skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> the American people have subjugated all their decision-making responsibilities to people who are too lazy, stupid, or just plain evil to think that anything other than non-stop war is their solution.

Well, I supposed you are just calling every American government employe lazy, evil and stupid. You have just insulted millions of Americans. I am sure there are lazy and evil people out there, but your view is extreme, to the point you don't even know how to deal with reality. There are hardworking people. I don't know what people do in the government because I am never a government employee. Do you happen to know? Where did you get the impression that these top officials are all evil? Based on what? Selective events and newspaper reporting? Maybe there are nice top-ranked people tried to stop the war but others overpower him in the decision making process. Some biography says some X president is not stupid, that that former president was in fact very hardworking and very smart. How do you or me know whether that's the case or not. Can newspaper mislead us? Can popular gossip and stories mislead us to think that all the higher up officials are bad and evil?

We have to respect democracy. To remind you, this is a democratic republic. We elect people to represent us. I am sure there are some lazy stupid congressmen who don't care about voters until 6 months before election. I am also sure there are people who want to change the system. Also, people can become lazy after seeing how little they could do, so they either gave up and don't care, or kept on compromising and couldn't deliver his dreams.

> This has been the case in America for 80 years now - so its a generational thing as well, at this point..

No. It has always been that way. Why didn't we end slavery early? Why didn't we end racial segregation 200 years ago? See, my point is proved: it didn't happen just 80 years ago.

Things changed and evolved as time continues to roll.
I think part of the reason these discussions never get anywhere is because of blatant dishonesty in discussions. You actually think there is no "feminist activist" movement?
The documentary Dirty Wars suggests that the Obama administration added an increasing number of names to JSOC's kill list based on variable confidence intelligence. Isn't this the definition of mission creep?
The car batteries are really only stop-gap measures to allow the utilities to better match their plants with demands. It's for synchronization only.

A coal power plant might take several days to reach a "set point" and to generate a certain amount of power.

A natural gas plant might take as little as 5 minutes or as long as an hour to get operational.

A diesel generator might turn on and make power in as little as 30 seconds.

A hydro plant might be able to go from 0% to 100% in just a few seconds.

Given that the utility companies can't KNOW for sure EXACTLY how much power people will demand in the future they've always got excess capacity ready and waiting. But these idling plants aren't free and that drives the price of electricity up.

The idea behind V2G is that the utility companies can get some of their demand power from the cars whilst they fire up diesel generators or natural gas plants or whatever, thus saving them from having to keep those plants idling until they're definitely needed.

EDIT: The idea isn't that you constantly charge/discharge car batteries it's that you charge them in the morning after the drive to work so they're full by noon. Then as the day heats up you can pull small amounts of power from large amounts of cars until the demand is high enough that you fire up a peaker plant. Use that to charge the cars back up and provide the afternoon A/C electricity and shut it down as everyone starts to go home.

Instead of having the peaker plant be at ~20% capacity from 12-2, ~60% capacity from 2-5 and ~30% capacity from 5-7 you get to run 0% from 12-2, 80-100% from 2-5 and 30% from 5-7. Two hours of runtime saved per day is 600 hours per year. Turbine rebuilds aren't cheap; a buddy of mine is a private jet pilot and they have to put away between $500 and $2500 per hour that engines are running for overhaul at either 1000 or 2000 hour intervals. And that's for the kind of small engines in a 6-12 seater business jet. I'd wager that 20MW (~20,000 HP) natural gas turbines are substantially more.
Shave with Olive Oil to Save Money and Get Smoother Skin
My guess is that it's all of the above. You're talking about a massive, compartmentalized organization.

I'm sure that different groups approach their data acquisition activities with multiple channels, if for no reason other than to prevent other NSA people from knowing about to what they are doing.
"On the horizon" to me implies a timespan that's a lot shorter than my own view on when self-driving cars will be commonplace. I think we're decades away at least. Though in terms of the scope of the modernization of the electrical grid that would be required to make this workable, decades is probably the best case scenario anyway.
If it has to be inlined, how is that the same vulnerability? I thought the vulnerability was that script tags can fetch external scripts and a local script intercept the results. If you have to inline both scripts, you can only attack yourself.
OP does not need 1 million to buy a house unless he wants to live in New York or SF. One million for material goods is plenty but it will not be enough if he wants to live a very extravagant life. Assuming 4% return on the rest, next 5 million will give you around $200k which is way above US median income.
Ah, thanks...As soon as I wrote "Norvig" I immediately regretted it, but he was the first transcends-even-Google person I could think of. Obviously he doesn't count if he's given a high ceiling to reach for (which it seems he has)
I got into programming by figuring out how to cheat at games when I was small; another common route is writing mods/addons (which I also did, later on). Don't knock the instincts even though it's not writing code!
I don't necessarily agree with this metaphor, but it was entertaining and a fresh approach to the girls in tech problem. I especially thought 'Male players wanted more females playing so it didn't feel like a damn sausagefest all the time, and to help with dating' was hilarious.

Anyway, my major problem with your assertion is that we know that the number of female bouncyballers has been going down significantly over the last few decades. It's not as if women have gotten significantly shorter, or men have gotten significantly taller in that time period, so the difference in participation rates can't be explained entirely with biology.
Friendly reminder that "meritocracy" is intended as an anti pattern, in the same way that waterfall is.

Edit: here's a thoughtful piece on the term and its implications, from the original coiner of the term: http://www.theguardian.com/politics/2001/jun/29/comment
These are reasonable points. I don't know enough about modern-day black markets to say how much Bitcoin facilitates them.

If you're right that Bitcoin is a major factor, then yep, that could be an effective price floor (at least until a better rival comes along). It would be interesting to learn how much of Bitcoin purchasing is due to black market transactions. My intuition says it's mostly speculation, but I'd be happy to be proven wrong.
Without facts and critical-thinking skills, the hobgoblins take over.
Part of a healthy developer culture is teaching. If you're not comfortable in that role, I hope you aren't applying for senior positions.
The problem is that governments forcefully prevent competition and call that "natural monopoly." Personally, I would call that the opposite of a natural monopoly. The term is used very confusingly. Wikipedia gives one definition, which I think is reasonable, which is basically a (theoretical or real) environment in which a single producer maximizes efficiency. But the term used by governments and their supporters is something completely different, where the government forcefully prevents all producers but one from operating.

It's silly to talk about telcos "enjoying" a "natural" monopoly, when the airwaves are one of the most tightly-regulated industries, and in addition to being expensive for a competitor to enter the market, it's generally illegal.
As much as I like the idea of this, I don't see it playing out that way. We currently have a form of self driving car - taxis, and yet the majority of people prefer to own their car. Golf clubs in the trunk, child seats in the back, favorite music in the glove box, etc. and the sense of "mine" seems to be enough to drive this preference for most.

While true self-driving cars should be cheaper than taxis and also allow for longer distances, I don't think this will be sufficient to change the dynamic significantly.
Oh, like publishing in academia.
Louis CK has many smart and funny things to say on this topic (race, here, not gender for the most part):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=y4LkrQCyIz8
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=derzWWYf3-w
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF1NUposXVQ
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TG4f9zR5yzY

When the jester mocks the king it's funny. When the king mocks the jester it's just cruel.
There are many things you could tell someone to get them started in programming. Here's one:

http://docs.python.org/2/tutorial/

Offer to answer questions when they have them.

If they get through that, talk about what kind of programming they'd like to do, and point them toward their first resource. Offer to help. If they actually still want to code, they'll go from there.
What about all the new technologies like DPI and data analytics coupled with things like SDN and NFV which will easily technically enable any operator to have a very high level of granularity (e.g. application, user, site, device etc.) in controlling access to the network in the name of providing better QOE/S to the customer? These technologies will easily enable operators to enable complex policies which will be difficult to track and can be modified in very flexible manner to adjust to the current workarounds around any NN laws.
What they were doing is no different than what thousands of other websites do to game Google. Except that instead of paying for links with money they were paying for them with traffic from tweets.

I don't really understand why buying links is suddenly called "growth hacking" when a startup does it.
This isn't really related to the "Google myth" though, is it? I always thought the Google problem was the employees are worried about being replaced, and even the proverbial janitor holds a CS degree and runs an open source project in your subject area on the side.
I want to help other groups in this industry; however, there is no speaking to them.

I think I partially know how it feels to be gay, because I didn't choose my situation yet there is an extremely vocal group that wants me to believe I am doing something wrong.

I humbly submit that you have no idea how it feels to be gay, and that the best way to find out is to actually talk to us. aphyr@aphyr.com.
The 6502 was fun and it was the first assembly I programmed[1]. The 6809 also deserves a look if anyone is reviewing old instruction sets / assembly code. I am still not sure which of the three I preferred.

1) on an Apple II, sadly not on my Atari 400
Why? That's a near useless-metric on any device with more than 32kb of ram, and highly variant on things like compiler and library minor versions.
Why is Machine Learning the Most Popular Course at Stanford?
Sorry, used the wrong term. I mean it can be injected as a script tag into an xdomain site.
"Can you use such a construction to create carbon nanotubes or equivalent and then lay them out in a three dimensional lattice structure with nanometer precision and six-sigma workpiece reliability?"

I can use biochemistry to build second-generation machines which might be capable of doing that. We might not have a diamondoid nanomachine but we can eventually synthesize it, since biology gives us atomically precise positioning of atoms. This looks like a feasible way to develop Drexlerian nanotech.

An analogy with computer programming could be that biology is like assembly language. Using that you can make a higher-level language such as C, and from there you can develop much more powerful abstractions and technologies (Python, Perl, Lisp, Ruby, etc.)

The domains of biochemistry and molecular manufacturing are not completely different because the former could be the foundation of the latter. Also, the science behind biology can inform nanotech. Transforming mechanical energy into chemical processes and viceversa are common processes in cells (e.g., motor proteins.), this is very similar to the type of processes molecular nanotech aspires to make.

Another thing is that cells are capable of correcting errors in DNA synthesis to a substantial degree, 1 mistake for every 1 to 10 billion nucleotides. Reliability isn't an insurmountable problem in biology.

"This is not atomically precise, mechanosynthetic manufacturing."

But we can agree that biology can do atomically precise synthesis. And enzymatic catalysis can sometimes be described in terms of mechanical bending of molecules, such as the ATP synthase.

If biochemistry were so irrelevant to molecular manufacturing, Drexler wouldn't have written so many pages talking about it or suggesting it as way to develop nanotech.
Media Credibility: Killing small businesses with false and outdated information
Windows 3.1 will run inside DOSBox.
12 Days of HaXmas: Exploiting (and Fixing) RJS Rails Info Leaks
Who decided that automobiles should have seat belts, collapsable steering columns, and the numerous other safety features that save lives today? Hint: not consumers.
He also did not escape angle brackets, so for instance “typing <left>, <right>, <S-left>, and <S-right> adjusts” from the original becomes “typing , , , and adjusts” in the text.
That's a fair point, although he did hire that British guy to head up retail... only to then fire him after just a few months. Let's see how he does in 2014.
Google is wrong IMO: there is no need to have such workaround. In rails we had similar problem https://community.rapid7.com/community/metasploit/blog/2013/... and fixed it by adding request.xhr? check on server side.

while(1) is ugly solution to currently non-existing problem.
After basically 20 years of commerce dictating the needs of the net, I'd think we've already lost it.

The internet model worked when subsidized by a military and academic community supported by a massive industry.

Now that it's trying to pay for itself, it's looking a lot more like television or those free newspapers that are more ads than articles.
Report Says NSA Intercepts Computer Deliveries
Just pay people differently depending on their settings. (A bit like Amazon's pricing with a spot market and all.)
I can't get this to work with an actual API call.

<script>
Object.prototype.__defineSetter__('user', function(obj){alert('Hijacked!');console.log('Hijacked!', obj)});
var trigger = [{"user":{}}];
</script>
<script id='current-user' src="http://my.secretapi.com/users/current"></script>

Where the API returns something like

[{'user':{'name':'Joe Bloggs'}}]

(Un)Fortunately (depending on which side of this you're on...) they've plugged the holes?
Having a work room that you can lock isn't just good productivity advice, but also good financial advice. You can deduct it as a business expense.
Ask HN: Critique this Peer Review Algorithm
Example Paint Artists

Given A group of peers. In this case a self selected group of persons who paint artistically, say 4 hours or more a week. Let these be the peers.

Hypothesis A "consensus" of opinion within this group should establish a qualitative analysis of the whole pool of submitted works; a curve. If each individual within this group of (approximate) peers is given the ability to actively criticize a significant percentage of the other artist's work, I believe the result would be simple but accurate stratification (indicating, roughly, the top dog).

Algorithm Hypothesis

-- 500 artists who all work in a similar category (realism, impressionism, anime?) submit 1 work of art each.

-- Each artist is required to view and rank 3 unique sets of 5 works. (5 works per set for ease of ranking, 3 sets to increase the amount of redundant input, "unique" meaning each set of 5 works is a permutation).

-- 1500 ranks (ideally) will be submitted. Each piece of art should get ranked 30 times against a completely different selection each time.

Why is this supposed to be good?

-- Those voting are work-proven peers

-- The ranks are not simple "hot or not" choices, but rudimentary curves.

-- Voting is limited, evenly distributed, and public

-- Recursive post analysis is possible based on discounting the rankings of lower ranked voters and, similarly boosting the ranking weight of higher ranked voters.

Disclaimer I am working on a project that will use this algorithm, and your comments, links and criticism. I am not a statistician, obviously.
The government isn't completely inept. They execute policy decisions quite well.

IMO, the US government correctly concluded that the Bell Monopoly was initially in the best interest of the nation, as it accelerated universal phone service. Later, with a lot of prodding, they reversed that policy and unleashed the telecom competition that helped bring us the last 30 years of innovation.

The problem is that the telephone companies are essentially rebuilding the old AT&T through merger, and wants to pillage the consumers of telecom services once again. They are doing this by declaring that the FCC can only regulate voice, defined as legacy TDM/POTS lines and related technology. Simultaneously, they are moving in state legislatures and congress to eliminate the requirement to provide universal POTS service.

I've worked in a large enterprise where the network teams became too politically powerful (essentially becoming a troll under the bridge instead of a service provider) and basically put the organization out of business by making it either impossible or too expensive to get anything done. Empowering phone companies without a short, tight leash would be doing the same thing to our nation.

Powerful network owners are the most dangerous people in technology.
I'd say you're spot on. Much as I hate it, the Rothschild family et al have sewn it up fairly well.
The ruling seems to have put the kibosh on legal redress. Now the question becomes of what to do next. So how does one neutralize something like an NSA? Where are their pressure points?
> Hertzfeld

Atkinson
bug doesn't exist anymore
it does, but it's worst workaround. we chose request.xhr? check
> While true self-driving cars should be cheaper than taxis [...]

Different costs can lead to radically different consequences. Just imagine how smart phones or tablets would play out without, say, cheap touch screens. People wouldn't care much for them.

Or imagine if power was much cheaper, then we could run eg desalination for almost free, and no coastal area or island would ever have any problems getting fresh water.
Another reason to consider pfSense (which could use a crowdfunded secaudit like TrueCrypt).
Jeez, that is a lot nicer. I've updated my page to point there. Thanks :)
I'd like to call attention to this part of Fred's post which many of the sub-threads appear to have overlooked:

Instead of turning Paul's comments into a blogosphere shitstorm, maybe we would all be better off staring the issue in the face and thinking about how each of us could help make a difference on this issue

How would you help a 13-year-old -- of either gender? -- get interested in programming?

Raspberry Pi? PyGame? Lego FIRST robotics? How can some of these initiatives be spread more widely to those who maybe don't have supportive family or communities to encourage their nerdy, high-school-pariah interest in tech?
I agree on your timespan. But not because of technology, but because of law.
Does your solution assumes referrer will not be manipulated on the client side?
Ooops, you're right. My mistake.
Hey sprinkles, I could use some legal advice. Think you could advise?
This isn't unique to programming. Every home improvement project, for example, comes with a slew of complaints about the corners the last homeowner cut. It's just a lack of context. That previous person isn't around to explain why they made the choices they did. Meanwhile, the current guy always has a good reason for taking a shortcut and someday, someone else will complain about those choices in their absence.
> On top of that, I know several women in the industry, from marketing wizard to expert programmer with publish credits, who have to tip toe when they go to a company because men are being trained that all women are like Shanley in the industry.

It's really hard to read that and not think of this: http://www.theatlantic.com/sexes/archive/2012/11/vote-no-on-...
It's called progressive-splaining [1]:

A condescending, inaccurate explanation delivered with rock solid confidence of rightness and that slimy certainty that of course they are right, because the are the progressive in this conversation

[1] http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=Mansplain
> So then why don't startups hire based on the results of IQ tests, isn't this a meritocracy?

In the US, doing that is a decent way to get sued.

'tokenadult has a standard comment (he's made it many times with various revisions/updates) on this topic that you should read: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6584957
There is a long discussion about this at

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5168121

(from about a year ago)
The utility market moved towards a regulated model in the very early days of electric and gas transmission. There were lots of really good reasons for this around safety, universal service and public good. Most states today have a model where delivery is tightly regulated, but electricity generation is a competitive marketplace.

At the end of the day the government exists to serve the public interest.
Sensationalist writing to stir activity. That's all that's coming from the author.

There are many different schools of thought carrying around the word "libertarianism" but yes, they are in each their own way anti-politics. It's not left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, but authoritarianism vs. freedom.
You've obviously made a serious study of this and that's why you have such justifiably strong opinions on the matter. Can you do 10 minutes of googling next time and share more? Or maybe 20?! Think of how informed you'd be after 20 minutes!
Seems like anything that is "hustling" is called "growth hacking" now a days. We applaud startups that make it to the big leagues and idolize how much they hustle and break the rules and then when someone does break the rules, everyone jumps in to tell them how bad they are.
I spent many years working with the 6809.

One of the biggest advantages over the 6502 was the ability to work with 16-bit registers. X and Y were 16 bit, and a user/local stack pointer was added, U. Even the A and B accumulators could be combined into one 16-bit register, D.

It's one of my favorite architectures. You could do a hell of a lot with very little room.
I think the conclusion is wrong. Many people care about many things. But most of us aren't really equipped to lead a movement, and most self-organizing movements lack the focus and ability to put aside differences to achieve more than modest goals.

Put bluntly, we're (myself included) waiting for a King or Gandhi to take the reins and lead us to the promised land. Snowden can't lead us from Moscow or jail. The Dalai Lama and Suu Kyi have their own problems. And let's face it -- who wants their dirtiest secrets aired on CNN and Fox? Because that's the price of fame.
You and your complexifyin' aren't welcome around here, friend! All that nuance just makes our arguments much harder to make. You'd best take it elsewhere.
my solution is request.xhr? check. the link above is only to explain what rails-bug was. I don't think checking referrer is a good idea there.