skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Government is positive-sum (in theory - if used correctly). Taxation is not. If taxation was positive-sum we could just tax everyone 100%, give it back to them, tax it again, and all be incredibly wealthy!

Building roads is important and benefits society, but regardless taxation is still zero-sum. Taxation is just a funnel of inlets that eventually go to a bunch of outlets. The money in equals the money out. Nothing was created. benefit = the amount. Zero-sum. The government can spend it on things that are positive-sum, but so can we.

Now, lets take roads again, the economic benefit of roads is much much higher than the amount it takes to build and maintain them. Roads create wealth. But taxation is still zero-sum. We as a bunch of private individuals could have paid to have the roads built for all intents and purposes the same price the government can. Obviously that's impractical so we don't do it that way. The positive-sum of government is exactly this -- the organization of community projects among other things.

It's a difficult idea to wrap your head around, I know. The government can invest tax dollars, but so can you. Taxation, regardless of what it is spent on is inherently zero-sum by definition. That said, plenty of zero-sum things are incredibly important and worthwhile. Taxation is one of these things.
Hmm, as far as I can tell most of the pointer casts I see there are unnecessary.

- ifr_name is cast to char pointer. It's already a char array.

- A few memcpy() calls cast their arguments to void pointer. This is just silly. All pointer types implicitly convert to that. This anti-pattern can create bugs with some 64-bit compilers if you fail to declare a function prototype (implicit `int` from undeclared function, cast into `void pointer` = bad times).

- The file ends in `.c`, but the return type of `malloc` is cast to different pointer types. This is a big "author has no idea what they're doing" red flag to me. In C you can implicitly convert void pointer to any other pointer type. It's not the same as C++. This also happens to let you fall into the "convert `int` to `void pointer` trap of the previous point.
Meet Paunch: The Accused Author of the BlackHole Exploit Kit
ratings would be awesome :)
The interferes, IMO, is only in the area of personal freedoms. The drug war being the #1 offender. Corporations have record profits and few regulations on them (thanks to the GOP over the last 20 years). The financial services sector has imploded twice in that time, largely due to lack of controls.

If you are arguing for further erosion of checks on corporations, I see the US becoming more like China and will, at some point, have the same air quality they have there. Remember, the GOP want to do away with the EPA.
My brother and I exchange little goodies from ThinkGeek. I look forward to it every Christmas.
some ofmy fellow devs are mac owners and some linux and rest windows. But how many of you are MBA owners and like the same way as MBP?
Where is "around here" please?
/I don't think they are always out to bilk their patients./

"Genentech also provides rebates to doctors who prescribe large amounts of the drug."

"Rebate"? No, it's a kickback. Unless somehow the doctor is paying for the patient's prescription.
CT requires all CAs to willingly participate. They are, obviously, less than willing:

https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/certificate-transparen...

(Symantec is VeriSign)

The efficacy of CT will largely hinge on whether Google can get CAs to participate. Even if they can, it'll be a long road (it already has been), and TACK is immediately deployable in the short term.
Reading your comment, I was reminded of a quote that I read quite recently: "If you don't even try to figure out your opponent's assumptions, you should probably shut up and start listening."
Unless schools somehow got paid for good outcomes then this is a specious argument.
It is missing an explanation of what it is, ratings, reviews, resumes. Also how is this different than other sites where you can hire programmers?
Interesting.

Definitely you have helped a countless people. ;)
> I didn't mean he actually eat people

That's not sarcasm. That's lying.
For those interested, there's a great Bill Moyers Journal segment with David Simon as the guest. It uses themes brought up in The Wire as a launching point for discussion of topics related to this speech. In particular, Simon explaining how the War on Drugs has transformed into a War on Inner City Poverty was particularly interesting. David Simon is incredibly articulate off the cuff, and that really shows through in this interview:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/04172009/profile.html

BTW, this interview does contain The Wire spoilers since it aired after the conclusion of the series.
A16Z: Enterprise Hacker Rises
So everyone should be able to consume resources on this earth but not be forced to give anything back? I fail to see how this will give us a viable future when some people will be able to "opt out" of society?
The FBI's list of information elicitation techniques
I don't think that I am misrepresenting this, however I should perhaps have made clearer what I mean by classical vs. quantum. So I take the view, that entanglement can be traced back to the smaller than naively expected state space, which is something that can be constructed in classical physics. If you then quantize such a system, then the system would be in a superposition of the classical states.

The problem of local realism then arises from this smaller state space and the collapse of the wave function during the measurement.
I assume you're referring to Norway, when you speak of tons of oil? Norway is the sole proprietor and large extractor of oil amongst the Nordic countries for what I know.

Neither Sweden, Denmark or Finland extracts any oil - or so little, that it's almost none.
Some laws might be unjust, but the vast majority are just.

It doesn't really seem like you're examining this assumption too closely. The vast majority are just? Really, the vast majority or laws are immaterial to criminal behavior. The vast majority of law is definition, e.g. Telecom companies are only allowed to use such-and-such a frequency band, utility companies must implement such-and-such safety measures, banks must have such-and-such leverage ratios.

When it comes to criminal laws, though, are the vast majority of them just? Do you really think the application of the law is just in this country? I think very smart men and women have made fantastic arguments disagreeing with the basic assumption you glossed over, don't insult our intelligence by not seriously engaging with that assumption before ripping off some anecdotal tale of being assaulted in da 'hood.
It's contrived but it highlights a real problem: free markets are very poorly suited to the task of avoiding tragedies of the commons.

Unless you think tragedies of the commons don't happen in real life, the contrived example is relevant.
Instead of regurgitating an old chestnut:
"thermodynamic limits impose a cap to energy growth lest we cook ourselves. I’m not talking about global warming, CO2 build-up, etc. I’m talking about radiating the spent energy into space."("Exponential Economist Meets Finite Physicist", http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2012/04/economist-meets-...)

Essentially, even if we have exponential growing access to resources, we'll still be facing earth BBQ circa 2400.
Can I somehow sniff details of all certificates that go through my (Linux) machine? I would be interested in seeing what CAs my used services and visited websites use.
I accept your beef about zoning codes, but the government should have some say on safety standards, don't you think?
By Hal Varian, who has interesting microeconomics books, works with Mathematica to provide visual examples of what he is teaching, etc.

Reading that at the moment, seems very interesting.
>You have to some how get the markets to stop chasing profits

There is another solution. You could set up the markets so that the way to maximize profits is to create the best solution. For example, imagine if we had a perfect measure of student outcome. You could make the school's pay dependent on their outcome, then the market will find a way to maximize the f(outcome)/cost.
"Engineers and physicists are often portrayed as clueless geeks on television, and despite the high pay and the importance of such jobs to the country’s future"

I must have missed this part when I was a post graduate. The only thing I saw physicists getting paid was peanuts you had to move three states over to get.

In 2006, when I left things looked largely like this[1]:

age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college

age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month

age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year

age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

Sadly from what I hear of people from my class who stayed on things are worse now. So why doesn't the article talk about the elephant in the room? That when you add student debt to the picture you need to work until you're 40 to beat someone who has worked at McDonald's that whole time. And just at that point you enter the most uncertain part of your career which will make or break the rest of your life.

Students aren't leaving the STEM fields in droves because they are stupid and unmotivated, they are leaving because the prospects for a career are terrible.

[1] http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science
:) the "simultaneous" thing was me being cheeky.

But on a more serious note, I can see where being "the black guy" would get tiresome fast. Or being mistaken for "the other black guy". Don't know if that would cause a person to quit the OSS world, but it's probably not a highlight.
Somehow, every other VRBO site (such as VRBO.com) manages to comply with local laws. AirBnB doesn't--by choice. It refuses to comply with local laws because this lets it avoid the costs of compliance. Ultimately, AirBnB's competitive edge over its competitors is simply regulatory arbitrage.

This is why AirBnB generates such apathy. Take the regulatory arbitrage away and AirBnB isn't a technical startup or a market disruptor; it's just another VRBO site with pretty CSS.

They are overkill and would be the same as if Congress, at the federal level, had passed laws saying that YouTube-style services should be banned because they can facilitate copyright infringement that hurts others.

No, completely different, and as a lawyer you know this. Local issues are valid concerns for local laws. If New York wants to pass an across the board tax on temporary rentals, it is absolutely not the same as if Congress passed a country-wide ban on Youtube-style service.

The key to all this is to deal with the abuses while preserving the values conferred by the new services. If there is antipathy toward the wrongdoers, there is no basis for directing this to the innovators themselves.

Existing laws already do this. And as a business that injects itself into the market governed by such laws, AirBnB has taken on the burden of complying with such laws. Moreover, AirBnB isn't an innovator--it's a copycat. The only innovation AirBnB provided was sub-unit rentals (i.e., just a room or a couch), which is no longer the mainstay of its business.
Yeah bro it is. I'm bored, browsing HN, seeing articles I've already disliked.

The article seems to blame the programming language for the issues cause by the social involvement of the community.. and laziness to research and find a good environment to develop with.. come the fuck on. If you're a programmer, you're a problem solver. Don't bitch about solving one..

Funny how this ^ is still... 7 years later.
Heh, I'm surprised there have been no New Yorkers yet chiming in to say "good riddance". Most New Yorkers -- in my experience -- seem to share the sentiment that there are too many tourists already.
I hope the book itself doesn't make such as generalized claims as some of the sections of the Wikipedia page describing its sections..

I will add it to my read list though, thanks.
>> In Sweden private for profit schools and schools run by the municipalities compete with each other. All of them are funded by the tax payers and they get a certain amount of money for every student.

How the hell can a school be "private", while being funded by taxpayers?
This modular, snap together synthesizer kit looks awesome and I want one!

http://littlebits.cc/kits/synth-kit
Screen wipes. (At least if you're looking for a gag gift.)
So you admit that somehow you're able to find few hours a day volunteer. While you may not have enough time to contribute to os projects at this moment, it's simply because you have different priorities,and prefer to spend that time doing other activities. "Lack of time" excuse is simply that - an excuse. Instead of saying "I lack time to contribute to do X", people should be saying - "I want to spend my time doing Y instead of X".

We all have a limited amount of time to spend on our hobbies, work and the family. We will never have enough time to do all that we would like to do - that is obvious..
B
A Deeply Unsettling Time Lapse Of Every Nuclear Explosion On Earth
all we need are browsers to support it

This makes it sound easy: after all, there aren't many browsers, but really the problem is that everything that talks SSL needs to support it. Browsers are the starting point, after that I guess the OS-level libraries, then everything else.
Get them a nice mechanical keyboard. - http://elitekeyboards.com/

Xkcd volume 0 - http://www.amazon.com/xkcd-0-Randall-Munroe/dp/0615314465/

A subscription to Hacker Monthly - http://hackermonthly.com/store.html
I don't agree with Simon's claim that because Marx provided no clear clinical treatment it should cause one to not call themselves a Marxist. Marxism is the science of analyzing socioeconomic relations.
A Yottabyte Is A Septillion Bytes(1000000000000000000000000 Bytes)
There is a simple way to address the libertarian argument, IF that argument is honestly about being "forced" to act as a group: Devolve political power until you start being able to say "we" enough of the time to act together.

If you can't agree there is such a viable grouping that enables consensual government action, that's anarcho-capitalism, not libertarianism.

Big nation states make big mistakes, like multi-trillion dollar wars. Smaller governmental groupings are not capable of mistakes on that scale.

The world also needs more diversity of social, economic, and legal systems - the opposite of the monoculture of IP laws treaties like TPP want to create.
Then don't look at different countries but at the evolution of inequality in a particular country. The rise of inequality in the US since the 1980's is an indictment of the current system. Here's an animated map showing this evolution:

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2013/09/19/w...

And this article has a chart illustrating the inverse relationship between inequality and well-being in the US:

http://aeon.co/magazine/living-together/peter-turchin-wealth...
I clicked on the Starbound link and hours of my life vanished. What a beautiful game.
38 Startups Pitching At TechCrunch Moscow Today
Or one could stop looking to the extreme as an inevitability in either case.
Why do we treat "hackers" as some sort of mythical beasts who belong to a whole different race altogether? Now, I'm not saying you're doing that, but this is something I've observed quite a lot. Especially with those "X for Hackers" etc..

Answering your question — it differs from person to person. I personally wouldn't be interested in receiving a new router, for example, but I do know people who would. I'd like a typewriter more, to be honest. But that's just me.

Lastly, a good gift is one that comes with sincerity. It doesn't matter what it is, as long as its sender sends along warm wishes and sincere affection.
One of the most honest comments in the entire thread. The problem is, both sides don't want to admit this. The conservatives because it makes them out to be assholes (and they'd never win another election again). The liberals because they think they'll lose the argument if they say they want income redistribution--everyone will jump on them and call them (unfairly) socialists or communists (yes, I know they're different), and they whither under such attacks.

Fundamentally, conservatives are people that are angry someone is getting something for nothing, and liberals are people that want to help the least privileged among us.

Until we can all come to terms with this, and logically come to terms with the idea that raising up the poor to a certain standard helps everyone, we're doomed.
Yottabyte: A Septillion Bytes (1000000000000000000000000 Bytes)
> I feel a lot of sympathy for these people. At the very least, they honestly believe they're protecting this country and their friends/loved ones. It's not their fault the higher-ups have botched the national security apparatus and turned it into something disgusting and unamerican. Most of them were/are likely unaware of the vast majority of what the agency does, and they had trust in their government that they worked at a trustworthy institution.

Funny. I'd expect that if I was working for an organization supposedly doing "good", which turned out to use extremely questionable methods, I would not feel depressed due to the public reaction. I would feel incensed at the thought of having been lied to and betrayed by my hierarchy. The reactions expressed in the article are more along the line of "politicians should come to the bat for us".

I can understand the feeling. Let me extend to them the same sympathy I have for former Stasi personnel, other Five Eyes SIGINT members and all the other people who think 1984 is an instruction manual. Because next year, you'll lobby for installing cameras in all private homes, in case the owner is a terrorist. And why not? You're already playing digital peeping Tom, might as well go all the way. Think of the terrorists. War is peace. Freedom is slavery.
>>CEO pay to minimum wage workers they'd only be getting a thousand bucks or so each.

I would bet the workers would take it. And we'd probably have a more equitable and healthy economy.
What isn't mentioned is that these drugs are actually injected directly into the eye. My grand father was prescribed both, and had no improvement in vision. When he switched to the expensive one, there were excellent results, and he can now see again.
Girl sings O Holy Night in a choir of herself 
This is amazing!
In my state of Washington, tuition increased due to a voter approved cap on taxes, exactly the opposite Rowe's claim.
I much prefer the Ministry of Silly Walks.
I have mixed feelings about this. On one hand, I like the somewhat scientific approach to the little things that government does - I think that approach is sorely lacking in many areas of government.

On the other, just the idea of governments using behavioral science to 'herd' us is a little worrying. To be honest though, I don't find that nearly as worrying as the idea that such small differences in the phrasing of a letter, for example, can have so much influence on the decisions we make.
> The problem is that too many people reach for government power as a first response instead of the last resort it should be.

If we are reaching for government power, then we have encountered a problem which has not or cannot be solved by the free market as is. I have not seen many people saying "hey, we should socialize the software industry, Google just isn't doing well enough." It already is a last resort.

> Government force is always going to result in unintended, negative consequences.

I rarely use the word always because all it takes is a single counterexample to disprove the point, and I can name a few: Firefighters, police, military, are all "markets" that would not be easily regulated by the free market and the government has done instead (and done so quite well, in most cases.)

> Those socialistic programs you laud, with the high taxes, intrusive regulations, and government debt, are a net drag on the economy.

Lumping ALL those programs together (again) invalidates your point. There are some programs that work very well and have more benefits than costs. I agree that this is not true for all programs/regulations, thus my point: Fix what's broken.

> Working together voluntarily is vastly superior to being compelled by force, however well intentioned.

This argument could be used to support ANY form of government. Communism would work wonderfully if we all worked together voluntarily! Fact is we live in a world of game theory. Sometimes people work together, sometimes they don't. Capitalism works because in theory, even if you are working only for yourself, you are working for society as well. But that is not always true, and so we need to pull together to make sure that those who would abuse the system can't. We need to pull together so that everyone, or at least the majority, benefits from our society.
Easier said than done. I think it's probable that some problems are so difficult to translate into proper market motivations that the cost of the perverse incentives inevitably produced by your attempts will consistently exceed the potential for increased efficiency and miraculous innovation that the market promises.
An SJCL Extension: Searchable Encryption
Surprised to see indian politicalscape twitted/ discussed avidly on Twitter
on HN
Maybe you'd like to think that, but that's the opposed of what the article is saying.
His point (as I read it) isn't that the Constitution as written is sacrosanct, but that it is extremely useful to have a document whose rules are 1) executed as closely as possible in the present, and 2) changeable in the future. Otherwise there are no rules, and people are just making things up as they go. I tend to agree that this is the situation we currently find ourselves in, but I think a lot of the blame for it can be placed at the feet of the Constitution being too hard to amend, forcing the kind of (arguably) extra-legal pragmatism we see.
>You're an American (or a Canadian or a Briton or whatever). You are part of a society and part of a nation whether you like it or not. So let's make it work for everyone.

"{Nature|The State|Society|Some other abstraction} is the only thing we all belong to, so better get used to it."
£2,140,164 raised.
Housing in NYC is definitely a special-case, people should keep this in mind when discussing AirBnB
> But the regulations cannot stop anything.

Regulations can and do stop lots of things. If the regulations don't stop anything, then why do they 'distort the natural behavior of the market'?

You can't claim that regulation is ineffective at affecting behavior while decrying its distortive effects at the same time.