skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
What is your N on this observation?

"Snowden differs from many of the whistleblower ilk in that there is nothing to dislike about his character (yet)."

How do you feel about famous whistleblowers like "Deep Throat (Mark Felt)", or the various awardees of the Sam Adams award: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sam_Adams_Award
I'm guessing cscurmudgeon is arguing that it isn't.
This is a great explanation I hadn't thought of before. Thanks.
China Bans Payment Companies from Working With Bitcoin Exchanges, Sources Claim
Even if the information can be verified, there can still be questions of things like lies by omission, so knowing if the leaker has an undisclosed agenda can still be valuable.
Send Bitcoin/Litecoin by e-Mail or Create and Share Vouchers Yes Vouchers
Currency in itself can never "produce" anything or generate GDP. It is a tool to facilitate transactions. Mining is just a way to generate and at the same time limit the supply of money. When miners mine, they inflate the money supply by taking value away from others who own bitcoins.

Instead the activity of Mining should be thought of as minting new coins and miners are people trying to get lucky; similar to how someone mining for gold. Remember even the worthless paper dollar needed to start somewhere.
The actual quote from the manual, that they appear to be referencing, is:

Internally, PHP strings are byte arrays. As a result, accessing or modifying a string using array brackets is not multi-byte safe, and should only be done with strings that are in a single-byte encoding such as ISO-8859-1.

It seems like they just replaced:

is not multi-byte safe, and should only be done with strings that are in a single-byte encoding such as ISO-8859-1.

...with...

will trick the parser into evaluating arbitrary php code in the scope of the variable if the prior mentioned requirements are met.
i have capslock as my backspace key. where do i put escape now?
Find an aspect that you are passionate about. There are a lot of niches, whether it's specific types of companies, specific problems, or whatever. It's like saying "you can't make money with consumer apps." The space is far too large to permit such blanket generalizations.
What I find hard to undestand is why I should switch instead of randomly choosing again?
What is their revenue model?
Well Europe has thousands of years of productive civilisation (not to denigrate the achievements of mesoamerican civilisations) - but density and continuous habitation of cities is different in Europe.

It seems madness to suggest we should mount an archological expidition to Mars before a colonisation mission but I hope efforts are made to explore it scientifically.

M
You are correct, as long as the host doesn't reveal the prize the odds of winning by switching remain better than the odds of winning with your initial selection. EDIT: And in the case that he reveals the prize your odds have gone up. I suspect (but haven't calculated) that a version where you can switch to the winning prize when it's revealed would give you much better odds of success and a bankrupt game show would result.
Of course the Avatar example. :-)
Then I assume you mean that one party is better off and the other party is worse off (taken advantage of). Sure, that can happen. But in the case of Amazon, the workers are better off or they wouldn't work there.
What happens when your competitors buy the same machine, are not so generous with their workers, and undercut your prices so that you're no longer profitable?
From wikipedia: "The law states that paying a worker an "immoral wage" is illegal. There is no general consensus what constitutes 'immoral' payment. One judge at a court in Krefeld, Germany, ruled that a cashier at a supermarket has to earn the equivalent of approximately 7USD per hour. The federal courts in Germany ruled that any wage lower than 75% of the average wage or salary for a specific occupation constitutes illegal payment. However, since there is no well defined legal minimum wage as of February 2013, courts are usually the ones who have the final say and will only rule for individual cases."
I didn't call anyone a racist conservative. Also, I dont have a breaking point for "4th amendment suspension" in the case of people not suspected of a crime walking on a public street.
The protocol is an open standard, similar to HTTP. There's no license to speak of. There's many implementations of the standard, and those can have any license the developer wants, including making changes which break other clients.
Aren't they in the pocket, though?
Amazon’s best-selling book every year since 1995
You're both assuming that offering someone the best option they have rules out the conclusion that you're taking advantage of that person. But that does not necessarily follow.
I wonder how well this would work tied in to the stack exchange model?
While I have no strong opinion on this, it's interesting from a game theoretical perspective that the only way Mars doesn't get contaminated requires the consent of pretty much all of humanity, as a single entity deciding to send some antarctic lichens (or whatever) can't easily be stopped by the others.

An entity interested in this could be the space program of a country or even a privately backed kickstarter project; such an undertaking doesn't take nearly as much resources as one would initially estimate.
The many years of "yea we'll add that feature" usually means a long lasting enterprise product ends up as a customize-able workflow tool with a customize-able rules engine that stores data as an EAV. It may be slow, but throw enough servers at it, and it can handle your workload. Then you just have presets for each market that you can pre-load the rules and workflows, and data if required. It's absolutely crazy. You have to fight to keep your product from turning into an XML parser.
I'm really skeptical about Datomic. I think it has some great features, but I have a hard time believing that ACID transactions is one of them.

I've asked about this on their Google Group: https://groups.google.com/forum/#!topic/datomic/zkMV50VKw2s

As of right now, there are still questions left unanswered.
No, "taken advantage of" does not require one party to be made worse off. That is not the way the phrase is ordinarily used in the English language.
Federal Judge Rules NSA Phone Program Likely Unconstitutional
I think this is genius.

Call me naive but this is a really nice idea. Reminds me of flattr except it's automated. The idea of having bounties to various project issues and setting up a commit/pull-request payout could be a real incentive for a lot of people to contribute to actual open source software.

Bitcoin is just the icing, makes this really well integrated and anonymous too. I can't wait to see where this project leads us to. Maybe an actually fully decentralized open source employment career?
> Even if they were terrorists, there is no way they could have done as much damage as the slaughter of a whole wedding.

Erm, why? You're saying terrorists can't kill 14 people?
I think users outside US are under Privacy Disclaimer with Irish Google. So English users should sue in Ireland.
As far as I can see, shadows being the other one. Depending on the time of day / position of the sun of course, so it should be easy enough to rule that one out.
It could also mean that the NSA wants you to think that there is much worst that wasn't revealed yet (fear mongering).
Austin startup M87 wants to turn your phone into a shared node on the 4G network
@ "Every Agency employee goes through orientation, in which we are taught about the federal laws that govern NSA/US Cyber Command: Title 10 and Title 50. We all know that it's illegal to look at a US citizen's data without a court order. I use the term "look" deliberately: the Agency makes the distinction that looking at data is surveillance, while gathering it from locations outside the US is not. We gathered everything, and only looked at a tiny percentage of it. I am okay with this distinction both because I don't mind if my emails are copied to an Agency database and likely never read and because from a technical standpoint it would seriously impair our ability to spy if we couldn't gather everything."

lorendsr has far too much confidence that what he was taught about the governing law is correct. The governing law is far broader than the two titles of the U.S. Code he cites. The 4th Amendment, for example, protects against not only warrantless searches but also warrantless seizures. That line is first crossed at the gathering point, not at the point that the data is viewed. Put another way, the Amendment prohibits warrantless gathering of the haystack that includes private communications, not just the warrantless search of that haystack for a given needle. http://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/fourth_amendment And that is only one example of his legal naivete.

Paul E. Merrell, J.D.
Consider the 3 door case, it's narrowed down to 2 doors. The one you selected has a 1/3 chance of being correct, the one you didn't has a 2/3 chance. If you randomly select between the two (50/50 odds) you come out with a 50% chance of picking the correct door. If you strictly switch, your odds are better, and if you stay the same the odds are worse.
There's some serious money to be had in this market. I would actually argue this a very low amount.

http://www.marketresearchmedia.com/?p=568

http://wikibon.org/wiki/v/Big_Data_Database_Revenue_and_Mark...
Awesome! From the article, Watsi have raised a total of $2.2 million including this, so this is huge.
http://guidetodatamining.com/

Readable, gentle intro to practical data mining techniques for programmers who may be wondering what all the fuss is about.
Silly?

I had a hard time tracking down good, comparable numbers, but here are some numbers I biasedly picked to support my question:

* Cycling: 14 months (http://www.bikeradar.com/us/news/article/regular-cyclists-could-live-14-months-longer-than-car-drivers-28162/)
* Jogging: 6.2 years (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/05/03/jogging-life-expectancy-_n_1472318.html)
* Swimming: "longer than runners" (http://www.chatelaine.com/health/swimmers-live-longer-than-runners/)

These numbers (which could be wrong, I didn't dig too far) say you have more to gain going from cycling to running than you do from driving to cycling. So why focus on getting people cycling instead of getting people jogging?
1000 times this. If Snowden could do what he did and the NSA doesn't even know what he took, it is inevitable that a hostile foreign government will infiltrate the NSA. It is also highly probable that there are people in the intelligence apparatus that are abusing their power in some way or another.

There have already been about a dozen cases in the NSA of 'LOVEINT' where employees were spying illicitly on love interests. From what I recall, all of those people volunteered that they were spying illegally on their own, none of them were caught by any internal review process.
A counter-example from HBR Magazine's December 2013 issue

http://hbr.org/2013/12/how-google-sold-its-engineers-on-mana...
Love spacebar as the leader key, but not a fan of CapsLock as Esc. CapsLock as Ctrl is better. For one, you never have to stretch for the real Ctrl, and two, you can use it for escape as well: Ctrl-[
I've been using

inoremap jk <ESC>

for a long time now, and it works like a charm.
That sounds like a problem with your particular work environment, rather than a reason to not learn design
The host doesn't open a door at random. He always shows a goat.

You are discussing some other game show.
I have a much easier explanation than this: By offering you the switch, the host has given you two doors to open - it's irrelevant that he opened one for you - so, it comes down to picking one door (the one you're on) or two doors (of which he has opened one for you, again, irrelevant - the effect is the same) ergo, it's 1/3 or 2/3.
Are you referring to B2B, or Enterprise?

I've blown my proverbial load on Enterprise, and while I appreciate the money to be made, I've found that my psyche is more suited to 100 small wins than one win worth 100x the others. In short, enterprise isn't for me, at least, not if I'm involved in the sales process. The sheer arbitrary-ness of it was so mentally exhausting that it affected my productivity.

I can work on enterprise software, but if I'm in any way involved with the sales channel, it's a hardship.

For me, the happy middle ground is vanilla B2B, e.g., the same general demographic that 37Signals sells to. You still have customers that want to pay you money, but while cost is a factor, it isn't usually the driving factor -- there's likely little difference between $25 a month and $125 a month, assuming you're solving a problem that isn't cost-centric, and you're saved from the mental turmoil of enterprise whale-hunting.
Build database, sell support. Like any other open-source DB. Or Riak, for instance, charges for site-to-site replication. Generally if you have an open-source project many people are using, you can make money with it.
Don't forget mandatory knee pads, elbow pads, protective eyewear, an unexpired First Aid Kit, front light, tail light, reflectors, impact sensor so we know if you crashed, GPS in case you get lost. Always carry extra batteries in case your blinky things stop blinking. And training wheels are mandatory without a biking license.
FireHOL, the iptables stateful packet filtering firewall builder.
Given two choices (equal probability; redundant?) - which is the case once you have two doors - switching cannot change the odds. Have someone flip a coin. Call it. But before the flipper looks at the coin - (whether he KNOWS the result or not) he asks you to consider switching. Explain how the option of switching changes the probability of a correct or incorrect call. Inference?
Slava @ Rethink here.

This is a really good breakdown. I can't read our investors's minds, but I'm pretty sure this would be a worst case scenario for them. It's certainly not why we're doing Rethink -- if we thought it would be a #5 company in the space, we'd pack up and do something else (life's too short).

The NoSQL market is reminiscent of "horseless carriages" -- as long as you define a technology by an absence of something, you know you're early in the game. Databases are a fundamental part of the technology stack, and they tend to easily stick around for 20-30 years. We think we can build a long-term open source company that will stick around for that long (incidentally, that's why we take conventions in ReQL so seriously -- we imagine millions of programmers fifteen years from now cursing at us for a stupid naming convention).

It's not hard to imagine groundbreaking features in NoSQL products that nobody is shipping. That's why RethinkDB exists, and we think we won't be a niche product for long.
Self-replying to add: The other thing to think about with on-premise enterprise software is that while it's a huge pain to sell, it's incredibly sticky. If you build up a sufficient volume of customers, you can basically fund operations off of renewals, and invest all of your net new income in new R&D and development.

Many companies will renew support contracts for years, even if they're not heavily using your software anymore, because the risk associated with their being out of support and then running into a critical issue is greater than the $100k it's going to cost them to renew. But if you've got 100 customers paying $100k/year to renew support, that's $10m in basically guaranteed revenue, which means that now you've got some breathing room to plan and grow sensibly. That's when the lumpiness goes away.
Appreciate the cite. Thanks.

Interesting how the "we must vet this stuff first" ties in pretty closely with a long profitable release.
China banking is now clearly anti-bitcoin, and new policy tries to kill bitcoin trading:

http://tech.sina.com.cn/it/2013-12-17/01139011174.shtml#4832...
> I find it so interesting that there are so many things being proposed by people entirely ignorant of political economy and contradictory to the most basic understanding of the profession.

Actually, the opposite is true.

1. There are many economists who support the idea of a basic income.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Basic_income#Origins

2. Many supporters of basic income are empiricists. Me, for example. I think it's an intriguing idea and that the trials so far have all shown good points.

http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/a-new-approach-to-...

What the idea needs now is more testing in the field.

If I might suggest, this is actually the problem with most of the arguments against basic income. People appear to have very strong beliefs about how the universe works and how economics works that are grounded in philosophic principles of fairness. Phrases like:

> This whole idea is a very naive scheme

> ... proposed by people entirely ignorant of political economy

> ... contradictory to the most basic understanding of the profession

> I keep hoping that the adults show up

... are all emotional reactions not supported by evidence.

Economics is, sadly, able to support lots of opinions, many contradictory. The only solution has to be based on real-world evidence from real-world trials. Either we'll find this idea will work or it won't, but I don't think your phrases above are currently strongly evidenced.
If you click on the timeline link provided, it pulls up links to the original publications that broke the story. If you were interested in facts, you could read them yourself.

Also, if he is not a spy and is not being charged as one, then he should return to the US. The fact that he can't and won't speaks volumes about his character and his intentions.
you consider that an appeal to authority? how about your complete disregard for his point.

thanks for re-enforcing my point.
The US doesn't govern non-citizens. Most people don't see why people who do not pay taxes, obey US laws, etc have to be treated with all the perks of US citizens. Recall a feudal model, where a lord governs his people and protects them, but is not generally obligated to extend his protection to non-subjects.

It's not a belief that foreigners have no rights, but more like foreigners have their own government to watch out for them.

I don't really know which I personally believe, just sharing information.
I think there's a lot of good thoughts here, but also a bit of re-inventing the wheel. This is NOT a new, innovative way of developing large systems - it's called a Service Oriented Architecture (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Service-oriented_architecture). It's actually pretty common in enterprise apps (from hearsay alone).

I think this kind of thinking is great, but there does need to be some referencing of past work and existing techniques for solving these problems. Otherwise we'll be stuck in an endless cycle of discarding "old, stupid ideas thought up by enterprisey developers" in favor of "new, shiny ideas by intelligent hackers" without realizing the substantial overlap.
SAS might have an issue with the name JuMP when then have a product named JMP, pronounced "jump".
While your techno-optimism is very inspiring, I'd rather not be the victim of a solar system black plague either. On the other hand, since we're speculating, I'm looking forward to the one piece of "dirt on a rock" somewhere that can make me immune to radiation while on my space voyage.
I use CapsLock as escape but had I not gotten so used to that by now I would probably have used it for control instead and mapped escape to jk or something. I, like many people, use `,` for my <leader> and with Clever-F[0] I don't lose the original functionality which is just remapped to consecutive presses of 'f'.

[0]: https://github.com/rhysd/clever-f.vim
The day that we realize that all human beings are worthy of the same fundamental protections we take for granted, and act on this impulse, will be a great one indeed.
If every abstraction were perfect, sure. Of course, they never are, and you will always, at some point, need to understand what your code is actually doing in order to solve a problem.
BIOS Malware that can remotely destroy any computer, NSA claimed
I'm not necessarily disagreeing with the concept of banning armed droned, but I don't think the operators actually get to pick and choose the targets. I don't think the operators have much discretion at all. Those orders, especially orders to fire, likely come from a commanding officer. The same probably applies to fighter and bomber pilots too, though they may have more discretion when it comes to defending the aircraft.
"As a result, Node.js projects suffer very little dependency hell."

LOL: https://github.com/bevry/watchr/issues/51

The article above will be especially funny in 5 or 6 years when everybody's cussing about how crappy Node is and how FooBarLanguageThingy will suddenly make all the complexity disappear.
Great to see them involved. I'm curious about this model... At what point does the overhead of following so many companies become prohibitive relative to the small amount invested? I suspect this could be why Milner left.

I don't have much (any) data on this, and no professional stake in this. I'm just fascinated by the YC model in general, and by a way of "buying the market" for emerging companies. (The closest thing to an S&P for startups) That, and I'm tired of arguing about unions on the other thread.
I wonder if there's something different about Haskell that makes "less copying" more attractive?

In the C++ world, libstdc++ strings have copy-on-write semantics, which (as far as I heard) turned out to be terrible because you have to do reference counting instead, and with multithreading it requires atomic operations, which is slower than copying for small strings.
The article says this was done on "a 1980’s-era PC" with a 6809 processor. teddyh was clearly wondering which PC (Tandy CoCo 3, it turns out) and which game, not asking for a random list of arcade games that happened to use the 6809. I'm not sure why he's getting downvotes when you're the one being obtuse.
Perhaps I have spent so much time on Mac that pressing the Ctrl key for things feels unnatural vs. the Command key

Argh. OS X is the last significant platform that gets this right by not trying to use Control for menu shortcuts out of the box. When I'm in a terminal, or editor, or browser text box, it's perfectly common and reasonable to want to distinguish Control-V (literal) from Command-V (paste), Control-Z (suspend) from Command-Z (undo), and so on.

Pre-Linux X Window software typically managed this, using Meta or some other keysym for GUI operations, but current ‘desktops’ seem dead set on imitating MS Windows. Damn kids get off my screen.
Is this just a bottom line of their donations through customer purchases of Humble Bundles? That is, when people buy Humble Bundle X, they can specify the money goes to charity, the developers, or Humble. Watsi has been a featured charity along with the Red Cross and EFF.

Or is this a separate donation from the Humble Bundle leadership or such?
Interesting post full of ideas - many thanks. I agree that it would be great for us to be able to get the best of both worlds - paying business customers and (probably) non-paying users that supply the google-juice, as you so aptly put it. Maybe we can offer a "Social license" that allows people to use Helium for free if they tweet about it.