude
enter your email to get pwned
Now, note that with the rhetoric we've seen concerning anonymous and the evil hackers and whatnot, one should not be surprised if the next group prepped for suspicion and tar-and-feathering is programmers.

We've already seen backlash against the "techie/yuppie" stereotype in places like San Francisco (to be fair, you've earned it).

For incumbent power structures, we represent an unknown, and it would not be surprising to see them market against us.
I have ambivalent feelings about this. All in all, this is my stuff.
> Personally I would never work for the NSA or a defense contractor, but I understand why some people do.

I used to work for a defense contractor and would do so again happily. I think there's just as much of an ethical consideration in play when you're building robots to put people out of work faster than our safety net can keep up with as when you're building robots to fight our wars so American soldiers won't have to.
I agree with your sentiment, but although it was hijacked near Mexico City, 'nowhere near' seems a bit overstated:

"stolen earlier in the week in a carjacking as the material was being moved from a public hospital in the border town of Tijuana to a storage facility in central Mexico, news reports said."
I was going to say this. Most antidepressants are not really understood. Also I have central sleep apnea (brain forgets to breath when sleeping). They give me a machine but they don't know exactly why the machine helps but it does. It's approved for use.
For my B.S.C.E., we were required to take an ethics course. By the end, everyone was convinced being ethical was a fast track to job loss & blacklisting.
This doesn't matter much, v1.0 is a very important milestone because very little will be written about the language before then. Also, nobody will consider using a pre v1.0 language in production, no matter how many years it was in development.
I wouldn't trust them either. I've seen the source via Shared Source and the CSP stuff is missing from it. If it wasn't missing they wouldn't have something to hide.
Natural beauty secrets - Family Navigator
RgbQuant.js - a color quantizer
playground: http://o-0.me/RgbQuant/
Your profession doesn't define your ethics, you should define your own. Anyone telling you that you have to be ethical because of your profession is trying to coerce you to their way of thinking.
Thanks for posting that link.

I'll also add something I put here in my two posts on common questions I got about North Korea -- http://joshuaspodek.com/common-questions-visiting-north-kore... and http://joshuaspodek.com/common-questions-visiting-north-kore....

> Aren’t you supporting a repressive regime?

> Briefly, I know of no popular tourist destination where tourism hasn’t strongly affected the indigenous culture. I believe touring North Korea will increase its trade with the rest of the world and open it up.

> Many people have tried many solutions, including aid, sanctions, diplomacy, and military action. None have decreased the regime’s hold. Doing nothing sustains it as well. If you have a better plan, please let me know.

The regime has shown itself incredibly stable over several generations. I don't see how tourism makes it more stable. Lack of tourism doesn't hurt them. For anyone who wants to change it, what do they propose that hasn't been tried unsuccessfully repeatedly?
I tend to vote Democratic and the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee can go fuck themselves on this.
This might not be the norm here, but give me enough money and challenging work, great working conditions, and I'll work for any legal company or organization, though some organizations would have to put out a great deal of money vs others!

Given that like most decent programmers here, I can work more or less anywhere, given equal amounts of money etc, I'd probably go work for Google than the CIA.

But if the job choice is between fiddling with javascript on some ancient offshored CRUD codebase(say, been there done that), vs building robots for the American Army, or the Indian army - [I live in India]), no contest at all.

In other words I won't work for the mafia or child pornographers or anything illegal, but the CIA/NSA/whoever? In a heartbeat.

Drone targeting software? sure thing. A drone is just the weapon of the day and not any more illegal than say a smoothbore musket in its day. Should all the engineers/metallurgists have stuck to making trinkets for the nobility vs cannons for their army? You are working for the same people in any case.

Every algorithm known to man has both good and bad uses. Not developing algorithms because they might be harmful is insane.

On a less hyperbolic plane, I like Richard Stallman but would easily work for Apple or Goldman Sachs (for e.g, given enough money and good work and good working conditions and coworkers).

The software you'd write for SpaceX isn't that far different from the software you'd write to control an ICBM.
Salarymen who think they can control what the software they write will be used for by their employers are just deluding themselves. Do you think the people who built Watson have any control on what IBM will do with the tech? And this is a company that used computing to help the Nazis. Should the engineers at IBM not have worked on computers?

Work is just work, a means to exchange your talents for money. Keep it legal, do good work. Go home and play with the kids.

The way to stop the NSA from doing distasteful things is, in my opinion, to work to elect people/hold your legislators feet to the fire, and get good legislation passed not refuse to research/deploy cryptographic/cryptanalysis algorithms.

I just wanted a little balance to this discussion. Not everyone buys into the political correctnesses of the day.
Sorry for the rant, but the article is nonsensical, trying to guilt trip algorithm developers.

yes so "People should think about it. But I'm just an engineer, basically."
Sorry if this was unclear. You own any code that you write for this competition.

The prize is that we'll use your algorithm to validate any matches that you go on. If that doesn't seem worthwhile to you, feel free to pass on this contest.
I didn't mean it to deride Bitcoin - I like Bitcoin. I just don't think it will lead to an Utopia were we are all just friends and forever without debt.
As far as I can tell, it's not a conundrum that many software engineers will face. As for the U. S., the worst that's going to happen is that one goes and finds another job. In the worst imaginable case (that is very unlikely to happen), one begs at an exit ramp off the interstate highway. Oh, you'll sacrifice some pride, but you won't starve.

The most likely case is that the person doesn't say "your family needs to eat", but rather "I'll have to explain why we gave up the leased BMW and the kids aren't getting iPads for Christmas" (or pick your own lifestyle impact that doesn't involve going without food).

Maybe India is different, Europe I'm inclined to believe not so different. Few of us will have to explain to our children that they are hungry because Mommy didn't take that job at Lockheed Martin.
How to win as a first time founder - a Drew Houston Manifesto
Alas, mortality does not seem to be relevant to how seriously people consider a threat. Look at the Boston Marathon bombings: 3 dead, total. And yet the reaction has not been to see it as a relatively nonserious threat (how many people died in car accidents that same day?).
Submarine patents no longer work since TRIPs.

When they did work however there was no liability up until the patent becomes granted an unpublished submarine couldn't be used to make money until it surfaced. The idea was that you'd keep it hidden to allow the industry to make use of the invention and then when the invention was established you'd surface the patent and say "stop or pay up".

That's been [largely] fixed now with "early" publication (18 months I think it is in the USPTO).
My hope that the tool is activated for deactivated accounts is more for people that suffer the same fate today - if they lose all access to their account, that they at least be able to get their data/life back.

At least according to the page I get when I try to log in, they still have the data: https://support.google.com/accounts/answer/40695?hl=en&ctx=c...

I don't disagree that Google was within their right to shutdown my account, but it seems silly that something I did at 19 has gone on this long.
EdX.org is missing images & assets
We'd probably attempt communication.

We'd also probably try to send probes. Hopefully intelligent, self replicating probes that will avoid contaminating any alien biological systems while gathering information and transmitting it back.

Of course, that would be an extremely long lasting project so we'd have to set up some way to collect the signal here at home for the next few dozen thousand years.

In other words, we will have some interesting questions to ask ourselves and interesting challenges to overcome.

Perhaps, for example, we could find a dead moon, planet or stable orbit nearby (to avoid contamination) and set up a station or artifact that any intelligent life that gets to the advanced stage of getting to that body would find. We could have information about ourselves and instructions on how to communicate with us.

We could even do this for all candidate planets -- whether we know that they have developed intelligent life or not, yet. Basically lay out a galactic internet protocol so that even if these things are discovered long after we are gone, they could attempt to communicate with others that have found any of the other protocol monuments.
So, are you concerned about the betterment of the species or about individual humans? Unfortunately, the two are not always in alignment.

As an aside, many astronauts are former soldiers.
Quite poor financial reporting from AJ to be honest. BTC is highly volatile but it has generally stuck around $1,000 for the past couple of weeks, the upward spike to $1,200 was just one of many fluctuations which has once again levelled off at $1,000.

China telling large banks they can't handle BTC will not have any impact on the currency because everyone buying/selling BTC in China weren't using the banks anyway. The "dive" was potentially a slight overreaction to the news from China but it's also a fairly uninteresting fluctuation in a highly volatile resource.
Thanks for sharing! Great read :)
"PRISM-like access to unencrypted data"? The notion that PRISM was literally a technological back door into servers and storage clusters at providers is a conspiracy theory.

Here, it's being deployed in the service of a dismissal of one of those providers improving their encryption --- of them making it harder for the USG to monitor comms.
raises hand

http://gmvault.org/

How does anyone get upset when something they're not paying for stops working?
#Retirement Woes Cartoon
The good news is, crypto isn't the only thing that can do that - banks already do it all the time! That's what I'm saying - this has shown a demand for what you just talked about, not Bitcoin in general (which, of course, has it's own demand). We're going to get more and more options that fit those qualifications, and a couple will become dominant. I would personally be a little surprised if Crypto is one of them, but not floored - it's totally in the running if not in the lead.
But you can send shared memory between threads and race on it, presumably?
Really? That's a bit unnerving, and I can't understand why. It would certainly account for a lack of traction, and the fact that the same stuff gets submitted later and attracts comments....

So to answer your question: I didn't know and I have no idea.

Just looking at your submissions, they are not marked Dead as far as I can see....
http://imgur.com/na2DuiK
Can you cite somewhere the mainstream media actually suggests the citizens of the DPRK are brainwashed monsters? I've never seen anything close to that.
Are Node.js Workers a Good Thing?
People will use good software, and they'll use it for good and evil. Think of how nginx is used. Software isn't like an article for theguardian.com, which can take an ethical position.

Paralyzing engineers by demanding they consider social complexities seems like a bad strategy for getting things done.
Everything I Missed in "Vim After 11 Years" (a follow-up post)
i wouldn't know. i do remember that psglInit did not 'just work' as expected when I experimented with starting a PS3 engine from scratch - I was going to use it as a time saver, but ditched it quick and just did a proper interface to the GCM/RSX functions.
I apologise for the quality of the sources of information. I can't find alternatives. It's interesting to note Obama's speech on NSL's from 2005 five minutes in to the first youtube video. As an authority on such issues he should be held in high enough regard for you.

"Then they came for the blah, and I didn't speak out because I wasn't a blah."

In responding to the above, you said: "What group is no longer here because the CIA/NSA have decided they shouldn't exist?"

The absence of voices contesting this apparatus is used as a defence for the NSL's and a similar mechanism used under FISA.

200,000 is a huge number. Their dissenting voices don't exist legally, they cannot speak out.

Imagine this: "I didn't speak out for the blah because I got a national security letter."

I see no mention of blackmail, who were you talking to about blackmail?
I think the point which the parent is trying to get at is that he should not be expected to follow rules whose premise he disagrees with. People can call you whatever they like, but the question is whether you should allow their moral or ethical norms to affect your actions.
What recourse does someone expect when there is a problem with their free account? It's free! You have no SLA or data guarantees!
Earplugs really help. And a simple scarf that you can place over your eyes to block out light.
ObXKCD: http://xkcd.com/radiation/
I understand you have a vested interest in bitcoin and for that same reason I would suggest you take a few basic economic courses so you can understand what a currency is and why it is impossible for bitcoin to be a currency.

> But paper greenbacks don't play well with the internet. Bitcoins do.

This is simply false. The evidence is all around you.

Bitcoin is composed of two parts: the token and the protocol. The protocol is interesting and useful. It will be most probably integrated into existing currency systems. We are already seeing this type of experimentation with the Canadian MintChip.

The token system on the other hand will be remembered as an interesting digital phenomena the same way we now look back at beanie babies and tulipmania.
If you use a native email client and this client saves every mail on disk, you have a chance to have it backed up with everything else. It's still far to be the generic scenario, I think, but it should raise a bit the number of people having their gmail backed up.
I have found out that lots of people from other non-technical areas also have the "too many tabs opened" problem. We are working on a solution for that except for the soldiers part =)
The idea is that you can keep your browser synced (one or many browsers) and move tabs for later, search them, archive them, restore them and soon also share them. Take a look at http://listboard.it if you are interested.
poe's law strikes again.
Well, you've got ~12 years to build up some kind of war chest. If you're willing to work for 15% less money at a startup, consider what that 15% saved every year for 12 years might do for the college problem? On the low end of software positions, I come up with numbers that more or less pay for college.
Lol I wouldn't call a £100 drop a dive for bitcoin.

Honestly i expected more but it's already recovering it was more like a minor bump in the road.
I think the idea is that "evil" is a relative term and it relates to morals, not ethics.

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Ethics_vs_Morals
Maintaining High Maintenance
Creation of entanglement simultaneously gives rise to a wormhole
A few questions about the data:

1. How is it collected? From a survey, or grabbed from user FB profiles?

2. What is the platinum albums variable? Maybe the number of platinum albums that the user likes on FB??

3. Why are there some "male" entries in the f_gender column, and some "female" entries in the m_gender column?
Your Process Isn't Sacred
Its usually (in my opinion) the subject of the photograph that makes it interesting, not the style that a photographer has put on it.

Have you seen this guy's shots? I've tried taking pictures of ants and other insects and it takes lots of luck or lots of shots that you throw out to get something even vaguely decent. Even then, nothing I've ever done looks anywhere near as good as the stuff this guy was pointing to as stolen. (And some of those shots likely required getting up close to insects in uncomfortable positions, all while trying to not interfere with the light or scare the buggers off)
sure, that would be part of the solution. But I don't think that they would implement something server-side to make this easy for most people to use.
Awesome! I'll be testing this one out when I get some free time.