skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Here we go again with the false dichotomy of metadata vs data.

There Is No Difference. Collecting metadata enables you to infer some data, psychology, and behavior directly, or you can identify the individual and cross-reference with other databases that contain data.
I conflated you with the other response to my post saying bitcoin was not fungible.

Regardless, you seem very adept at unfairly attacking my vocabulary usage and finding inconsequential issues with bitcoin. Other than that I don't see much in what you are saying.

It doesn't matter that the number of bitcoins will slowly decline. Bitcoin is infinitely divisible, and whoever lost the money is the only it's a problem for. For everyone else that's a benefit.

Even if you were correct, such theoretical long-term concerns will not stop the adoption of bitcoin.
Socialist reductionism always works for me, although never as I expect.

"Health is important. Doctors should be free, right?" - Yes.

"But what about housing?! People can't just freeze to death. So housing should be universally free for everyone, right?" - Yes.

"Clothing is just as important as housing. Clothing?" - Yes.

"And food? You can't live without food. Universal free
food?" - Yes.

"And without access to technology, you can't get a job, so surely the government should provide computers and phones. Otherwise people have no chance of rising out of poverty. Universal technology?" - Yes.

I'm pretty sure no one has ever gotten the point, and I've only turned half-hearted socialists into full-blown socialists. Oh well.
Another possibility.
No offense but it sounds like we'd better off without you working. If you think minimum wage laws don't harm anyone you're terribly mistaken. They invariably hurt marginal and low skilled workers. The very people you aim to help.

Econ 101 is a misnomer of course because economic understanding developed over thousands of years starting with Plato really (however misguided he was on the topic). There is much to learn still but it sounds like you are just looking in the wrong directions.
Samsung: Uneasy in the Lead
Why do you think it's either/or?

Can't voluntarily funded charities replace all of those functions?
Good to know as a recruiter contacted me a week ago re: a position there.

Not sure why I hear disdain about recruiters. I find it flattering people want to find me a better gig.
Thanks for posting what I'm sure you knew would be an unpopular opinion around these parts. Interesting read.
I would like the trend towards ever-concentrated power and wealth to be reversed.

I would like people to be able to expect their interactions online to be private instead of operating under the assumption that intelligence agencies are scooping up all of their private information.

On a much more selfish and trivial note, I would also like an plugin-electric 4x4 so I can drive around the woods AND drive a futuristic Tesla-ey thing. Damn you Jeep, cancelling the electric Wrangler. :(
To me, meditation seems like an entirely self serving activity. As an analogy (and probably not a very good one) what if electrons began to meditate 60 minutes per day? They lose their charge and basically do nothing? Or what if birds and bees began to meditate? I think the result of all that would be pretty obvious.
If you look at the "behind the scenes" stuff you see they avoided all the tough questions. It was less about the NSA's justifications for their actions as much as how the NSA and people feel about the situation.
> Where does wealth come from if nobody works?

If you didn't have to work for money, what would you do?

Would you spend more time with your kids? Would you take your parents out of the nursing home and care for them yourself? Would you spend more time with your signifiant other?

Would you return to music or painting, which you abandoned when you had to enter the "real world" and earn a living? Would you go back to school, to pursue the academic interests you earlier had to set aside to focus on something that had good job prospects? Would you volunteer more often, or get politically involved trying to fix issues you don't have time to worry about right now?

Would you exercise more, and play sports more often? Would you spend more time cooking, and cut back on prepared, unhealthy foods? Would you sleep seven hours a day, instead of five?

Would you quit your job and start the company that you always wanted to, and steer it in the direction you wanted, working with the people that you wanted to, without thinking twice about what potential investors might think? Would you move into the career that you always dreamed of as a kid, but that just didn't pay enough? Would you take more risks? Would you worry less about failure, and work harder on those things that you are passionate about?

Or would you just laze around on the couch in your cramped apartment watching TV and eating ice-cream all day?

Of course, it must be this last option, because what else would anyone ever do if they had the choice not to work? Of course, without the fear of abject deprivation as a motivator, no one would ever do any work, and no one ever has.
I got a prescription for them from my doctor at the time (for PA, not high blood pressure), so it should be doable. Definitely would be helpful for job interviews too (I'm sure 20-40% of the people you see appearing before news cameras take them also) but be aware that they can cause your mouth to be dry. Also, try them out before the big day -- I've known people to pass out during big performances because, you know, they can lower your blood pressure.
In the US (and I presume most 1st world countries), we're pretty thoroughly (and intentionally) infected with Consumerism.

People who are making $150,000 are not content, and are working 60-hour weeks to get that raise up to $160,000. And the same thing is happening with people making $500,000 or $50,000.

All of those salaries produce MORE than enough to live comfortably on. And many people with a good salary could -- if they so chose -- live on $40,000 and save like crazy, and retire very early (as preached by Mr. Money Mustache among others).

But ALMOST NO ONE DOES THAT. So what logical basis is there to assume that Basic Income would change this? Many people already have Basic Income plus a whole lot more, but they don't pursue a basic secure position. Rather, they spend all they make (and often more), and they work slavishly to get more income.

(Is Basic Income meant to help the poor and unemployed ... who don't have the "good salary" I mention above? If so, I'm all for it, but it seems to me that if the price of a slum apartment is $300/month before Basic Income, it will merely be $600/month -- or whatever scale factor it takes to soak up that extra income -- after it.)
It's pretty sensationalist.

There are so many little things that have to line up for a BIOS virus to work. The idea that it would just spread like nuts and brick computers is laughable. So either the NSA is lying and they know it to try to legitimize their operations, or they don't know what the fuck they are talking about.
Sure they do! Optimizing is more than just low-level efficiency. It's also about using appropriate data structures and algorithms, and using advantageous APIs (like buf_concat here) when they're applicable.
It is a standard mistake that people sometimes make when working with lists. Lists have a O(1) complexity of prepending an element, and O(n) complexity of appending an element. So when you have to append a bunch of elements to a list, it is better to reverse the list, prepend the elements, and then reverse the list again, instead of just appending all elements. The former approach has linear complexity, the latter quadratic.
I'll go back to your original response here.

"Subdividing a unit of value does not create new value."

So what? Neither does printing money. Mutually beneficial economic activity creates value.

The point is, the decline in the number of bitcoins does not impact it's usefulness for those who possess and transact with bitcoins.
Income does not rise with the cost of consumer goods. Why is it that people feel so much poorer now than they did 30 years ago?

The reason that inflation is a transfer of wealth from the poor to the rich is that the poor do have small savings and that gets robbed from them as the newly inflated money makes it way through the bank accounts of those with influence first and don't ever the poor in any positive way.
Him lying to Congress actually isn't that black and white.

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/intel-dir-james-clapper-lie-c...
Look. I love Haskell. I usually formulate solutions to programming problems in my head in Haskell before I write code in whatever language I have to deal with. Constructing programs using combinators? Great. Assuming referential transparency everywhere? Great. It's a great language.

But there comes a point in time where you have to project that stuff all away and get down to the brass tacks of what's happening in your system, leaving behind the Platonic heaven you've constructed for yourself. As the patch proves without a doubt, this is very possible to do in Haskell. But sadly, the general ethos of the Haskell community does not bend in that direction. I am a lover of the language, but at the same time a vocal critic of the community in that respect.
Many people can't exercise critical thinking, or will be trusting of what is said, but none the less I am glad this was posted.

I have critical thinking skills, I can asses what is said based on it's merits, and I'm not the only one. So to me this was an interesting (though mildly infuriating) article.

I do believe it's fair to give the opposing position a fair say. In charged issues, it's not uncommon for anything an opposing party said to be labeled as malicious propaganda, while supporting parties hurling emotionally charged insults are propped up as uncompromising paragons of truth.

This should be taken at it's word, this article is telling us that many people in the NSA truly believe that holding this much data on everyone isn't a problem, that there are such devastating threats (such as a BIOS virus who's vector is social engineering). That the meta data is harmless.

Don't call it propaganda, just respond.
A couple weekends ago we tried to watch a movie on the Microsoft Zune service (hey, we have an Xbox). It didn't work. After half an hour of futzing around we watched a DVD instead.

I won't buy an e-book unless I know I can somehow get the content DRM-free. If Amazon ever makes it seriously hard to de-DRM its books, they've lost a customer (and I buy a lot of books).
Before, I use Scala + Finagle. Right now, I really like using Flask for my REST APIs. It's so lightweight and easy to set up.

I still use Scala though for data / computation intensive code. The setup is REST API with Flask, add to queue to be dequeue by the Scala worker. I really like the combination.
The only allure is that it's Kevin Rose attached to it. The idea is terrible and will flop.

Not only do people not want to watch the very boring process of content creation, but the content creators will not want people watching their (as viewed) awkward, stop & start, process of generating. We're all pretty weird when put under a microscope, and not many people like to be under a microscope. There is no doubt an extraordinarily small market for this, as some will go for it, but it's the equivalent of watching paint dry.
Well, kudos to them for doing that, at least. Of course it's awful that you could be out ~$3k, but imagine how bad it could have been if they hadn't been so proactive.
> this stuff scares the crap out of me.

I used to live in the ex Soviet Union. Yeah, it was a time when things were thawing out, and people had stopped disappearing. One thing that was still there, that I remember, was a persistent fear of the state. Not acute, but kind of like a dull pain -- in the background, you feel it, and are aware of it. Jokes in private were made about the party and government, inefficiency and corruption. One had to be careful not too say too much in public, or they might find themselves without a job, or maybe worse.

With the recent NSA revelation, I am feeling the same kind of fear. I don't think they'll knock on my door later tonight. But instead I think about "should I post this comment?". Does it mean I will be put an a no-fly list? What if they mis-interpret my joke and then I can't get a job on a project because they'll read this joke 15 years later to me taken out of context? I would got to a protest to DC, but hmm, facial recognition will probably shove my image another another black list. Does that mean constant IRS audits from then on? Stuff like that.

It is not a fake fear, it is there. People engage in self-censorship already. I do it.
You underestimate how lazy humans get if they don't have discipline and/or pressure.
If you're going to add footnotes, you probably shouldn't be citing wikipedia.

Capitalism is a system whereby "capitalists" (people with capital) use their capital as investments in business ventures. The person who risks the capital (the capitalist) has control over the outcomes of the business. You can have free markets without capitalism, and capitalism without free markets.

"Economic injustice" has nothing to do with anything. If you don't have capital you can't be a capitalist.
How is the original (the for loop that you mentioned) O(n^2)? Isn't that O(n)? Isn't acc += strings[i] a O(1) operation?
As an aside, immutability (ie purity) in Haskell allows refercences everywhere, and thus less copying. (They call it `sharing' in Haskell land.)
Not really relevant to the main discussion, but directly counter to your comment "Nobody rents a house and then go around using the word "own" and "buy" when describing their access to the house.":

In the UK, we have a situation which appears strange to most people when they first come across it: the vast majority of flats (apartments) are 'sold' on a leasehold basis. An individual or company may own the freehold (the building and the ground below), whilst the 'owners' of the individual flats have 99-year or 150-year leases.

The freeholder collects annual ground rent (maybe 200-300 GBP per year per flat) and is reimbursed for costs of managing the building (e.g. for building insurance, repainting common areas etc.).

I may 'own a flat' but in reality my right to occupy it has an expiry date. (I realise you referred to 'house' rather than 'flat'.)
Only the programs that aren't good (eg fast, simple, small) enough.
Right on the heels of Saturday Night Live skewering 60 Minutes for softball interviews:

http://www.nbc.com/saturday-night-live/video/rob-ford-cold-o...
Here is the context

http://www.reddit.com/r/haskell/comments/1sh67u/the_reason_w...
Why? There are lots of people in the Haskell community interested in speed.
I don't see how it necessarily offers a "window" into someone's soul to have a blurry webcam running on them. The webcam probably won't add anything to the context of a post, and more likely than not the image is either going to be someone staring into the screen or an empty chair when they're not there.

The process of watching a writer write is not as insightful as, say, watching an artist paint.

There may be something to combining video and text into some kind of blogging system - because I could almost see it working on mobile with pictures of just about anything else. You write a post, you take some video, it just goes.

But this just seems superficial and even a bit vain. Also potentially dangerous. Digital blurs can be removed after all, can't they?
No. It is impossible. What will happen is add basic income on top of current welfare system.

Read:

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2013/11/wha...
Custom 3D printed smartphone cases
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.

http://www.constitution.org/mac/prince00.htm

The NSA is unable to do a thorough damage assessment -- they don't know how which documents Snowden took.

Greenwald is drip feeding the world press "stories" which can go on for an indeterminate amount of time (see "no damage assessment").

Only viable option is to keep Clapper in place until Greenwald et al. have exhausted their supply of new scandals.

If, for example, Snowden had gone all Wikileaks and dumped the whole lot of files at once, Clapper would have been gone months ago.
For a given number of them, yes. Who cares?
Australian scientists grow mini-kidney in lab
"If you're not prone to psychosis or heart issues"

If you've never tried taking these drugs before, how would you know that you're prone to these issues before they hit you and it's too late?

The following excerpt from Wikipedia[1] describes side-effects of amphetamines (e.g., Adderall) and similar stimulants when used to treat ADHD:

Increased rates of psychosis and/or mania are associated with many stimulants used to treat ADHD, including Concerta, Ritalin LA, d-MPH, Atomoxetine, Adderall XR, Modafinil, MTS, and Metadate. A 2009 FDA review of 49 clinical trials found that one to two percent of children taking stimulants for ADHD experienced hallucinations or other psychotic episodes. Nearly half of these were under the age of eleven, and approximately 90% had no history of similar psychiatric events. Hallucinations involving snakes, worms or insects were the most commonly reported. This incidence of psychosis is higher than the 0.1% reported by previous short-term clinical trials. Even this new incidence rate may be low, however, since the clinical trials often excluded children with previous, adverse reactions to ADHD medication.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attention_deficit_hyperactivit...
Then why not raise it to $30/h? I'm serious.

Will those who previously made e.g. $20/h get a $10 raise or will their employer outsource/automate?
Haswell-EP and Broadwell-EP Xeons on time
MIT Media Lab: Vision Blocks
My suboxone treatment is an amazing booster for my work. Prior to that, I was a heroin addict, which also helped quite a lot. Shame about the whole "I'm and IV drug user and addict" bit though...
Probably. The old phones before flip, home phones/office phones you could hang up all intensely. The flip phones replaced that with hanging up with the massive flip, but got annoying when everyone is using smartphones. Now when they hang up they can't tap the phone harder to hang up. A tension moment has been taken.
> It's hard to be vulnerable to XSS and CSRF with all-static content, no?

You would think, but actually Apache managed to be vulnerable to XSS by including bits of the request URL in its error paegs, if I remember right. Last millennium, I think.

> So, not only will a trickle DoS other clients, each byte will also force an O(n) traversal of $buf (burning CPU). Granted, buf is only 1000 bytes, but that's not great.

Hmm, while I hadn't thought about that, and I should have, I think that's probably okay; basically you're saying that you can get the machine to burn up to, say, 2048 cycles by sending it a small TCP packet. Which means that a 4-core 2GHz server machine can't handle more than about four million packets per second (well, one million until I parallelize), which is about 85 megabytes per second, or 680 megabits per second. There are probably other bottlenecks in the code, the kernel, or your data center that will kick in first. It's probably more effective to DoS the server by just requesting files from it.

> It looks like a request with no space could force you to walk (`repne scasb`) through invalid memory after $buf.

It's possible I could have gotten this wrong, but I did try to limit the number of bytes it would scan to the bytes that it had actually read, by doing

mov (bufp), %ecx

before the repne scasb. Did I screw that up?

> HTTP/0.9 ...verbs other than GET.

Yes, those are unimplemented features, and you're right that their lack makes the server behave incorrectly; hopefully they don't result in security bugs. I think they don't matter in practice, since nobody sends HTTP/0.9 requests or HEAD requests, except by hand, do they?

> We don't validate that paths start with /, we just skip that byte.

Right. And the $'/ check below is to keep you from saying

GET //etc/passwd HTTP/1.0

and getting /etc/passwd. In case that matters in 2013.

Thank you very much for looking over it!
I agree with you on that, in this case it wasn't fast enough though. I think "optimize" should be a part of the "refactoring" phase.
There's two separate provisions of the Speech and Debate clause:

1) Members can't be arrested while attending a session of their House of Congress, or while travelling to or from such a session, except in relation to charges of "Treason, Felony, and Breach of Peace."

and:

2) Members can't be held accountable for any speech or debate in their House except by the same House itself.

The "Treason, Felony, or Breach of Peace" exception has nothing to do with the second provision.
> They should see these holiday parties as what they are: a part of the employee's total comp. I hear Amazon does not have holiday parties. As an engineer, I reduces my desire to work at Amazon.

I hear ya. And it's only getting worse. I was recently recruited by a major tech company and when I learned that weekly bottle service at a popular nightclub wasn't part of the comp package, I lost all interest.
Because if it's a common pattern, then it's nice to put it in a common library anyway, instead of having everyone write it out by hand. It makes the code cleaner and more efficient. Win win!
There's an interesting conceptual tension in your post:

High performers like to believe that they're entitled to the vast majority of the country's income because they're responsible for the vast majority of the wealth creation. Thus they see high taxes as "punishment" for success. But if that's true, why does it matter if say the bottom 40% of income earners just stop working. They account for only about 10% of the nations income, and presumably if the market compensates people fairly production would decrease by only 10% or less if these people stopped working.
not if you have to reallocate space for storing acc on each iteration