skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your point about causation is a good one. Its worth thinking through the causal chain of how your work is used as an engineer, even if you conclude that you are not the proximate cause and therefore do not bear responsibility.

I live in the Delaware Valley, an area of the country devastated by engineers. Engineers built communications and automation technology, which has allowed executives to outsource and eliminate jobs far more quickly than people here can get trained for new ones. The human toll of these changes has been higher than drone and surveillance technology combined.

Are engineers working in communications and automation the proximate cause of these changes? Maybe or maybe not. But how long or short is the chain of causation? I think its not very deep, not when an automation company might market its technology by mentioning the labor cost savings. At the very least, before anyone gets sanctimonious, they should think about what sorts of impacts their own work has on other people.
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You're assuming a basic income requires expanding the monetary base. It doesn't, it could be redistribution as well.
A lot more than what? One can have welfare state and a degree of immigration. Usually more immigration means that it's more expensive. Sweden has considerable immigration when compared to many other countries, and is also a welfare state. Immigration doesn't mean open borders.
I'm glad someone got the reference. ;)
I did read Grellas's comment, and I'm not sure why you think my question had anything to do with "absolute black and white with sharp dividing lines."

In your original comment, you said:

> 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

The key word here is "any." You later stated that you operate by your own ethical standards, and didn't seem to disagree when zzzeek interpreted that as "you'll work on what you find to be personally ethical," so I was merely asking you to clarify if you would really work for "any" legal organization.

Of course, if your ethical standard = whatever the authorities deem "legal," then your position is entirely consistent.
It is functioning as digital barter - that you fail to recognize this and mistake it for a currency is why I suggested you take some basic economic courses.

How did I malign your character? I simply stated that since you are building a business based on bitcoin you may not be as objective as someone who has no vested interest one way or the other.

I don't own bitcoins or have any vested interest. It is simply an intellectual curiosity for me. I have no interest in making this personal and I was and am polite to you.
Libertarianism is an assertion without a philosophy. You can't really define it. Usually it is synonomous with the non-aggression principle, but as you can see, oftentimes, even that is not the case.

There is an actual philosophy which defends individual freedom from aggression. Objectivism. About 5% of the whole philosophy deals with these kinds of issues.
The propaganda still present:

"My original, copyright-protected work is here"

Should be "My original, copyright-restricted work is here"

"I don’t mean to be harsh, but photography is how I make my living." — implies that stopping sharing of his photographs is necessarily fundamental to living as a photographer (may be today, but this shouldn't be accepted as the only way our economy can work)

"On top of being a copyright violation, the use of a potentially endangered insect to sell an insect-killing product is both inappropriate and offensive." Wow, yeah, but it's the use that's offensive, not so much the infringement. I would have sent this anyway, and if they kept using it, I'd make a public stink about it.

"Such infringements are illegal, they waste my time, and they devalue my work." The first part is true, the second part is only because he chooses to waste his time, and the third part is completely wrong.

It remains totally unclear whether these take-downs are actually benefiting the photographer. It is nice that he's human and reasonable, but there's still so many assumptions here.
Binaries are easily pirated, and can be de-compiled. Obfuscating a Javascript file is almost as effective for protecting your code.

Either way, the only way to protect your code 100% is to run it on your own machine, and not on the user's.
Haven't they made it to the 5 razor yet? I don't think Warren Buffett was bragging about success for the consumer at the expense of the owner. :-)
By "proposal", I assume you mean Basic Job? If you can't find a job, you don't get EITC.

A Basic Job means the government gives you a job if you can't find one. You show up, tell them you are unemployed, and they give you a job cleaning the DMV, filling in potholes, picking up trash at the park or whatever. At the end of the day they give you 8 hours x $7.25/hour. If you find a McJob paying $8.00/hour you quit the Basic Job and go take the McJob.
You can edit the merged file in place while merging.
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Receiver pays in the US.
I really like this work:
http://www.epi.org/publication/raising-income-taxes/

It basically suggests that:
a)top tax rates have historically had virtually no significant effects on overall economic growth

b)we are well below the optimal tax rate for maximizing revenues

The authors of the paper on which this summary article is based on go on to suggest an optimal top effective rate of 68.7% as the revenue maximizing point (basically the optimal trade-off between revenue and dampening effects and/or evasion)

I find this work pretty convincing...
A little exercise after your nap, like a few pushups or a run around the block really pushes the grogginess away in my experience. As others pointed out, the timing is key too. 15-20 minute naps works because you are in the pre-sleep state, so you never completely turnoff. However, if you sleep longer, you need to sleep for at least 90 minutes or so, otherwise you will wake up right in the middle of your sleep cycle. I am not sure if that's bad for you, probably not, but it does make you feel like crap.

It's probably a little different with everyone, so practice makes perfect :)
> There's definitely a significant difference in attitudes towards sleep and work between Europe and the US.

Or just between Switzerland and the US.
Spends it on what? The mind goes easily to stereotypes like "gambling" and "drugs" but how about "medical debt from visiting the ER" or "the rustbucket car they rely upon for work just broke down again"? Unless the basic income is quite large, it will leave people in the same kind of precarious situation as the working poor.
Access is access. Regardless of whether it's enabled by real time interception, SSH, remote desktop, FTP, a rich web app UI, or snail-mail based optical disk exchanges.

And besides, whatever PRISM may or may not be, it's pretty clear MUSCULAR would fill in any gaps, and dispel your claim of mere theories, in favor of reality.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6641378

NSA infiltrates links to Yahoo, Google data centers worldwide (washingtonpost.com)

http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/nsa-in...

I mean, you gave the top comment on that thread, after all.
We need more Black Girls Code community education groups for all ages/races/genders. Put them in an economically depressed area and you can still help people who have the most difficulty moving into the field.

Bonus for corporations: cheap cyber-labor at home as an alternative to outsourcing. Funding these groups would also probably be tax free! I wonder why the hell don't more corporations don't get this kinds of community outreach started.
I think it changes a lot of peoples thoughts about the question. It moves it from a "let's play with the concept of sound" to a basic question of induction and physics. At that point, why not ask how can we be sure the tree actually fell at all?

If you chase that rabbit hole, it probably devolves into arguing about what "know" and "is" and "sure" "actually mean".
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Also, aortega wrote "Operative System" instead of "operating system", so because of that incorrect terminology, we can ignore everything in the post. That's how this works, right?
That is a good point. I view the poor and homeless as two different groups. Yes the homeless are also poor, but as you say they often have a whole set of other problems besides money. People who are just poor, money can help them.
> I'd love your opinion on the merits of deporting unemployed Americans with $0 in savings to Liberia.

Don't import them and provide them with a basic income? I was just saying that while we'd actually have to review some other policies that would be affected, many of our policies are sub par at best, so I fail to see how either limiting immigration to X amount of people a year or simply paying them X a year is a fail for basic income.

> What is the harm of allowing an Indian to show up in NY with no money or job?

I'd rather look at MI as an actual citizen's benefit. Maybe a year wait from immigration? If our current policy is to bring people over who have no means of funds or help or work, and who require assistance, then IMO that's a bad policy.

Also, what would be the largest difference between our current system and one where everyone who's lived in our country for a year, and is currently living in our country, gets X amount yearly? If you ask me, the risk for this person remains the same, and our obligations only begin once the person has established themselves within society at large by way of working or find assistance from family or friends or loans.
Going from Motorola 68k to x86 with few preconceptions in the nineties was quite a shock after slowly having been convinced that the grass actually was greener.

On the x86 side I was surprised to find an unnecessarily cryptic assembly language, little-endian words and a byzantine memory model for starters.

Hacks upon layers of hacks and not the intuitive and aesthetically pleasing solutions seems to win out in most cases.
What about micro loans? http://www.kiva.org/about
...Which is exactly why engineers (like me) simply must seek out and look beyond the Kool-Aid their company and managers pour and understand exactly what effects the actions of their products and services have on the world.

We shouldn't just come into work, pull a bunch of levers and tell ourselves, "I'm sure the managers wouldn't let this happen if it were evil." We have to leverage our curiosity to extend beyond the Disney version.

BTW, this goes equally for marketers, a group I feel is as bad at ethics as engineers. Persuading people to continuously purchase and consume unhealthy food and activities is as destructive to the human spirit and our nation as bomb-making.

</soapbox>
Record-breaking gas ship launched, bigger one planned
Good article - there's a lot to take away from this.

However, if I ever read that Gladwell 10,000 hours quote again I think I'm going to go postal!
Specifically, you should explain all the columns, including:

- Is that the person's height in inches?

- What does the asterisk in certain column-names indicate?

- Why do the pets, platinum_albums, weekly_workouts, number_of_siblings and pokemon_collected values seem to fall in the range of 7 - 8?

Also, this dataset is far too small. There is a single male-male relationship and that's not going to provide any significant data if we're looking at genders at all.

I would also argue that it's not the best set of metrics to use to determine whether people will become friends. Age and facebook_friends_count might give you some hints, but I seriously doubt that shoe size has as big an impact on the potential for friendship as, say, common interests, shared culture, income class, or other socioeconomic factors.
It is not nonsense. I myself have received two patents (out of five total) using exactly this method. One of these patents is for a device that sends information faster than light (US Patent 7126691), so it plainly should never have issued. (I prosecuted this patent specifically to test the theory that one could patent anything using this method.)
Testing it out now, so far so good! I might make this my default profile, I would love not having rogue tabs freeze the entire system. It's very nearly my one remaining thing I prefer Chrome for, Firefox has really improved lately.
This is another example of why the FDA should be privatized and operate more like Underwriters Labs. If a company chooses not to seek FDA certification and still has customers willing to pay for its products, the bureaucrats should butt out.

If 23andMe is making demonstrably fraudulent claims, that's an issue for the courts. Otherwise, the government shouldn't be using force to interfere with voluntary transactions that harm no one else.
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The theory "A tree falling in a deserted forest does not generate pressure waves in the air" is a theory that makes falsifiable predictions.
I do not think anyone seriously believes it. If they did, you'd soon be able to convince them that the theory is false.

If you ever encounter someone proposing that theory, they're liable to be anticipating-as-if a tree falling in a deserted forest DOES generate pressure waves, and know perfectly well what the result of any of your proposed expirements will be. They'll do fast footwork to make up excuses as to why your suggested expirements are invalid or miss the point.

http://lesswrong.com/lw/i4/

Taboo'ing is especially helpful when you find yourself arguing over definitions, and want to get at the heart of the difference in actual models of the world, rather than just the difference in labels. If there is any actual disagreement on expectations.
Cryptography/Privacy: How To Delete & Track Files Even After You've Sent Them
No way. Windows 8 is a better OS than Windows 7 in every aspect. Once you are on the desktop, Metro is nothing but a huge start menu.
> In theory (stress theory) the shareholders (represented by the board) put a CEO in who establishes systems to minimize the risks of mini blow ups.

In theory. But if that isn't what happens in practice then what good is it?

> But if the govt doesn't have to bail out a firm, who outside it should worry?

You don't have to worry about the shareholders of some individual mismanaged corporation, what you have to worry about is that the principle you're trying to apply to prevent systemic risk has an established track record of being ineffective when applied to prevent internal risk, and it is not clear why you should expect any different result.

Again, the trouble is that you need a solution to the underlying problem. What "systems to minimize the risks" are there that corporations could cost effectively employ but are not already in place? How do you fix the problem that in a competitive market a company that spends resources on managing risks will be at a short-term disadvantage against a company that takes blind risks, and may consequently not survive long enough to see the day when its competitor has to pay the price for its risk taking?
Wait what? But to send to a phone, you need to pay twilio 1c or something. How do you actually SEND the sms for free? Can you describe it? I have NEVER heard of a free way to send sms except though sms gateways, and the result in that case is ugly.
This lull disappeared for me after I stopped eating wheat.

Not saying you'd get the same effect from quitting wheat. But there's decent odds it's something you eat.
I fail to see why. Perhaps you could detail the jobs that would be shipped overseas as a result of this, particularly those that haven't been already?

Further, I don't really see how a high top income tax bracket would affect much. It doesn't look to me like it affects businesses (its not a corporate tax) - only the pay of people at the top of the chain. Are those people going to revoke their citizenship and move elsewhere to avoid the taxes?
Yes, to the point that it is very easy to crash Thunderbird if you blindly hook it into your GMail account.
It's not just Canadian. I did it too for my engineer degrees in the US. My ring is in my dresser, but I still keep it in mind. I was being recruited hard by Picatinny Arsenal and didn't give them the light of day as I'm not keen on building weapons systems.
How does having someone do busy-work in exchange for the basic income address any of the objections?
I already know this trick and don't use it because :

* it's easy to get the real email address from it.

* most sign up form don't accept the "+" sign.
There is a point when further nitpicking communication is not only useless, it is actually a disservice to the forum. I leave the thread to you, and bow out. Cheers, have a nice day.
I tried solving this problem a while back - using a task based approach - where you create a meta-tab for a logical task and organize tabs under it. You can close, open, suspend, archive tasks. History, bookmarks and other browsing artifacts are associated with tasks. Sadly I couldn't take it beyond prototyping. I have made multiple attempts to - but failed.

* [A task based web browser - Conquering information overload](http://www.slideshare.net/mohanrajrm/a-taskfocused-approach-...)

* [A task-focused approach to support sharing and interruption recovery in web browsers](http://vimeo.com/9088447)

I am still waiting for a plugin which allows me to impose a efficient low-cost organisation layer over tabs (have made multiple feeble attempts to do a plugin which helps organize tabs using mind-maps, a org structure that is my personal favorite). I have tried almost all plugins over the years which could potentially solve this for me - but have not been successful in finding one that fits my needs.
It seems as though the author may be making up for some embarrassment on the part of the editors for putting 23 on the cover of fast company recently.
Because decompiling isn't a thing?
The argument reduces to "being a good engineer and not getting people killed". The insult is a dismissal with an eyeroll of a dumb comment.
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It seems to me as though he's simply describing and showing what he saw.

North Koreans are people too, and even if the tour is scripted and carefully controlled, the people he met were still real.

Edit - this is a fascinating documentary by another tourist who went to the DPRK: http://documentary.net/dprk-the-land-of-whispers-north-korea...

Again, lots of curated 'positive' images for the regime, a few hidden camera moments, and some fairly real commentary from the guy who filmed it.
> the wealthy invest disproportionately in economic (and job) growth, while lower income people spend more on consumption goods

This is a very strong claim that's difficult to justify by the data. Consumer demand is the largest driver of economic growth. Demand is what ultimately creates jobs. Capital cannot be applied to investment or growth if there is no demand to generate a return.
Of course, of course.

This paragraph:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/North_Korean_famine#Current_st...

+ the articles linked in it are interesting sources.
I've got mbsync set up to periodically dump my Gmail into a local Maildir archive. Works great, and it was a (relative) breeze to integrate with my old mail archives reaching back to the late 90's.
As a further observation on this, Robert O'Callahan has a blog post [1] explaining Mozilla's stance on (not) implementing bad-for-the-web features; as an example to show this stance is long-lived, he mentions that engineers at Netscape/Mozilla implemented (in 1999) ActiveX support for Gecko, but kept it disabled by default on purpose despite a possible market share impact.

[1] http://robert.ocallahan.org/2010/01/activex-all-over-again_2...
And what about the fact that Homejoy got caught trying to buy Yelp reviews? Even still, their Yelp reviews are quite poor in many big markets (Yelp reviews are a major driver in this business)? In addition, their $20/hr price is unsustainable and will have to go up once they demand profitability. Two week wait times to book a cleaning may appear to indicate heavy demand, but it also indicates poor planning and resource management.

Apparently all that matters anymore is how much VC money you can raise, not the underlying business. "Journalism" in this sector is so incredibly lazy.
good parable.

btw. oh wow, tripod is still around, nice to see some old websites
A bit misleading this part:
Less than four months after launch, Quip now runs on 76% of the world's smartphones and tablets.

I didn't know I had Quip on any of my devices.

Also:
Available in 11 languages on 8,560 distinct mobile devices, Quip can now be used by 1.3 billion people on mobile devices, and over 2 billion people on PCs.

Last time I checked there were only about 1.5 billion PCs in the World.

I do like the website, but I'd be a bit spooked by the big numbers.
It was eating wheat for me as well. Once I started eating according to the ketogenic diet, I no longer needed naps during the day.
It seems to have quickly "infected" literature on dependent types at large---not to the point of having replaced the normal terminology, but instead as forming a sort of common framework for examining those fields.

Which is definitely a point on the side of "has no impact".

But on the other hand, I think studying dependent types is a fantastic way to get some perspective as an intermediate to advanced Haskell or OCaml programmer. Software Foundations and Certified Programming with Dependent Types are both great books to read.

HoTT won't be on that list for some time if ever, but once you've got a good mental model for dependent types it's illuminating to see them worked out "from scratch" as HoTT does.

So, the best I can say is that it can be influential in the way that you view types if you're someone who frequently programs and thinks in a nicely typed language like Haskell/OCaml and maybe Scala.
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> Lower and middle classes feel inflation the most when it affects the costs of basic needs: bread, milk, etc.

Suppose there is a sudden massive increase in demand for basic staples after implementing basic income, isn't that an indicator that our current system + safety net is seriously inadequate? And that people were going hungry?

Really, I think there would be a small increase in demand sized to the backfill of the gap between basic income coverage and our current safety net. Maybe it would give us more leverage to remove some agricultural subsidies.
That's exactly why this thing is useful and appreciated.
A lot of BI proposals pay the BI only to citizens. New immigrants aren't citizens; it takes many years to move from permanent resident status to become a citizen.

This would create an underclass of immigrants & refugees, and create incentives for voters & politicians to make getting citizenship even harder than it is today.

This is definitely not a good situation, but it is better than forcing people to stay in Haiti or Sudan.
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Patent reform bill passes the house 325-91
On traditional PCs and Macs, Microsoft
still owns an overwhelming market share,
with 91.8 percent of all traffic coming
from Windows-based machines. Among non-
Microsoft operating systems, both OS X
and Linux have stalled since October
2011, hovering around 6.9 percent and
1.2 percent, respectively.

http://www.zdnet.com/latest-os-share-data-shows-windows-stil...