skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think we may be overestimating how much of the average developer's job actually requires creativity.

Most programming jobs combine creativity with more mundane work. For example, tracking down bugs or answering e-mail questions from co-workers or customers generally doesn't require the amount of creativity that solving a previously unsolved problem does. Neither does figuring out how some open source API works (whoever designed it originally did the heavy lifting for us).

So if we reserve the hard stuff for our hours of peak creativity, we could optimize our creative output while still getting a lot of other useful stuff done in the remaining hours of an eight hour day. Even if my brain is completely fried, I can usually find something to do that pushes my work forward.
Here is another example. They spent like a good 5 minutes talking about how they hired all these smart kids to work on cryptography, specifically code breaking. Maybe 60 minutes could have simply asked them, "We have reports that you are working to undermine secure internet communication, is that what your code breaking work is for? And why are you doing that?
I used it to mine dogecoin using those same instructions. I either had to use an older nvidia driver version or an older version of CUDAminer, though. So it wasn't that simple to set up once CUDAminer got the update that broke the newer NVidia software. This happened near the first of the month. http://doges.org/index.php?topic=43.0
"Winklevoss twin says value of Bitcoin will remain stable and find its place as a useful form of currency in the current global marketplace" ... said no Winklevii ever..
The issue is here:

> There is an added wrinkle here, however, is that it is not clear to me whether Clapper could have given a direct (and truthful) answer in a public hearing, as such an answer would have required him to disclose the existence of a then-classified government program. Even a non-answer or evasion could have revealed the existence of operations the NSA was trying to keep secret.

http://www.volokh.com/2013/06/11/did-james-clapper-lie-to-co...
> Winklevoss twin hopes Bitcoin valuation will top $40k

FTFY
"And make no mistake: irony tyrannizes us. The reason why our pervasive cultural irony is at once so powerful and so unsatisfying is that an ironist is impossible to pin down. All irony is a variation on a sort of existential poker-face. All U.S. irony is based on an implicit "I don't really mean what I say." So what does irony as a cultural norm mean to say? That it's impossible to mean what you say? That maybe it's too bad it's impossible, but wake up and smell the coffee already? Most likely, I think, today's irony ends up saying: "How very banal to ask what I mean." Anyone with the heretical gall to ask an ironist what he actually stands for ends up looking like a hysteric or a prig. And herein lies the oppressiveness of institutionalized irony, the too-successful rebel: the ability to interdict the question without attending to its content is tyranny. It is the new junta, using the very tool that exposed its enemy to insulate itself."

From David Foster Wallace's "E Unibus Pluram".
Lol, right. I thought the article was an interesting read anyway.
I absolutely don't dispute that. I am merely pointing out that there is a small number of messages to intercept. The traffic with the AQ Khan network would be a good example. That said, no, it does not justify turning the world into a surveillance state.
He could have said "I can't comment on that in a public forum".
True enough, but wouldn't you probably do the same? :)
Amazon's Jeff Bezos loses NASA launch pad protest
If you decide to do this, using git replace so that you and other trusted people can see the history, but others can't is a particularly good idea.
I get they had to play softball to get access. However there are ways to still do honest journalism despite this. They could have interviewed anyone outside of the NSA skeptical of their practices and spliced together numerous views. They could have asked hard questions and then shown NSA's refusal to answer them. And this whole piece was very light on facts. I kept expecting a voiceover of the journalist to explain how the NSA's story doesn't match the facts leaked. And there's no historical context of the NSA's dishonesty.
"Economists admire Americans for many traits: our profound respect for property rights, our tendency to forgo vacation days"

What "economists" are they referring to?
TLDR: Don't worry. We have civil liberties orientation. You can trust us.

The author understands their is a misconception at play, but it's not that the public thinks NSA agents aren't upstanding or law-abiding, it's that NSA agents think their idea idea of patriotism is broad enough. It's telling that he dismissed an examination of patriotism, because that's the root of so much discord over civil liberties and national security.

There are two major currents of patriotism in this country. The first is that we take pride in our accomplishments, and we must defend our borders, protect our treasure and lives, and maintain the status quo. The second is more idealistic, that we take pride in having an open (vulnerable, ever-changing) society, and we must defend our democratic identity, promote participation, protect individual freedom, and be skeptical of concentrations of power. The first is practical, easy to quantify (and therefore appealing to a data-thirsty culture). The second is strategic, asks more from the average citizen, and rests on an understanding of alternative forms of society (what is lost when we prioritize security and order over those "inalienable" rights).

Ideally, the NSA would be staffed by patriots of the second type. They'd embrace 'public service' as having deep reverence for the public (not just their physical safety, but their liberties as well), that appreciates the philosophical underpinning of democracy (including it's necessitation of vulnerability and cultural evolution), and that prides itself in taking on their intelligence goals while ardently building checks and balances. They'd never just ask how they can get the information, but how it can be done in a way that proudly upholds American values. With bureaucracy you'll always have some amount of inefficiency and misalignment with top-level goals, but a pervasive culture can go along way.
> I think the sentiment here mainly is going to be any report from 60 Minutes that isn't 100% negative about everything the NSA is doing is not going to be good enough.

Or maybe just something that's not 100% positive.
You do this by measuring productivity in terms of what each person actually achieves each day, not by how many hours they spend in the office.

I have done this for a development team by agreeing milestones and targets for my team with both the developers involved and the internal customers. The devs are then responsible for hitting their targets, and notifying everyone else if they slip or are unable to meet them. The customers are responsible for notifying everyone if the requirements or context changes. I was responsible for notifying everyone if the priorities changed.

It then became the dev's responsibility to determine how many and which hours they needed to work to achieve the goals set, with some simple rules (like a maximum of 8 hours coding per day and 6 days working in a row). We had some weekly meetings that the entire team needed to show up at, otherwise it was their call. They could work from home or from the office, although we generally preferred office because of the network effects. If they completed a task early, they got to go home if they wanted (some didn't).

We got some flak from other departments because it appeared to them that we were never around, but they got used to it. The fact that we were consistently hitting deadlines was a HUGE plus to the whole thing; they could see this worked. As a bonus, we had decent support cover for some of the evening and night shifts as there were devs who preferred working those hours.

TL;DR: Don't measure people on how long they sit behind their desks. Measure them on what they actually do. Then set targets based on what you expect someone to do in a week. Then send them home once they've hit target. To grow the company, set harder targets.
Oops typo. That was supposed to be embarrass. Fixed.
Remembering the Birth of Instant Replay
I think that was a poor example, especially since it was phrasal rather than lexical.

Let's take the word "bitch". It is deemed "offensive" but it's original connotation was just simply "female dog". However it evolved into the meaning it has today.
Data is provided by ISPs and big companies like Google and Facebook.

Now, if you ask someone working for a ISP or Google if they hand over information to anyone, of course they'll say that they don't and haven't heard of someone doing it.

But of course they wouldn't have heard of it, one person with access is enough to rsync or sftp it to the NSA; no need for the others to know about it. They are needed to their jobs with clear conscience. I assume its the same in the NSA on the other side of the 'relationship'.

The same phych screening process the author took probably also selected the guy is doing the abuse.
>We have reports that you are working to undermine secure internet communication

That isn't a loaded question whatsoever.

This response is justifying my statement above. The piece needed to have many 'When did you stop beating your wife?' type questions before the majority of the audience here would be happy with the reporting.
Planet Earth is You
Bank of America's analysis of price made a lot of sense to me, and to the best extent possible, they justified their valuation ($1300 max). This is just mindless speculation like CNBC saying BUY BUY.
This isn't true. If it becomes easier to spend bitcoins than dollars, why wouldn't you just spend bitcoins and convert your earnings to bitcoins as they come in?

The problem with Bitcoin isn't so much the price volatility. It's that spending them is difficult. That is changing rapidly. If a merchant offers a bitcoin discount that reflects the lower costs of doing business with Bitcoin, why wouldn't consumers spend them?
I don't think this comment deserves its downvotes. Rights holders get 70% of the revenue and they pretty much set all of the terms. Disney in particular has arguably the most valuable content portfolio in the world and has tremendous influence. If Amazon, Apple, and Google didn't want the terms, the licenses wouldn't have been struck, and we'd probably be shopping for these kinds of videos at atrocities like imedia.disney.com and sony-evideostation.com.

The only reason why this is happening is because online sales is still a very small portion of their total revenue. Check out slide #31 of this deck [x]. EST = electronic sell-through ("buying" a movie/show), and it's completely dwarfed by the other channels. (FYI: BD=Blu-Ray, VoD/PPV = cable rentals). So rights holders can screw over their tiny, small-revenue user base in exchange to keep the larger ones happy and profitable.

Also, the consumer reaction will be largely inelastic. No matter how bitter Corey Doctorow is bitter at Amazon and Disney, he's going to still going to buy/rent/pirate the content because his kids will want to watch it. This is why Disney is so powerful.

In the next decade or so, as consumers continue to shift their viewing habits, we'll start seeing the options be more consumer-friendly and probably cheaper. Remember it took the music industry 10-15 years from the rise of MP3s to today's DRM-free iTunes, VEVO, and Spotify options. Hulu didn't come around until 2008, so I think we're probably at about year 6.

[x] http://www.slideshare.net/mpalank101/2012-state-of-media-pre...
Well how else can we help others to earn money in order to survive?
In lots of poorer economies people are asked to work more than 8 hours.

In which countries are store hours are usually set at multiples of 8 hours? (I have never see that being usual. But then, I grew up in Europe.)
Sigh, I'm losing productivity thinking about what if...
'60 Minutes': NSA Good, Snowden Bad
SASS can give you the same result:

%red
color: #f00
%blue
color: #00f
header
@extend %red
div
@extend %blue
#foo
@extend %red
p
@extend %red

gets processed into

header, #foo, p {
color: #F00;
}
div {
color: #00F;
}

codepen sample: http://cdpn.io/JoHAv
My browser marks the washington monthly article as visited — maybe that's the one that op saw?
Justified the 1300 value how ? They have no real method to get to that number.
It wasn't my password it was my access token and secret key.
But it has almost the same effect.
Just yesterday i made 2 slow MySQL queries perform nearly 100x faster by replacing the reckless JOINs with smart subqueries.
Once Rooney died they were all free to stop complaining which does not make for good news. That grumpy old man was protecting our freedoms by protecting our lawn.
How is that a loaded question? It's a statement of fact. 1) They had people working on intercepting Google's private internet, 2) They actively wanted to weaken SSL.

For your example: Yes, if the interviewee was charged with beating his wife, that would be a very fair question. Not asking that would just be dishonest.
Sounds about right, those macbooks aren't worth anything.
Elon said in an interview that they have registered Model Y!
Wondering what would be neccessary for non-academic authors to pick up Github with markdown/prose.
What good is basic income if it does not encourage people on it to learn new things and find new sources of income or look for a job? What if basic income makes a majority of people not learn anything and just never learn from their mistakes and failures, and always have that basic income safety net to rely on even if all they do is play video games, get drunk every day, get stoned every day, abuse people every day, and just become a jerk to everyone because they have no responsibilities at all?

I don't think this basic income (while it does sound nice) has not been properly thought through. Do you have any peer reviewed sources on it that I can learn more about it? Apparently this is a 'hot issue' as my parent post was downvoted into oblivion for raising doubts about it.
Copyright Laws Force Release of 59 Beatles Songs
Bash prompt with git status
You can read it here:

http://cryptome.org/2013/12/boa-bitcoin.pdf

They look at comparables such as gold, silver, PayPal market cap, etc and then deduced where BTC would fit in.
I did 3 years of both in college through a dual degree program the college had setup with a CS concentration.(dropped out my senior year, but went far enough to give you a general idea)

Keep in mind, this will vary from uni to uni:

MIS from my experience was more about database management and very basic coding skills. It was definitely more business oriented. There was a decent amount of introductory Service Oriented Architecture and other kinds of somewhat technical topics, but it's not really all that relevant.

CS still gives you the fundamentals needed to take on different kinds of system architectures and problem solving.

I by far favor CS as far as what skills will be most worthwhile. You will learn everything you could in MIS as you go along in CS. There's either a lot of overlap or MIS just plain has a lot of lacking skills as far as technical goes.

Despite the stereotype that CS is more academic, lots of those topics are amazing to have under your belt. If you're hoping to get a programming job CS is still the easiest way to get in the door.

If you just want to be a project manager (good luck at entry level) you might get away with MIS.

I would recommend the CS degree with an MIS minor instead.
It's not a bad courseload in doses, but overall, to me, not as useful.
On a related note, I would even prefer working 4 days for 10 hours to make this quota if absolutely necessary, and though I am not particularly supportive of said work hours per week, I do obey the system. I understand that there may have some W/OHS related issues with this of course.

I wonder what sort of impacts these things would have on things of a grander scale, such as the economy, transport, employment rates, inflation etc. I refer to either lowering the hours & pay per employee per week (as discussed in other comments) or overlapping shifts such as half the employees work 38 hrs Mon>Thu and the other half working 38 hrs Tue>Fri (rough schedule of course).

Have there been any remotely similar studies on this?
IMO we're past the point of the layperson being so technically hopeless they'd swallow this whole. I grant the numbers are still out there, but I think the people convinced/reassured/calmed by this kind of PR are that way because they genuinely think it's worth it. Maybe even a "better the devil you know" scenario?; it's worth "our guys" having their hands on all of this power, with its potential for abuse, than the "other guys".

What I don't get is why, if you're the NSA, would you go through the PR effort for people already on "your side"; you're not going to sway a large swath of the population and there surely can't be that many fence sitters on this issue.
Since I do apt-get update && apt-get upgrade almost regularly, I found out that my system was already running 7.3 (cat /etc/debian_version). So yes, this is not a major upgrade release just that the Debian team thought that there were enough changes and bug fixes to label this as a new release.
We are then going down the rabbit hole of who gets to decide when it's appropriate to lie, and when not. IMHO, the only appropriate action to take in a case like this is to stop the open hearing as soon as possible, or refuse to answer any questions on the grounds that answering some and not others could be used to determine top secret information. At least then the public can decide whether they feel that is acceptable and lawmakers can decide what that means for them.

Instead, what we had was an official lie while under oath for political expediency.
>>Top earners have a strong vested interest in the lowest possible income not being too low, because starving homeless masses have a negative impact on property values.

There is little evidence that property prices of high value homes in areas with high income inequality suffer.

>>If giving $X + $Y + $Z to everyone in the US would provide them with a better quality of life, then it makes sense to do that instead of managing separate programs.

Except either 1) benefits to the elderly and the poor must decrease (by more than half if medicare, ss and income security are replaced with a flat basic income) or 2) or taxes on the middle class must increase dramatically. 2) comes about because increasing the top tax rate from ~58%(all ss and medicare with income) to 70% raises about 1.5% of additional gdp in taxes as per the IMF; which even isn't enough to finance a neutral level of basic income for poor, unemployed and elderly.

If you don't increase taxes then millions of americans will enter poverty immediately under a basic income (dramatic quality of life reductions )while large tax increases have a far larger economic impact than the relatively small administrative costs of running social programs. It is just basic math that instead of giving $X dollars to Y number of people doubling Y doesn't let you keep X constant. Some people will be big losers(the most vulnerable).

>> It enables the minimum wage to be much lower than the poverty line. The nation has collectively decided that an adult working full time should be entitled to to the basic necessities of life, and the cost of that decision is that jobs which are worth less than $7.25 simply aren't offered (or are only offered illegally). If everyone already makes enough to get by, then there's far fewer ethical problems with paying someone $3 an hour to sweep some floors or pick up garbage from a sidewalk.

The elderly already receive income assistance that is as least as generous as what you are proposing for everyone and many of them still work. Do you expect them to work for significantly less?
I don't agree.
Optimistic view on bitcoin -> Media Attention -> User Attention -> Bitcoin value goes up -> User Pool Increase -> Merchants' attention increase -> more merchant support, resulting in more utility for bitcoin and more confidence in the viability of the currency.

Of course, I'm simplifying stuff on purpose here, but more people talking about Bitcoin in a positive light is good for Bitcoin. Apart from the valuation they throw in here, them investing in Bitcoin will breed further options on the market.
Include a complete description of the protocol in `x`?
I am mentally ill myself, the language and social parts of my brain are dysfunctional. I am often misunderstood as a result and cannot properly community what I am trying to say. I come out as annoying people sometimes by mistake and they downvote me because they cannot understand what I was trying to say. Such is my personal life as well, I drive people away due to my mental illness.

If any of it got you to think about different issues, I am glad, even if you disagree with me on some or all of it. My goal was to get people to think about the different issues out there that the original article did not get into enough.
But the quality and sophistication of software in, say, astronomy makes bioinformatics software look like it was written by 14 year old spammers in the former soviet bloc. The real problem is that biology went from being essentially a liberal art, more like history or sociology than a science, to an extremely quantitative field in only a few academic generations. You can get a PhD in Molecular & Cell Biology from Berkeley without ever having taken a statistics, linear algebra, multivar calc, or CS course. Biologists need programmers more than the other way around, so they should start by taking a few courses with actual numbers and stuff and learn the bare basics first.
Every buyer needs a seller. So if this encourages people to buy, there will be sellers.

And in any case, this claim won't really do much to increase bitcoin valuations. Perhaps rather the opposite, given the source.
If you read Franzen's novels, The Corrections first, then Freedom, you really get a good sense of how he changed. They are decent reads.
Three Scary Words
I was hoping for something more ... rebel.
Antibiotics are not 100% safe, they can have serious life threatening consequences. They can knock your bacterial balance out of whack in your digestion system leading to colon issues.
It poses a real threat to the speculation value currently hoarded in Gold. It is not unreasonable to expect bitcoins to eventually replace a substantial part of that value.
> Please don't mock parents who choose to formula feed; there are many cases where it is preferable and/or necessary

And where have I done that? Formula is a fantastic invention that can specifically assist in very difficult situations.

But just as it is clearly inferior to take antibiotics daily because it is too inconvenient to wash one's hands ... so to is it clearly inferior to use formula when the mother is capable of breastfeeding, but can't be bothered.
Well they try to make up for it by killing off popular characters and having all kinds of 'mean' and 'evil' stuff happen to them.

Game of Thrones

Doctor Who

The Hunger Games

Harry Potter

etc.
But they don't do that.
You should try reading it... It's actually very well thought out.
You may be a slow caffeine metabolizer, its common.
I still think its amazing that Facebook is running off MySQL. Such a tremendous amount of user data, placed in a system that many deem inferior.

I'm not saying they made a bad choice, I'm just impressed at how they've managed to make MySQL fit their needs.
The memorizing part is where computer could be allowed. You'll still have to remember how to get the information back though.

Now test are flawed by definition, you'll always have to create some artifical restriction to control what aspect you are assessing. Idealy you never test someone by putting him/her in a room with a pncil and paper, you'd assess how good the students cleared real tasks in realistic conditions.
Internet Will End in 2014