skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is a bit off topic, but I hate it when they use pictures of malls to illustrate capitalism. I consider myself a capitalist and I despise malls, they represent mindless consumerism. They might be somewhat related to capitalism, but they will never be a paradigmatic example.
> Either way, dude just had his mind blown because a silly joke currency made him start to think about What Money Is for the first time in his life.

For the record, _I_ know this, it's that I think that _other_ people will start to think of this.

> Don't be putting anything you can't afford to lose in DOGE, or BTC for that matter.

Plus a zillion here.
In short:
telegram in secure chats (http://core.telegram.org/api/end-to-end) was using modified version of Diffie-Hellman algorithm:
key = (pow(g_b, a) mod dh_prime) xor nonce
(original: key = pow(g_b, a) mod dh_prime)
That custom 'nonce' is derived from server and in theory server can send a specially formed nonce which will lead to known client keys ("bookmark"). It means that server as MITM can read all needed chats by request..
Authors of Telegram agreed that it is a big hole and their algorithm needs modification. User, who found the issue will get a prize (not 200,000$, but good enough).
One of the authors of this paper is Adi Shamir.

One of the guys who wrote the RSA algorithm in 1977.

RSA -> Ron Rivest, Adi Shamir and Leonard Adleman

This is legit.
At its root is the idea that we humans don't understand the world we live in, but we think we do.

This is a false (and needless) dichotomy. We understand it pretty well, but there's still lots to learn. Some fields more than others.

It's far too trendy to say 'X is a black box and we don't understand it - only the smart people know that we know nothing', where X is 'the world', 'the brain', 'economics', or whatever. It promotes anti-intellectualism and glorifies ignorance.
Does this support encrypted drives? I had a really big pain trying to support an encrypted ssd under rhel 6, I gave up after an entire day of work.
I'm not sure what you mean by being "opposed" -- if you don't think there should be people who are unbearably unhappy with the gender they got stuck with at birth, we agree. If you think people shouldn't play around at being the other gender, that's not what we're talking about, because I can assure you that those of us with this problem are deadly serious about it, and a lot of us would be quite happy if we could find a way to go through life in a functional way without having to make the kind of enormous, life-altering changes involved in transitioning.

I have heard lots of studies on trans folk kicked around, but some of these things have inherent methodological problems. In particular, I think we're all aware that the gold standard for medical efficacy studies is double blind studies, and it's pretty obvious that a double blind study on SRS is impossible, right? Worse yet, in this study they're not even comparing SRS patients with other trans folk who didn't have an operation, they're comparing them with the general population of people of their original assigned birth sex.[1] We already know that trans people have an enormously high suicide rate already, so this comparison tells us absolutely nothing about a before/after comparison, never mind what we really want to know: what happens to the same population if they do/don't get surgery.

[1] http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21364939/ -- You didn't cite a study, but hopefully this was the right one?
For in-game currencies so far, the centralization has meant two strikes: one, fear of the proprietor's control; two, the risk other entities (governments) could exert control via pressure on the proprietor.

Emergent decentralized currencies address both – and might also improve centralized-proprietor currencies by competition and precedent. (Proprietors will accept more community input, and win greater tolerance from governments, because of pressure from alternatives.)
Can anyone comment on the contrary advice here, which is referenced from the debian SSD Optimization wiki page?:

http://www.spinics.net/lists/raid/msg40916.html
Wait does that mean slavery is morally neutral?

Because capitalism predates feudalism as the economic model and slavery predates feudalism.
So it's news that a feature supported on other platforms for anymore from months to years [1] will be supported on Ubuntu 5 months from now?

Huh. Colour me unimpressed.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trim_%28computing%29

Full disclosure: I was an Ubuntu user and tester (signed the c-o-c years ago) for years, switched to OSX on an Air a few months back, and cannot imagine going back to an inferior user experience on inferior hardware. Open source OS was an interesting experiment, begun to ensure access to my data, but given cloud apps with export capabilities and native OSS apps, I cannot imagine wanting to suffer another moment with an OSS user desktop. Server maybe. But even there my conviction levels drop....
I came here expecting this comment and I'm bored and disappointed to find placed so highly.

I send html emails. Not always but quite often I'm emailing people where this won't communicate the same making the text italic or bold.

Or I'm sending a code fragment and I want it indented and renderedin a monospace font.

Or I want to embed an image, or I want to linkify some text.

Can we stop having this debate? It's a was a battle lost a long time ago and the cost has been largely worth the benefits.
My items that I miss in Linux - anyone know any good replacements ?
Aabby & Visio

Few items for ubuntu/crunchbang: virtualbox - docker -krusader/rsync/filezilla - file mgmt - autokey - python automation -gimp 2.8.10 - 2.10 will bring gpu/multicore support - bittorent sync (been meaning to try owncloud)
kate text editor - terminator/finalterm - advanced terminal
clementine - firefox - lucifox/ghostery/abe/sqlite manager etc -
pdfmod
Read the paper.
As for the "is this really the best thing you can do with your time if you're going to be in Damascus" point of view, it's missing the essential part of the thing; we are ALREADY in Damascus now, I'm (one of the organizers) writing this comment from the heart of Damascus, all the organizers are living in Damascus, and all the attendees will be from Damascus as well. If we don't found useful startups, what else could we be doing to help our country and people survive?

As for the security point of view, you are right; people die everyday not only in Damascus, but all over Syria, should that mean we have to keep at home?
People die while at home, in job, or in any situation; the best thing you can do is to take whatever chances you have to help rebuild your country and bring ease to your people.

According to a UN survey, more than 500,000 jobs will be needed in Syria by 2015. We have absolutely NO hope in having these jobs unless we found local entrepreneurship culture and successful startups - it is a good idea to start that by a SW event, isn't it? :)
But you still haven't shown that Greed is a meaningful concept. Indeed, the link you posted shows

Greed (englisch für Gier) ist:
der Originaltitel des Films Gier (1924)
der Name einer deutschen Band, siehe Greed (Band)
der Name des Albums der Swans, siehe Greed

In my opinion, there is no such thing as greed. There is only maximizing one's own happiness, which can be done through immoral or moral means.

You still have failed to define greed (or show that it causes these bad things you refer to). And your quote is very vague, I have no idea what it is saying a person should avoid doing.
> That's a bunch of needlessly cynical and completely ignorant bullshit. [...] It isn't something that's done at the point of a gun.

Alan Greenspan is of the opinion that our Iraq wars were 'largely about oil' and economic stability. The point is debatable, but certainly not completely ignorant bullshit.
You're just making a fool of yourself. This work is absurd, ridiculous and legit at the same time.
I look at buying a dogecoin like buying one of those "joke-a-day" calendars. It's probably going to sit in a drawer in your desk, not actually used for its original purpose as a calendar, but you take it out every few months and rip off the old pages, reading the jokes. It's just a shitty joke book, made to look like a calendar, thereby encouraging you to destroy it and buy another one next year.

If someone were to ask me if they should invest in joke-a-day calendars, then the obvious answer is, unless you are interested in getting in the business of printing joke-a-day calendars, or selling them, then no, joke-a-day calendars are not an "investment".
I wouldn't take a definition seriously that failed to exclude lottery tickets.

Ever since Rich Dad, Poor Dad I've been careful to distinguish assets that bring income, and other forms of property and equity whose price is purely an illusion supported by speculators' predictions about other speculators' whims.
I think that such a currency would have a particularly low buy-in from people, making it quite difficult to get off the ground. Simple privacy like "I don't want my friend who I'm dieting with to know I sneaked off to get a burger" is just the start of the issues...
A simple linux driver for vmlaunch
Real capitalism has never worked "by the book". "The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and expecting a different result."
Bitcoin is not especially anonymous. Researchers have demonstrated techniques for de-anonymizing users through transactions: http://eprint.iacr.org/2012/596.pdf
The idea you are referring to is about self interest not selfishness.
Initially it was based on that. Then, when that didn't work, it shifted over to Ayn Rand's "material self-interest is the only good" system of ethics.
Interesting idea - can we make a cryptocurrency whose tokens have an expiry date, like the Zimbabwe dollars?
I was in the early days of Dogecoin

It launched two weeks ago.
AFAIK the "fstrim" option will be used and the "discard" flag will not be enabled by default.
From what I've seen, corporate plans are becoming more and more like what was once called major medical insurance.

So yes, coverage for anything below a small crisis is non-existent under these new plans, but it's about the same under the old plans. I'd rather bank the 50% monthly savings and know that my family can stay insured no matter what comes along.

As for the artist couple, they've got to be better off than having no insurance at all under the previous situation.
It has been supported for ages, this is just making it automatic. From the article: "SSDs are now being trimmed automatically out of the box".
A financier I know who grew up under the WASP standard not long ago told me that he thought that the subprime real estate collapse and the continuing hedge-fund scandals have been brought on directly by men and women who are little more than "greedy pigs" (his words) without a shred of character or concern for their clients or country. Naturally, he added, they all have master's degrees from the putatively best business schools in the nation.
'Unobtainium'? I might actually mine for some of that...
Capitalism needs consumerism to deal with its overproduction crises. The imagined "sober Protestant bourgeois ethic" of capitalism stopped having any basis in reality hundreds of years ago, around the time usury and Enclosure Laws, and Poor Laws were used to evict the peasantry from their land to forcibly create a landless proletariat.
There seems to be trend of namning things with language as suffix. Like xx.js and xx.py or xx.go
Once upon a time, racist white upper-class men ruled the United States honorably and without corruption, and Ronald Reagan was the greatest president...

I wish the author provided some examples or evidence to support his rather outrageous claims.
beatbox

couldn't be more thrilled by that
What warming? There hasn't been any for 10 years.
A Solar Boom So Successful, It's Been Halted
Data brokers won’t even tell the government how it uses, sells your data
Why do most programming languages only return a single value from a function?
It will date pretty fast, just like every internet meme before it. Imagine an AllYourBaseCoin, or a StuffOnMyCatCoin. Or even a KonyCoin. It will run it's course and people will forget it - I'll be coloured surprised if doge[coin] is anything but a footnote in a year.
My perception from reading the Brazilian newspapers about this topic since it surfaced: we wanted the advanced Rafale but couldn't pay, Gripen wasn't perfect but it was a bargain so.. Boeing was in the lead because it was advanced and the price wasn't too bad (transferring technology would be good and was still being negotiated).... and then the NSA thing happened. Next thing we heard was our government decided to go with the Gripen.

I think the conspiracy theories will go on for a while but in the end the NSA scandal really changed the final outcome.

Personally, I think Brazil did a good thing choosing the Gripen. We don't have a history of participating actively in wars (besides, we usually send medical staff instead). Our main concern is the borders and people smuggling drugs.. Gripen, F-35, Rafale.. any of those would serve the purpose very well. It's not like Brazil is planning to use the jets for anything huge like going to war... unlike the US.
Downthread, the poster states that he used the same email and password as for his Twitter account, which was recently hacked...
Geez I'm old. My word is "Internet".
Have you read his comment ? Or you just wanted to make a blanket statement devoid of sense?
Now, if they can adopt F2FS (flash friendly file system) for SSD's, that would be neat, too. On Motorola's latest phones and in benchmarks it shows substantial performance difference (~50 percent more on average or so).
I always wonder why people bring up the 2008 crisis as an example of the problems with Capitalism; in my view, it was just the self balancing mechanisms inherent in the market economy kicking in. The fact the crisis happened at all is a testament to the viability and adaptability of Capitalism. State sponsored market deficiencies can go for much longer and have worse implications.

I don't like the tone of that article at all. When you start demanding that morality, for all its subjectivity and relativity, be involved with economics, you invite troubles.
The next step is for morality to be mandated through regulations. Such regulations rarely do more than benefit specific players, those who know how to bend the rules or those with higher up connections.

While I was expecting the author to call for such regulation, he surprisingly didn't.

In my view, the correct way of fighting monopolies would be using the great social tools at our disposal to make consumers more informed about the distant implications of their buying decisions. This will create an informed Capitalism, one where in the consumers are the ultimate regulators.
No. It makes sense to have a minimum wage where the market can support it. If setting (or raising) minimum wages causes people to lose their jobs then it does not make sense.
>>I was in the early days of Dogecoin
>It launched two weeks ago

Yup.
Why not the 200K? Was it outside the parameters of the contest or something?
Throwing this out there - but given your experience, why not remain an entrepreneur and try raising money for another business? Something tells me you'd have a much easier time than first-time entrepreneurs. Assuming of course your wife doesn't mind (though IMO that should never be a reason not to follow your passions).

I hope to be as accomplished as you at age 50, degree or not.
"What our new meritocrats have failed to evince—and what the older WASP generation prided itself on—is character and the ability to put the well-being of the nation before their own."

With regards to the older WASP generation, I would like some independent verification of their character and ability.
Are you claiming that the stock market is zero sum?
You just have to deploy them wisely. Brazil is buying 35 jets now but the expectation is we'll buy 120. You don't have to station them all in one place.
I've been meaning to read The Bourgeois Virtues, a book entirely about the importance of morality in functioning market economies. But while morality is very important in a market economy, planned and traditional economies destroy themselves even more quickly in the face of moral breakdown.
This is in logical structure very similar to the argument which anti-drug people use to justify further crack-downs. They say 'the punishments are still not severe enough, we must make them stricter, to provide a real disincentive'. There is no end to that argument, they can carry on invoking it until people are being given life sentences for trivial drugs offenses (and beyond).

You are also making the mistake of framing all of these issues as part of a grand 'government vs. market' battle. There is no reason why a government cannot provide good public services from a reasonable tax rate, and also avoid corporatism and regulatory capture. In fact, I would say there's almost no connection between the former and latter. The US has a far more pro-market attitude than most of the rest of the Western world, but also has stronger links between private contractors (particularly military contractors) and government than would be acceptable in most of those other countries, and certainly its fair share of regulatory capture, particularly at local and state levels. Within Europe, there are low-tax economies, and there are high-tax economies, and no apparent connection between levels of taxation on the one hand, and on the other hand, economic success, levels of corruption, or poor regulation. These issues are actually a lot more granular, and a lot more complicated, than can be captured by the hope for the righteous and complete victory of one ideological force against another.
NASA Releases New Earthrise Simulation Video
Mate! :)
White House Tries to Prevent Judge From Ruling on Surveillance Efforts
Brazil has no war to fight, doesn't plan to start one and usually does everything to avoid it at all. When we get involved we usually send parachutists and medical staff. So all the technical details aside, our air force really wants something that will allow them to patrol the borders and not cost a arm and leg to service when it breaks (otherwise it'll become a skeleton in the parking lot).
Oh well, this is embarrassing. I rewrote the CPU benchmark in C and it does indeed perform much faster. I think it has something to do with the use of the CUDA complex number functions. Unfortunately, I do not have my desktop with the GPU set up to recompute the GPU numbers.
"I'd argue that cryptocurrencies have a fair amount of commodity worth to them. The security of the coin is enabled by work put into the system by miners. Hypothetically there is some value in linking a commodity compute operation to crypto coin value."

You got causality backwards. Intrinsic value is what you can get out of a commodity, not what you spent putting into it. I can spend $100,000 cooking a hotdog over a Tesla Roadster bonfire; this does not inject $100,000 of intrinsic value into the hotdog.
Multi RSS Feeds in Joomla
Exactly. In-game currencies showed the potential since they broke out to have value in the real world, but could never really catch on beyond those gaming subcultures due to the friction involved. Dogecoin's light attitude is a great marketing tool and will help further reduce the friction involved in using it.

The thing to watch for: when another online community embraces the dogecoin tipbot culture. That would be a strong indicator of long-term stickiness. The OP joked about having no /u/dogetipbot on HackerNews, but that's exactly the kind of feature that I suspect will start turning up in a number of communities.

With regard to games, Valve hired an economist some time ago. I'd love to see if they have anything planned with regard to innovating in this space. Could you have an in-game currency backed by a cryptocurrency?
First full body transplant to occur within two years
> Is this really the view that foreigners have the how the states is run?

Might be just people I interact with, but terms like plutocracy, kleptocracy, and theocracy all come up fairly regularly. As does police state, for that matter. Terms like republic or democracy seldom get mentioned -- not seriously anyway.

(Not saying the grass is so much greener elsewhere, mind you.)

> We actually rank among the least corrupt nations in the world depending on if you trust Transparency International or not.

I don't trust them personally, but I'm in full agreement with that point nonetheless, having seen and experienced corruption first hand in developing countries.

> I guess you could say it's legalized corruption through lobbying and political donations, which I agree with to some extent, but even than it wouldn't be bankers. Pharmaceuticals top that list with room to spare, where as "Securities and Investments" don't even make top 5.

Unless, perhaps, you count TARP and under-the-counter bailouts that Bernanke handed over in recent years. But I'll happily concede if I ever see material clawbacks and jailtime for the related ill-gotten gains.

> Lawyers are really the people who run America and anyone who has any sort of political ambitions will get a law degree, not become a banker.

The same is largely true in any country [and time] where a significant bureaucracy is leveraged to run a large enough political unit. Which is to say just about every country nowadays, bar warzones such as Somalia.

Also, that doesn't mean that these countries are run for lawyers. If anything, the cynic in me wants to compare them to valets who are content to cooperate with their masters in order to keep the small amount of privileges that they have over the masses.
via some wikipedia research on "smart phone":

The first smartphone (available in 1994) was the Simon (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_Simon), although the term was coined a little later.

It could send and receive faxes, e-mails and cellular pages through its touch screen display and included many applications such as address book, calendar, appointment scheduler, calculator, world time clock, games, electronic note pad, handwritten annotations and standard and predictive touchscreen keyboards.

It had exactly one third-party app (which cost $3K). :)
I like the idea. I can see its usage in an enterprise setting.
Their contest had very restrictive parameters if I recall correctly.
Wondering when they're going to support Trim for Software Raid?
Totally unrelated, but only 500k programmers? That seems low.
There is no reason why a government cannot provide good public services from a reasonable tax rate, and also avoid corporatism and regulatory capture.

Yes, there is: governments are run by people, subject to the same incentives as people in any other part of society, including the perverse and misaligned incentives that cause "market failures" in other parts of society.

The US has a far more pro-market attitude than most of the rest of the Western world

Attitude is not the same as reality. If the US really were more pro-market, instead of just talking like it, we would not have given a massive bailout to the same investment banks that tanked the economy in 2008. (Nor would we have allowed the various regulatory schemes that enabled the crash to happen in the first place.)
But his appeal will not stop those copiers, and it does annoy his intended audience.
It's pretty far out, but Adi Shamir is one of the world's foremost experts in cryptography. The paper is pretty thorough, including details of the lab setup and tests which were conducted. There's even a patch for GnuPG.

In short, I'm not really clear what else you'd expect to see.
In my view, the correct way of fighting monopolies would be using the great social tools at our disposal to make consumers more informed about the distant implications of their buying decisions. This will create an informed Capitalism, one where in the consumers are the ultimate regulators.

Can't upvote this enough.