skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You keep using that word 'meritocracy', I do not think it means what you think it means.

It seems the author, Joseph Epstein, picked up on the idea that using privileged education as a proxy for merit is probably a bad idea, yet why he feels that this vindicates WASPishness is beyond me. It wasn't even particularly clear why WASPishness was included in the article at all, since it seemed only to serve as a mildly interesting biographical backdrop on an argument that centered around evaluating the worth of university.

Frankly, the article seemed like it had no clear direction. It banged on about meritocracy throughout, and used ivy-league universities as some sort of prima facie proxy for merit, yet it seemed to tiptoe around the crux of the argument: ivy-league universities are the new WASP. Yet rather than make this point outright, and show that attending an ivy-league school is no more an indicator for merit than was WASP birthright, the writer spent the majority of the article romantically eulogizing the old-school WASP. Frankly it all seemed a little tenuously connected.

That said, its strongest point -- on which it spent the least time -- was the argument that privileged education does not prove anything of one's abilities. This is certainly true in my experience, yet this undermines the article's claim that a meritocracy would choose someone with a privileged education. If a meritocracy is marking irrelevant traits as indicators of merit, then all that shows is that the meritocracy is incorrectly assigning merit, rather than showing that the concept of meritocracies themselves are flawed.

Maybe it's only in the tech community that quality of output is seen as a better proxy for merit than educational background, but here at least I don't believe I've seen much weight attributed to education. When given the choice between two candidates, one of whom having attended MIT and the other of whom having written some fantastic systems, it's been my experience that it is the latter candidate who would be more desired by tech companies. In a meritocracy where one's output alone is judged, that seems to me to be a fair system, because -- unless the output is intrinsically tied to some unfair advantage -- it seems that it cannot be gamed through class, gender or race. I felt that the author failed to consider such a meritocracy, and instead -- to his discredit -- just assumed 'merit' and 'ivy-league' are synonymous without arguing to prove such a point.

Why any of you should care what I thought of this essay is another point entirely...
Sorry but I've worked in crisis PR, and this article doesn't jibe at all with my experience. This statement in particular rings false: "If for one second you think that Phil Robertson of ‘Duck Dynasty’ isn’t coached by a public relations team prior, you’re an idiot."

I'm sure that Phil Robertson has gotten a lot of PR support over the years. I've seen it happen over and over again though: someone gets used to receiving only positive coverage and gets overly confident about press interviews, and then refuses formal media training. Amazingly, things can go great for years... until that one disastrous interview where everything changes. Then every interview after that focuses on that issue for the next few years. Then a PR team gets called into manage the newly formed crisis situation.

That's probably what happened here: he had gotten used to getting tons of positive coverage, and he started to think that he had a handle on the press. So he (and his team) start to do less and less preparation and due diligence for each interview, until this disaster occurred.
FWIW, "hi" was my first guess when I saw "jo". $200k, please. :-)
Right. Mainly because everybody who runs a full namecoin node will have access to the equivalent of a root name server: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Root_name_server
I agree with most of this but there is option 3. Solar people buy batteries and don't return power to the grid. This is probably a bad outcome for the average electricity user as well since the richest, most heavy users, won't be participating. My guess is the end game is a "grid connection fee" with a tax credit.
Here's my guide for when to enable HTTPS :

Always.

You're just adding one more reason. Anybody can do this if you're not using https (with real certificate).
<< Here's what happened: A wealthy religious Southern man told GQ an interview that he believes homosexuality is a sin, >>

That's not all he said though.
http://www.gq.com/entertainment/television/201401/duck-dynas...

There was also this incredibly ignorant statement: "Phil On Growing Up in Pre-Civil-Rights-Era Louisiana: “I never, with my eyes, saw the mistreatment of any black person. Not once. Where we lived was all farmers. The blacks worked for the farmers. I hoed cotton with them. I’m with the blacks, because we’re white trash. We’re going across the field.... They’re singing and happy. I never heard one of them, one black person, say, ‘I tell you what: These doggone white people’—not a word!... Pre-entitlement, pre-welfare, you say: Were they happy? They were godly; they were happy; no one was singing the blues.”

It's amazing how little coverage has focused on his ignorant comments about race, versus his graphic comments on how homosexuality is wrong.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2013/12/the-real...
He has essentially defeated your protocol, so he deserves the full $200,000. After Lavabit, it is no longer a fair assumption that you (or government agencies forcing your hand) will not interfere with the protocol to compromise it.
Reading this article made me realize how disconnected I am from popular culture. I only know of Duck Dynasty because my relatives watched it while I was visiting them. All I know about Miley Cyrus is that she's a singer. Until recently, I thought Hannah Montana was a different person. I have no idea what the Dolphin's "Jonathan Martin versus Richie Icognito feud" is, but I'm guessing it's related to the football team. Finally, I only know about George Zimmerman because a friend told me to watch the South Park episode he was in. That's also how I found out that there was a World War Z movie starring Brad Pitt.

If you want to have more free time and be a happier person, cancel your cable subscription. Unfollow Twitter users who talk about pop culture and news. Unsubscribe from subreddits that are full of this tripe. (Or even better, stop visiting Reddit.)

If you're in your mid-20's, you've got about 2700 weeks left on this planet. If you want to minimize future regret, spend them on more worthwhile things.
Each question seems to come with just an uncommented code dump. Not any discussion of the actual algorithms, why it works, what the trade-offs are, etc. If I happened to ask all these questions in an interview and got all these answers, I would reject the candidate.
It's all fairly preliminary at the moment, and I imagine it will be worked over for weeks by the great minds that keep namecoin running.

You should setup an account on the dot-bit.org forums and voice your opinion there. It is a good suggestion, and I'm sure you'll have others!
This. I'm extremely good with legalese, regulations, fine print, etc. More so than 99% of my peers, even some that have law degrees, and I have spent a lot of time explaining all the ways in with a specific contract might be trying to screw them. Most people simply aren't equipped to make those decisions. In fact, I'd go farther to say that the overwhelming majority are ill-equipped. A comprehensive cost-benefits analysis is hard enough for most people without also requiring them to sift through impenetrable legalese to figure out what the costs really are and what benefits they will actually get.
It is finally powerful as an abstraction. Assigning the immorality to individuals is exactly what perpetuates the overall system.
So much of what is celebrated as "innovation" these days involves taking something open and using it to build something closed that it almost feels unfair to call Netflix out for doing the same.

(Almost.)
> Once upon a time maps cost a lot of money and were a government thing - you had to licence the data.

In some countries yes, but in the U.S. the government-created map data is licensed under much friendlier terms than Google's is. You can download huge piles of map data here, as bulk export with no strings attached: http://www.census.gov/geo/maps-data/data/tiger.html

Although the best map data in the western world comes from neither a government nor Google: http://www.openstreetmap.org
Moving a city to Linux needs political backing, says Munich project leader
They did, but then you have to spend all of your time fixing broken packages whenever you do a world update. :P
Why is Telegram in the HNews so much? Are they part of the YC fraternity? Why do pay so much attention to crypto hucksters?

It hasn't been so long since the last snake oil peddlers had their roasting -- I forget the name, it was some cutesy web-browser "secure" chat thing.

It's cool to report debunkings, but if it weren't for HN, I (and most others?) never would have even seen these products in the first place.
I know someone in the reality TV industry. And all the current reality TV shows absolutely envy DD. It is the golden standard and few can match it (and it isn't for the lack of trying), many heads are thinking how to capture and replicate that.
Jesus...A&E was so desperate to get attention that it risked a boycott of its most popular show ever? How does this even make sense?

Oh wait, I can take a guess from the OP's beginning:

My initial response is who the f&# cares.*

Ah, the fact that the OP doesn't care about it might be an indicator that he doesn't really know much about the details...I mean, if he hasn't heard of Duck dynasty, then it must not be very important, and so this must be a stunt in order to get attention, right.

How does this bullshit even get up voted?
To be pedantic, BitCoin (and most other cryptocoins) are pseudonymous, not anonymous. But yes, one user can have multiple pseudonyms.
I'm not certain, but I see another alternative for those that find themselves screwed by the cliff and are self employed is to form an LLC and pay themselves a salary that keeps them at the ideal salary and keep balance in the company for future years. This has the added benefit of helping minimize tax obligations over the long term.
The people who concern themselves with the things you list here are likely to be or may become your customers. If you don't understand them then you will never be able to sell to them. There's nothing wrong with taking time away from the monitor and getting out to see a movie or talk to another human once in a while. Perspective is a wonderful thing.
imho that approach would have worked if they had implemented merged mining before implementing namecoin.

That's somewhat of a moronic statement considering the namecoin crew invented the idea of merged mining. But I digress...

I remember back when namecoin came out... they started the difficulty at 512 instead of 1 (bitcoin's initial difficulty) which made sense at the time, because GPUs were everywhere by then. But with namecoin being so new (and worthless) the difficulty soon dropped to the ~200 range, and anybody with a few GPUs could literally mine 1,000s of NMC per day.

Case in point, the 50 NMC they charged for the first domains was still much too cheap. One could theoretically mine with an average rig for 1 week and register a few hundred of the first domains available.
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Really?! So, as a teacher, if you gave me feedback and I repeated "No" smugly, over and over and over, and insisted that I was right and you were wrong... you're not going to at least have a twinge of "told you so"?

We got Gandi over here posting on HN.
Swamp coolers are basically just water mist things connected to big fans. They work off of evaporative cooling, so they are extremely effective if it is dry but not effective at all if it is humid.
There are potentially dragons if you artificially reduce salary and retain earnings, but if you have a business justified way, it is possible. The other weirdness is that a lot of this is income based, not assets, so a rich "retired" person could get subsidies.
It's down there at the end, that CG Boarding Page 14. Those Focal Points I just don't get them. Can't they just say make your frame look good and less boring by putting your object of interest off center, or did that rule just stick because it's easy to remember and easy to program and overlay.
As a side note: never interview in C++. For these types of problems java is just so much easier to work with, and it's easy to learn enough java to interview with in a weekend from a C++ base.

In my experience, interviewers always prefer a good easy solution (java) to a so-so difficult one (C++). Ruby and python are worth a try too, but often they make things so easy that the interviewer disregards the answer--many common string manipulation interview questions are one-liners in ruby.
Counterexamples:

1) Every Bitcoin thread

2) Every NSA/Snowden thread

Source (cough): I've been around for 6.3 years, am in the top 40 users in terms of net karma, and am actually very frustrated with the unfortunate turn the community has taken in the past 12-18 months. And am considering leaving, which makes me sad.
Agree, the way it does hg-flow and git-flow is pretty cool.
if you think the only reason you'd want to be in the same culture as most people who live near you is because they "are likely to be or may become your customers"... jesus, i don't even know how to respond.
Not sure what either of those two topics has to do with this thread..
Gandalf the Venture Capitalist
Absolutely nothing, so downvote away. I'm just expressing my overall frustration with this board.
And in winter, solar is near zero at those times.

Note that Hawaii is (mostly) below the Tropic of Cancer, so gets quite a lot of solar radiation even in the winter, and the length of a day only varies by a couple hours throughout the year ([1], [2]). I don't know the math offhand, but even without adjusting the panels, I'd expect that the winter output is probably pretty significant.

[1] http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=103&m...

[2] http://www.timeanddate.com/worldclock/astronomy.html?n=103&m...
yeesh, the only reason it's worth understanding the things other people care about is to better understand how to sell things to them?
Just look at Michael Richards: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Richards#Laugh_Factory_...

That Laugh Factory incident is one of the 4 main things he is known for on his Wikipedia page.

I'm sure he was told many times throughout his life just how wrong what he said actually was. And he proceeded to talk that way not just to a single interviewer but a large audience.
As someone that has his life in unixy land, umm, I hate to ask but what exactly (super high level is fine) is wrong with NServiceBus?
Yeah, that was my thought too. Two thoughts actually:

1) I don't doubt that he got extensive coaching from a PR team. I do doubt that he followed their advice. History is littered with the bleached bones of the reputations of people who walked into an interview thinking they knew how to deal with the media better than their PR person did. There's no shortage of cases of people with great PR support going "off-book," either impulsively or on purpose, and getting a very different reaction than they expected.

2) The fact that A&E fired the guy argues very strongly that this was not a pre-planned stunt. That's the sort of thing companies do when they are getting unexpected heat from the public and the execs are panicking. If they'd planned this they wouldn't have fired him right away -- they'd have wrung it for even more attention by sending him out on an "apology tour" or the like, so he could get an hour on Oprah's couch and then remind all her viewers when to tune in to Duck Dynasty.
https://android.googlesource.com/

Whats this?
Here's a crazy notion: maybe the squatters don't matter?

DNS isn't going away anytime soon; maybe not ever. Dot-bit domains can exist alongside the old domain system, competing by being cheaper, resistant to censorship, more flexible, etc.

Can't get mycooldomain.bit? No problem, grab mycoolerdomain.bit, or go old-school with mycooldomain.com. Apple can't get apple.bit? No biggie, they've still got the .com, and if they want the .bit bad enough, they'll pony up the cash. (It would also greatly help if a way to make purchase offers was baked into NameCoin itself.)

The posted idea is an interesting one, and it's worth considering, but from where I sit, the significant roadblock to adoption is implementation in browsers and/or operating systems.
The reason for these comments is because you're exactly right– they are gambling. Putting $200k on the line in the hopes of winning mindshare, reputation, etc. Of course if you lose, you'll lose all of that and your money. I'm really happy that more people are getting into crypto and not browbeating themselves out of creating new stuff because it's necessary for any field to grow. These negative responses are also necessary so that those people stop trying to raise their own victory flags prematurely, making it even harder for outsiders to be appreciated for their work.

Note: This is not so much in response to thom's comment, but rather the criticism of jimmytucson's comment (which actually has some substance).
I wish they do street view for India. If I recall correctly, they started it in Bangalore but had to shutdown because of local law.
Maybe they need to turn down the account-ghosting requirements a few notches?
If you don't care to know then you trust the provider to make the decisions for you. The fact that you found out you don't agree with a decision they made shouldn't really surprise you. It is unlikely that you agree with every decision they made.
I just watched the first 2 videos, they are great. Thank you!
Being on a website called Hacker News.

Seriously, this surprises you?
I'm not actually familiar with that one. Clue me in?
Sorry to be rude, but that's a rationalization. The best way to understand potential customers is to talk to them. If you can't talk to them, there are surveys or other methods. But keeping abreast of pop culture is the worst market research you can do besides consulting a Ouija board. "How do you know people want what you're making?" "Well I watch a lot of Duck Dynasty..."

A better argument could be made for using pop culture as common ground when socializing. Although in my experience, if someone brings up a current event that I don't know about, they're usually happy to explain it. And there are lots of ways to socialize that don't involve pop culture or current events. My favorites are games and sports (playing them, not watching).
You can only pay your taxes in Federal Reserve Notes (which are neither Federal, not backed by any reserve, and not notes).

THAT is why the income tax and US fiat currency were put into law at almost exactly the same time. Same as in ancient China and many other empires and countries - people can be forced to use fiat if they go to jail for not paying their taxes. Thus they have to work to get fiat.

Your statement about the Federal Reserve is laughable... I suggest some remedial learning, perhaps Ron Paul, or even just Zerohedge.com.
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when renewables fail, they don't give you much warning (we're talking minutes at most)

If your country has a lot of hydro (which has ramp times measured in seconds) this doesn't matter.

Additionally, clouds don't magically appear and obscure an entire cities sunlight over the course of a few minutes. They pass over cities, so as one area loses solar generation another is regaining it. Or maybe it's an overcast day where the the solar generation is at a predictable low level all day. Neither of those cases pose any problem to hydro or any other plant that can ramp up and down over the course of a few minutes (and every nation has these - you can't run a grid without low-response time generators)

In the case of plant failure, the system is much more resilient. And in the case that something disables most small plants (say, an earthquake), the system is much more affected than today (because rooftop solar just isn't built to power plant standards)

I'm not really sure what you're saying here. That distributed generation gives you resiliency? In Australia and NZ, if the grid goes down then your solar inverters turn off too so it doesn't affect the grid's reliability at all. I believe most countries have this requirement.

How does not being "built to power plant standards" have any effect? Your inverters are still required to generate clean AC, and if they can't match the grid closely for any reason they stop generating.
The choices are to either abuse an existing word, or make up new one (possibly a homograph).

What is '+' ? Addition? Modular addition? Logical OR? Concatenaton? Sometimes, any of these.

There where always be more concepts than distinct labels, since the space of concept is exponential combination (power set) of words.
It does, unless I misunderstand what you mean.

The original URL RFC, RFC 1738 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc1738), envisioned three URI schemes relating to email. The mid: scheme would refer to messages by message-id, the cid: scheme to parts of a MIME-encoded message by content-id, and the mailserver: scheme would refer to resources on a mailserver.

The mid/cid schemes were further specified in RFC 2111 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2111) a 1997 proposed standard, updated in 1998 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc2392). These do what you want, I think: mid:message-id is a URI referring to an individual message.

The mailserver: scheme was never further defined, and was formally moved to the history books in 2011 (http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc6196).
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NSA compromised Dual EC DRBG never actually worked in OpenSSL
I think it would be sad if you left.
>It is the difference between a currency and a collectibles market.

What, the size? I bet there are currencies from small countries that are harder than bitcoin to exchange without crashing the price. I don't think your distinction is a good one.
This is where you usually see some silly comment like "Because the majority of users cannot use a command line and will never use FreeBSD."

Of course that majority will also never be given a choice.

Sony PlayStation users are using FreeBSD. I doubt they will complain.

Imagine, for the purposes of a thought experiment, a majority of users would be receptive to using FreeBSD. Imagine that instead of staring at a screen that says "Buffering...", the user could transfer files to the her home computer with something as simple as:

tnftp -o /home/netflix/nextmovieinqueue.mp4 ftp://netflixftpserverlocatedatisp.netflix.com/requestedmovie.mp4

And when the download completes, the user could serve the video to the devices that are connected to her WiFi router:

tcpserver -vRHDl0 192.168.2.0 80 bozohttpd -snX /home/netflix

And then she accesses the file as she would any video on the www, by pointing her web browser/http client at http://192.168.2.0/nextmovieinqueue.mp4

In this imaginary scenario, how could "DRM" be implemented without forcing the customer to use a particular OS, browser or video player, or some other closed source program?

Could it be done?