skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This section on the "costs" of mining bitcoin is well raised and relevant>Here is the passage:

<One thing I haven’t seen emphasized, however, is the extent to which the whole concept of having to “mine” Bitcoins by expending real resources amounts to a drastic retrogression — a retrogression that Adam Smith would have scorned.>

This he calls out as completely misplaced:

How much does the existing banking/payment infrastructure cost? One reasonable measure are the fees charged. Standard online payment fees are 2.5%, not including the added costs fraud (chargebacks plus transactions blocked out of fear of fraud).

And he's right. but The real cost of running a market is not, however a bid-ask spread. And he gets at the point, but its not clear, here:

Bitcoin payment fees are close to zero and fraud is impossible since Bitcoin is a bearer instrument.

The [true costs] of running a market are thos that instill [trust] in the market system. That is, what is commonly called "transaction costs" in economics. But these are not literal costs, which tend to be rent-extraction wherein the transaction is merely instrumental to effect a scaling biz model.[1] The true transaction cost of "effective honesty" are to be found in "governance costs", that is...the cost of lawyers. And thus more generally, and indirectly, the primary purpose of government (eg schooling, police, courts, national defense). So, it is worth putting in context the "cost" of mining bitcoins here. The "innovation" that is provided is provided also at this seperate level of abstraction, far away from the "overhead" style transaction costs in a literal definition. And to the authors point, these are both measurable and large; such an innovation thus actualy saves wated resources that would otherwise be deployed (think of all the energy spent on anti-spam and anti fraud by CCs...that 2.X is ~mostly profits tho).

In any event, interesting topic and interesting post. And I think he intuits the right answer, but the exact words put forth sort of murky the point abit, IMHO.

[1] eg 7% of an IPO to a Bank, X% to your real estate broker, 1/8 of a point in a pre-decimalized stock market, 2.x% on a credit or paypal transaction.).
Notice any facial hair trimmers missing?
I mean, I'm not going to bother doing that.

I'll just pirate it on demand if they're going to try to make me jump through hoops trying to give them money.

It's really up to the media companies if they want my money on reasonable terms or they don't.
Yeah, that'd work for me. If you have to lie to do business, then you shouldn't do business.
Google Play Newsstand One App to Read Newspapers Magazines Blogs News
You make a number of predictions here which are really only based on conjecture. Why are you so certain that inflation will be a problem under BI? And why would price controls be inevitable?

The fact is that your opposition is a moral one, as your last statement shows.
That depends on the person, I suppose http://dcurt.is/the-best
I want to eliminate the work required to go from idea to implementation.
a guess: studios realized leaving drm on for music meant perpetual apple lock-in for consumers. Eg my so has several thousand songs that before drm removal could only be listened to on an ipod.
I really doubt that he understands that algorithms will be formed that filter those reviews out on amazon. I really do believe he thinks that quality control being supposedly better in print was actually good for the best writers.
i want my body to always work as well tomorrow as it did today.

let's start there.
Oops, all I know is that this founder is from Sudan.
> The long term benefits of breast feeding are so tenuous

This is a joke, right?

Simple reasoning and deduction will lead you to the right answer. We evolved to drink the milk of our mothers, not a chemical concoction derived from the milk of cows fed by corn.
Unrewarding jobs in an ideal world would pay more.
Yea and I want a pony.

The best way to predict the future is to invent it.

-- Alan Kay
And that's the anti-intellectualism.
That is a pretty interesting point. Though, this is DC we're talking about, so local PD probably has attachés from all sorts of 3 letter agencies and access to gear for limited times (with oversight, most likely). Protests that are organized, so far, seem to give ample notice (as far as broadcasting to people) as to when they will occur so coordination probably isn't that hard (and because events take place all the time in DC that probably require such efforts that aren't protests).

Though thinking about this makes me wonder: what types of things we'll see evolve to counteract this type of surveillance, and I'll extend, that are available now to some degree? I keep thinking back to ideas of generating noise, and I wonder what that could potentially look like, what the catalyst for demand for that type of hardware/software would be, and the incentives for the makers of it.
Hey there, Captain Overreaction.

Cigarettes are something that have nothing but negative consequences - for the smoker, for those in the vicinity of the smoker, and for the impact on the health system supporting the smoker.

It defies reason that these small poison sticks are still sold, especially to younger people who have not yet developed the crippling addiction held by those who have been smoking for years. It's really quite sad that people still seem to be stupid enough to volunteer for this long-form suicide.

Farting, on the other hand - is great. And, the release of hot air that's mildly annoying to others, faintly humorous, and quickly forgotten seems to be something that you certainly would relate to.
Don't peg BI to inflation ("actual" or "projected" - "targeted" is probably appropriate).

That way, if "supply-and-demand [...] render BI too low" because too many dollars are chasing too few goods, more people are motivated to move into the market and help produce. On the flip-side, when we hit a deflationary period real BI will rise, and people will pursue other interests rather than scrap for jobs that don't exist.
Shareholder litigation is typically brought under federal securities laws. In this case IBM misled the market by failing to disclose material adverse information which caused the stock price to fall. To prove you suffered losses you only have to show that you bought stock during the time period affected, and lost money as a result of the information coming to light.

This is interesting. Investors have a right to all material information about a company, and public companies are obligated to provide that information, and SEC regulations require that they do so. But, in this case, that information was classified, so IBM would be breaking the law by revealing it. Conflicting laws.

If the shareholders win, who knows, we may see more lawsuits like this. Maybe that would compel these companies to stand up to the government.
At compile time or run time?
Just like they could simply ignore the law and conspire with telecom companies to do the snooping anyways. :P

If you're going to assume that level of malice on the part of government then the game is already over.
Why would you use gnome if you've used xmonad :)I run crunchbang (debian w/ openbox) and it's awesome.
Yes I am ready for that. Wage slavery is wrong if there is a viable alternative.
Knowledge isn't a barrier to participation, though it is a factor that affects outcomes.

Commissions, fees, and minimum account sizes can be barriers that prevent participation at all.
&copy; <?php echo date('Y'); ?>
More sources on how RAS is being used by these different agencies. Note that an initial RAS queries are what pulled the data in to the more easily queryable "corporate stores".

Morning session of civil liberties review, 21:07, 23:04, 37:00

http://www.c-span.org/Events/Civil-Liberties-Board-Reviews-S...

26:20 is an insane defense of writs of assistance by Brad Wiegmann. Actually explaining why the effectiveness of stop and frisk is an excellent example of why the NSA should follow similar policies.

http://endthelie.com/2013/11/21/the-nsas-reasonable-articula...
Unless I am mistaken, you can verify arbitrary computations[0].

[0] http://arxiv.org/abs/1105.2003
Just so no one reading is confused, should be:
Result is 10 in foldr example. Just forgot one element from list.
The IP owner and the redtube website both aren't residing in Germany.
Sentence 2 has typo "or" -> "of"
Install iReader on Chrome (like Safari reader).
You have to understand things on their own terms. A lot of times you can find a biological process that resembles something in computer science, but you shouldn't take the analogy too far. Nature doesn't know what a computer is, so any resemblance between a natural process and a computer is incidental.

You can't conceive nature as an engineer and talk about how sloppy and random its designs are. You have to bear in mind that nature has made things that we can scarcely comprehend, let alone engineer, so if you're critiquing its designs as if you can read its mind and see what it was trying to do, you're probably missing the point. It pulls off incredible things, so nature is the master and we're the student.
I only work when I feel I can be productive, and am currently averaging 6.5 hours per day. As a graduate student I am somewhat disconnected from the whole "show up at x, leave at f(x)" concept. I also tend to work on the weekend. Basically if something has to be done, I make time for it.

The disadvantage to this approach is that whenever I want to meet people, I have to modify my schedule. There is value in the idea that everyone involved in a project is at the office for a mandated period of time. It may not be best for everyone, but it sure is nice to be able to interact with people without the ordeal of establishing a common meeting time.
That would come as a real surprise to all the people in Afghanistan and Iraq who have been attacked by Carrier Strike Groups in recent years.

What in the world do you mean by "modern warfighting"?
Imagine falling in love with someone in perfect silence, knowing them entirely through their actions, having only the feeling of their presence.
If they had nothing but negative consequences, no one would smoke them. Obviously the people who do smoke them are getting some kind of value from them.
This is retarded. There... I said what everyone is thinking but too scared to say.

It's ok people we don't have to get all philosophical and say "but oh, the ideas that no one understands are the world changing ones!".

No, just no.

I understand this just fine. It's retarded.
Never trust a doppelgänger.
Own a Windows Phone? Try textly for taking notes. Feedback welcome
Software As Service slowly eroding its credibility as something reliable and being there for you whatever happens. As it happend with twitter and developers who had access to Twitter API, just like with Gmail disabling access to facebook's 'find your friends feature'.

It seems that SAS companies treat their end user as a cannon fodder and enlist them as bystanders who have consigned to suffer through everyone of their whims. What is eroding is trust people in SAS, which can be bad in variety of ways.

But then when you have your data on someone else's server it is not yours to have anymore, nevermind legal rights - which are very expensive and difficult to defend.

my 2c
Did anyone else notice the countless screens running windows xp?

There were a few linux desktops, but really most of the screens were turned off, or on and showing windows xp.

I don't like the idea of the US Govt using an extremely deprecated operating system.
I'm actually building an internship board for teens because of the problem that most internships are targeted towards college-going students. Right now, it's at http://teen2geek.com, and I'll be sending out beta invites to anyone interested.
Precisely the opposite: he has a very engaging style, which makes his lack of substance all the more insidious.
Predictions on the future of databases
I find it interesting that "salesperson" has connotations that are so negative for so many people that we find ourselves using euphemisms.
The problem is probably that you have to train in two separate fields to be competent in computer science and biology, and that's not going to be common.
I feel the sudden urge to wear a Max Headroom mask, inject this into blogs, and then just wave my arms in the background. I am sorry.
I found the polygraph stuff disturbing. The fact that the NSA takes polygraphs seriously (despite presumably knowing there's little scientific evidence supporting their use and knowing that lots of spies have had no trouble passing them) makes me think the NSA must be full of gullible morons.

Does the NSA weed out polygraph non-believers during their hiring process? So far as I know, the main "valid" use of polygraphs is (a) to trick/intimidate people who believe in them into telling you a more thorough story, (b) to acquire a "scientific" seeming reason to do or believe what you already wanted to do or believe going in.

I don't feel very reassured.
Immortality by induction. Clever.
These are exactly the sorts of reasons why the more energy efficient Proof of Stake (PoS) was envisioned and implemented into several cryptocurrencies, like Peercoin and Novacoin.
Because downvoters don't win:

> Come on, real men do not use macros.

The sexism and historical ignorance in this sentence are in a race to see which can be more breathtaking.

Regardless of which wins, meshko will look like a complete fool to anyone who knows what they're talking about.
Here are two relevant passages from their EULA/TOS. The TL;DR: download your content to avoid getting fucked.

e. Availability of Purchased Digital Content . Purchased Digital Content will generally continue to be available to you for download or streaming from the Service, as applicable, but may become unavailable due to potential content provider licensing restrictions and for other reasons, and Amazon will not be liable to you if Purchased Digital Content becomes unavailable for further download or streaming. You may download and store your own copy of Purchased Digital Content on a Compatible Device authorized for such download so that you can view that Purchased Digital Content if it becomes unavailable for further download or streaming from the Service.

f. Downloading and Risk of Loss. If you plan to download Digital Content that you purchase or rent, we encourage you to do so promptly after your purchase or rental. If you are unable to complete a download after having reviewed our online help resources, please contact Amazon customer service. Once you purchase or rent Digital Content and we make the Digital Content available to you, you are responsible for completing the download, if you choose to download, and for all risk of loss of the Digital Content after download.

source: http://www.amazon.com/gp/help/customer/display.html?nodeId=2...
What about political change? Learning languages? Making loving relationships? Protecting and exploring our natural world? Traveling farther into our solar system? Eliminating poverty, oppression, or eradicating disease?

Perhaps his imagination is already capped. In a world of mind-boggling convenience, access to data, and cross-country mobility, he wants more of the same--with less human interaction and less reflection. Lots of these ideas have fantastic benefits, but lots of them inflict obvious harm. "I want," he says; less thought for others and more for himself.

I'd rather design things that help people start meaningful discussions with caregivers, not eliminate them. I'd rather enjoy the journey, not anxiously await the destination. I'd rather reduce the stream of useless (but entertaining!) data coming at me from my devices and focus on that tiny percentage of content that shows me things worth knowing.

In the future, maybe we will be able to stuff ourselves with guilt-free calories, buy shit we don't need when computers tell us to, and have our hedonistic wishes instantly gratified by swarms of flying robots, as Curtis suggests. In the meantime, I'll keep dreaming about technology's potential for true good--and teaching myself to be happy with what I have.
One argument for the 40 hour work week is that we've simply built a complex global society around it. Almost every country in the world adheres to it more or less. We have set store hours at either 8 or 16 or 24 hours, again based on shifts of workers, and we have a complex economy that I'm sure our leaders would argue depends on it.

Not saying I agree with that argument, or that something better isn't possible, just stating a potential defense to the "tradition" of our 40 hour work week.

Any solution would take a ton of logistics and considerations in terms of wage parity during any transition period, less you want people starving because of bad policy. OR it would take one class of people, those who own the means of production, to create this policy on their own. I see no reason why they would.
It is incredibly simple politics. He is in place to continue to soak up the bad publicity from the Snowden event. Once the bad publicity stops, he will step down. There is no point, politically, of taking him out right now. His replacement will end up tarnished with the bad PR as he starts his gig.

That is the usual way this goes. But we don't yet have the data to determine whether this is what's happening.

The situation may just be an indication that the NSA has joined the old Ma Bell and Italy's Berlusconi in being able to say "we don't care, we don't have to"
> When you get into gender, the argument can still be forced into a binary perspective by not getting much further than agreeing that some boys can be like girls and some girls like boys.

Except if you do this, you can't really say you're segregating by gender or by sex. You have to say you're segregating by learning style, which isn't what the article's about.
New British Telecom customers will have porn filters turned on automatically
> I have a very high opinion of my former coworkers.

Well then, problem solved.
I think it's retarded as well. Though I also said the same about Twitter, Tumblr, Instagram & Snapchat when I first came across them. So what the hell do I know, it might catch on.
Me too. Technically you don't buy a copy of a movie from Amazon in this way, you're buying a conditional license to watch the movie. What you said is true. If you cannot resell your copy, you don't actually own it.
As a creative, I easily could have told you this. ;)
I'm curious to see what company is first to use shorter work weeks as a perk (if it hasn't happened already) with a lower salary. I personally would love to work 20 or 30 hours a week, and have more time for side projects, etc.

I think part of the problem is that an employee has a set of fixed costs (healthcare, hr, etc) that don't decrease as an employee works less hours.
Unfortunately capitalism gets in the way.

Suppose you're a factory owner with 4 workers working 40 hours per week. You invest in a new machine that lets everyone be twice as productive. If you don't have demand for the extra output, then do you cut everyone's hours in half or let two people go?

Think the far more common solution is to let two people go. So even though productivity went up, hours worked per week stayed constant.

And I think 40 hours per week is status quo. Suppose you get a job offer, and ask to work just 30 hours per week. There are a number of forces conspiring against you:
1) If you're salaried, the employer would see this as less efficient (even if you're actually more efficient)
2) If you're used to a particular way of living, 30 hours could entail pay cut
3) Others are willing to work 40 hours per week, and hence employer gets more "value" out of hiring someone else per week

I think best bet to achieve that reality is to be your own boss. Friend of mine works as a UI consultant and bills out at $200 per hour, works maybe 20-30 hours per week. It's a brilliant gig.
Except with technologies like Cinavia watermarking now intruding, DRM free rips may not actually be DRM free. That may keep your grandchildren from viewing some of your content.
It's pretty faint praise if you have to argue that a lot of what <insert name> does is good. It's like listening to someone in an abusive relationship.

They have willfully violated privacy expectations of individuals and corporations, and they seem to have enjoyed doing it (the slide deck showing how they sniff google data comes to mind).

They do have a big job to do, but "protecting the US as an entity" is not a risk to the extent you imply. Even additional terrorist attacks on the scale of 9/11 are not going to threaten the future of our country. Furthermore, even in the presence of such pervasive surveillance by the NSA, we are still vulnerable to attacks of terrorism, such as the Boston Marathon bombings. The American citizen is not really any safer than before, and in fact is more vulnerable to abuse by those with access to sensitive personal data.

What's happening now is in fact a good deal of logical thought. The question is whether the NSA's operations need to be severely curtailed and/or monitored.

Finally, if you're looking for the scared-mode people, I would suggest looking to the individuals who have put their personal freedoms at stake to try and bring evidence of wrong-doing to light.
Sure. We really have to dissect what happiness (or "liberation") really means here, to answer the question. There seems to be a conflation between convenience/lack-of-frustration and happiness. I don't believe that happiness (the real, sustainable kind) can come to anyone from the feeling that the flashlight they own is bright enough, or that the fork they own touches their teeth in the right way. Having reliable stuff can certainly make life convenient like he notices—but happy? Seems like wishful thinking.

Just take the classic HN thread "how did your life change after FU money?" (http://bit.ly/1dEVs7x). PG writes that "a lot of annoyances are removed" which seems like the same realization that Dustin has here in many fewer words—that money can buy him nice silverware and he never again has to be annoyed at failing silverware. Take a look at Aaron's comment and you'll find more concisely what I am trying to say:

"My sense is that it bears out what the happiness research says: dispositional factors are much more important than situational ones. PG was an abnormally happy person before he got rich and he's still abnormally happy. I was pretty miserable before and I'm still miserable."
"No signal"

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XIZVcRccCx0

...I actually wonder why they don't just pretend cell phones don't exist. I mean, if you can imagine ghosts and zombies, etc, do exist, why not?
I would not be surprised if capitalism ends in the united states in our lifetimes, either peacefully or through violence. Consider the rapid onset of robotization, creating a largely unemployed (and unemployable) populace, with the intersection of current republican party attitudes towards the nonwealthy, which I think can be mostly summarized as "fuck you I got mine".

You may find a book called "Does Capitalism Have a Future?" by Immanuel Wallerstein, et al interesting; I did.

But a favorable alternative may be quite likely: the institutional
transformation from capitalism to a noncapitalist system of political
economy—an institutional revolution—could come about through peaceful
political process. If the crisis of capitalism is severe enough—a majority
of the population structurally unemployed, robots and computers doing almost
all the income-generating work but owned by a small number of wealthy
capitalists, the economy in deep depression—at some point a political party
could win electoral power on an anticapitalist program. Some governing party
or coalition would have to replace capitalist production, distribution, and
finances with a system that redistributes wealth outside the system of labor
market and profit-taking.

re-excerpted from: https://www.salon.com/2013/11/24/millennials_rise_up_college...

book: http://www.amazon.com/Does-Capitalism-Future-Immanuel-Waller...