skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think the point is that there is no intrinsically "right" level of health care spending. Spending 50% of income on health care would surely require some trade-offs, but that might be worth it, at least to some people.
Have you checked out Nitrous.io? https://www.nitrous.io/

Haven't had a serious need for it yet but it makes a Chromebook more attractive to me for sure.
Cool, but why not make the first client a web based one so we can all it work?
Software! Every time I poke around the code of any sufficiently complex piece of software I find myself overwhelmed with the endless levels of abstraction. One benefit of plateauing hardware performance will be the slowing of the hardware churn. As innovation slows we will hopefully converge on optimal units of computation and interfaces.

As diversity decreases it will be much easier to write libraries that talk directly to the metal, protocols that write directly to the interfaces and applications that run completely isolated at native speed.

Without the towers of abstraction it is much easier to reason about the data structures of your input and output and design optimal algorithms. If we ever do come to this point there will be a renaissance in the field of computer science field.
My daughter is using my CR-48 beta Chromebook. She watches Youtube videos, uses Wikipedia, writes stories in Google Docs, and plays Flash-based web games (which are admittedly quite slow on the CR-48's hardware).

There's really not much she's missing out on. I don't have to worry about the drive crashing (docs are saved in Google Drive), her pressing a button she shouldn't, or downloading malware. It's a really great device for children and anyone that spends most of their computer time online.
Doesn't mean it should have been retroactively granted. Extend the term if must needs; but retroactively granting additional years on an already-established term is violating the spirit of the US Constitution, if not the letter. LL agrees; the SCOTUS didn't.
Can you please re-frame your argument in quantifiable terms?
Here's something you can learn in less than 1 minute: Stop using Quora with their "Signup / login so you can see more than the first few lines" popup spam.

I wish Google would remove that site from its index.
+1 on tptacek's explanation.

> What I did was simply store links to music files hosted elsewhere on the internet and acted as a conduit for these music files, allowing people to search songs by title/artist and play/create playlists using my interface.

That's exactly why a lot music are not playable on the old turntable.fm. They are blocked even though they are searchable (which talks to various APIs as well?)

For someone who co-ran a popular BBS forum in the past with millions of Chinese users, I and my other admins got a lot of notices and threats to arrest us. I was also in my high school year as well. Just a few years ago. We didn't shut down the site, it still exists and is still pretty popular. We changed our domain name because it was somehow conflicting with another television company's name and we took down certain torrent files at their requests. We still allow people to upload these illegal contents but we just play nice. I guess we weren't the top players like PirateBay so we haven't been told that we must shut down. We just receive notices. But do play nice.

> I spent a lot of time building HypedMusic. I’ve learned a lot of really cool stuff along the way

You should talk to them. You should inform your users about this and think about future plans. Maybe instead of allowing them to search for illegal contents you can play a demo and link to iTune, soundcloud for purchase? If you have a lot of users you should look for partnership. With users, you should come up with new model. It will be tough, but think about it for a moment. Otherwise you have learned a lot by developing an app yourself. That's a plus already.
Regardless of what any armchair economist thinks about the federal reserve, how can you love bitcoin as a currency if you think that the fed 'plays an important function'?
I noticed that but wasn't sure what the OP meant with a "good job". Looking at the examples between Basic, Intermediate and Proficient, Proficient seems pretty required for what I would consider a non-menial, well paying job. Basic skills include "locating easily identifiable quantitative information and using it to solve simple,one-step problems when the arithmetic operation is specified or easily inferred" and "reading and understanding information in simple documents". The examples are comparing ticket prices and using a TV guide to find out what time a show is on.

Those are not skills I personally feel qualify you for a "good job", my definition of good job being defined as one where you work with your mind. However, basic literacy does not mean you cannot be a very skilled tradesman and know a craft extremely well.

However, the majority of college graduates are intermediate or proficient. Will they all become lawyers or programmers? No. Are they functionally literate and can they perform in a workplace? Most likely, yes.
Given how I feel today, 1/1/14, there is no way I could cope with that many New Years.
Top Posts of 2013, Stats, and Snoo Year's Resolutions
I got a Pixel at IO, and my wife won one of the HP Chromebooks in the "Give a Chromebook" contest Google ran earlier this year. We use them so much - they're our go-to machines for most things (I'm on my desktop for work, but any time I'm not in my office I'm on the Chromebook), and we have desktops that we can jump to if we need heavier work. However, most of our email/social networking/music/youtube/netflix/recipes/general googling happens on them.

Chromebooks aren't full replacements for how we use computers, but they're 95% of the way there, and given how inexpensive and light they are (not to mention how freakin' fast they are to boot/wake) they're an amazing complement to most computing cases.

My dev setup for years has been a Windows client working against a Linux box on my LAN. This works great with the Chromebook because I can just SSH into my Linux box and work in vim - the lack of computing power or storage doesn't bother me because all the real work happens on my beefy server, but I can still hang out on the couch with my boys and code.
This is a game the pro-Apple press loves to play - cherry pick parts for the PC based upon comparison to the often unique part numbers Apple uses (and which they buy in bulk) and ignore arbitrage.

How much would a MacPro comparable to this Dell cost?

Dell Precision T7600
$12,697.60

Two Intel® Xeon® Processors E5-2687W (Eight Core, 3.1GHz, 20M, 8.0 GT/s, Turbo+)
128GB, DDR3 RDIMM Memory,1600MHz, ECC (8 x 16GB DIMMs)
Dual 4.0GB NVIDIA® Quadro® K5000, Dual MON, 2 DP & 1 DVI
PERC H310 for Dell Precision, SATA/SAS 6Gb/s, RAID 0/1/5/10 (8 ports)
Dual 512GB, 2.5" SATA 6Gb/s Solid State Drive
6X Blu-ray Disc (BD-RE) Burner
Speakers Dell AX210 Speakers
3 Year ProSupport Service with 3 Year NBD Onsite Service after Remote Diagnosis
3 Year Accidental Damage Service

If the rules of the game were reversed, you'd have to buy two 64GB MacPros, an external Blu-Ray burner, and go to a third party for a three year accidental damage contract and a third party for three years of Next Business Day onsite service.
Not at all different, just a question of scale. Life expectancy will shorten, restrictions will be put on importing organics from the country.

You can read about the lakes or rivers in the US or in East German that would spontaneously catch on fire sometimes until changes were put in place.

I find East Germany and the former USSR an interesting data point in governments ignoring the health of the people in pursuit of some national goal. How much of the USSR's dis-assembly came from these sorts of abuses?

Its sad that the government of China, rather than taking an enlightened road knowing where unconstrained industrialization led (they have examples after all) chose to follow in exactly the same footsteps of previous nations in creating massive environmental disasters that will take decades of remediation.

That is the tragedy here, they know what the outcome will be and they are doing it anyway.
I Bought 2 Chrome books.

1 for my daughter. Only purpose she can use is Gmail (email and keep in touch with Aunt's and other relatives overseas). Occasionally she uses youtube and her school website.

1 for My Dad to read new papers online.

Both of them love it and its the only computer they use. I am sure none of them show up in any stats.

Edit:
I must add Why I bought Chromebooks for both of them. Their uses cases:

1. Only activity is online. No use with offline computer.

2. Not Tech savvy enough to deal with AntiVirus.

3. Limited Use and hence need cheaper option.

Chromebook fits perfectly in both scenario's.
Given your more liberal leanings, have you looked at Freicoin[0]? It's a perishable currency that is meant to counteract the natural tendency of money to be a wealth transfer device in the hands of bankers.

[0]: http://freico.in/
> Maybe you should get off your high horse and stop telling other people what they should be doing to solve the problem.

If that’s what you think I’m doing, then I have either failed to make myself clear or you have failed to comprehend what I’ve said. I’ll be charitable and assume the former.

1. There is no legal obligation for YC to change its selection criteria.

2. I am not looking to have YC change its selection criteria.

3. As long as YC has selection criteria that are inherently biased (as the YC selection criteria are[a]), the only thing that I’m saying is that they can’t pretend that the criteria aren't biased against women (and certain visible minorities).

I’m not on a high horse and telling YC to change things. I don’t expect them to be more “forgiving” of female founders not meeting their extant criteria. But it’s socially irresponsible to say that “I can't do anything about it, because the problem happened ten years ago.” I’m pointing out that while this is a thorny problem not of YC’s creation, there is an opportunity and perhaps a social responsibility that they have to encourage the people they fund to help fix this problem for the young women coming up five or ten years from now.

[a] As stated before: the bias behind the YC selection criteria is a fact, and it's admitted by PG himself in his response to this debacle. Selection criteria that expects someone to have ~10 years “hacking” experience prior to choosing YC is biased heavily in favour of people who already have accumulated advantages that permit them that exploration time (and are encouraged to do so in that particular direction) and against people who do not. This means that women are underrepresented because technical/engineering disciplines are not seen as “acceptable” for girls to do; certain visible minorities are underrepresented because, at least in America, race is strongly correlated to income and corresponding free time. These are facts.
How can one curate that which is lost?
Reminds me of the scene from the Tom Hanks movie The Wonders where the band is originally cute with the spelling, Oneders, and an emcee introduces them as the Oh-Nee-Ders.

For the opposite effect, does anyone else find themselves pronouncing gnu (the animal) with a hard G, a la GNU?
With the rise of iOS, Android, and ChromeOS which hide the CPU architecture completely from the user (especially when running Java or JavaScript applications), there are opportunities to change CPU architectures in more radical ways in the future.

But then again, the gains possible may be more limited that you suggest because the transition from x86 to x86-64 did involve a number of major efficiency gains from changing register counts and how FP calculations where done. There may not be huge efficiency gains left that are easy.

With LLVM basically being a new runtime in some cases, we can do more complex compilation strategies such as was attempted with the Itanium architecture: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_long_instruction_word

Who knows... I'm just brainstorming today. Happy New Years!
Also, it depends on setting an arbitrary poverty line (which in this case seems to be $1/day circa 1990, adjusted by PPP. Why $1? Probably because it sounded good and it was a round number. Since above/below the line is an all or nothing proposition, if you changed the line to $2, the graph could very well end up flat.

edit: You could argue that that's clearly an improvement in circumstances, but I would argue that it's clearly an improvement of people making less than $1 against PPP. Only a subsistence subset of the items used to calculate PPP would be relevant to someone who makes less than $1 a day, and the prices of those items (food, heating fuel, etc) could very well have tripled or quadrupled during that same period without a direct effect on PPP measurements.
Also, go to your bank and try to withdraw "as much cash as you reasonably want." At some point they will probably charge you a "Cash Withdrawal Fee," or some such.

I'm interested in Bitcoin because of its stated goal to disrupt the banking system. Banks suck.

Maybe this is an issue for you

Are you a US citizen, or a resident of one of the Five Eyes countries? If so, it's an issue for you whether you like it or not. You commit crimes all the time without knowing it, just like the rest of us do. Your government wouldn't have it any other way.
Yeah I think most people just see the offer and get too excited, especially if it's their only offer. It's a real shame because culture plays such a huge part in how happy you will be at a place. It wastes both the company's time and the new hire's time to join, hate the environment, and then quit a few months later
> This is akin to people stealing your bitcoin wallet

No it isn't. If I buy something on amazon, I need to enter my credit card information. If I buy something with bitcoins from cointagion.com, I don't need to upload my bitcoin wallet.

> Credit card fraud isn't caused by double-spending

If I buy some socks on Amazon with my credit card info intended only for buying those socks and a hacker steals this info and then uses it to buy a plasma TV at Best Buy, this exactly meets the definition of double spending, and this is exactly what credit card thieves do (and what you can't do with bitcoins.)

> There is nothing you can do about fraudulent transactions involving bitcoins.

Again, if someone hacks Target and steal all the credit card numbers you have fraud. Since you can't hack a bitcoin merchant to steal my payment information, you can't have this kind of fraud, so this isn't a meaningful question.

wsxcde, I think you're confusing "fraud" and "theft". Yes, it's possible to steal bitcoins. But this is not fraud.
It's a Phone survey. I'll leave it at that.
The fee isn't just a "convenience" fee. A significant proportion of the 2.5% overhead is fraud insurance.
We already do have to worry about quantum effects. Electron tunneling is a real concern and one of the causes of chip degradation over operating lifetime. Essentially, an excited electron can jump across the transistor gate oxide and get trapped in the gate metal. If this happens enough, the threshhold voltage of the transistor increases, making it slower.
I agree with this completely. PG basically said that the reason there are not many females in YC is that not that many qualified females apply. The interviewer then asked "what would be lost" if YC either lowered their standards for female applicants, or did more to encourage qualified females to apply. And PG basically (and perhaps unintentionally) dodged the question, and reiterated that there aren't as many qualified female applicants as male ones, because in some sense YC's 'ideal' candidate is a twenty-something who's been hacking for 10+ years, and more of those are male than female.

I'm not saying that PG is necessarily sexist or a bad person for saying all of this. But he did basically say that there aren't a lot of twenty-something females who have been hacking for 10+ years. And then he seems to sort of back away from that statement in "What I Didn't Say". In the original interview, he said "We can't make [these] women look at the world through hacker eyes and start Facebook because they haven't been hacking for the past 10 years." In "What I Didn't Say" he says "When I saw [the above quote] myself I wasn't sure what I was even supposed to be saying. That women aren't hackers? That they can't be taught to be hackers? Either one seems ridiculous." Basically, he was saying a less-crazy version of the first statement. Namely, that there aren't that many 20-something female hackers.

In summary, it seems like PG stated an inconvenient and perhaps unfortunate truth (and implicitly declined to get into what he could perhaps do to make this truth untrue), The Information reported it in a responsible way, and then ValleyWag re-reported it in a misleading and sensationalistic way. And then PG somewhat disingenuously claimed that he didn't say what he actually said.

Also, the irony is rich that all of this involves the guy that wrote "What You Can't Say".
I'm not sure how far afield from CS you actually want to go, but the list for music theory is at http://societymusictheory.org/archive/publications.
That is roughly how I work too. I have tags I care about and among those, I look for questions I believe I can answer based on my knowledge. Either I have used some aspect of what they're asking for in the past or by research I'll uncover something I should use in the future.

To use the site for the sole purpose of gaining points seems asinine to me. What do you get from that behavior? Only what the gamification gives you. I didn't understand that anyone can be a mod though so it doesn't surprise me that people would subvert the system to be the ones to "CLOSED NOT RELEVANT" other people. There seems to have been a pedantic movement and it can probably be traced back to people like this just boosting points to be the head bitch in charge. It explains a ton to me now...
It depends on exactly what you mean by discounted, but in a very real way the answer is both.

First there's the obvious, and quite significant, tax benefits to employer provided healthcare over private purchased healthcare. In the former case, neither the employer nor the employee pay payroll taxes on their contributions and the employee portion is also exempted from income tax (the employer also doesn't pay income tax on its contribution, but it wouldn't for cash salary either).

Second, more subtly, the group market faces much more favorable underwriting than the individual market. Even if non-employer group health insurance were allowed (which it isn't anymore under ACA) such groups are always subject to self-selection bias and thus are unlikely to be underwritten as as favorably. However, this point is somewhat tricky because there are both cross-subsidies and gross economic surpluses, which can be hard to untangle.
The reason why you carry cash is because you sometimes find yourself in situations where a credit card won't work - tipping the valet, vending machines, car washes, etc.

In what cases will bitcoin be better for small transactions online than a credit card? I'm at a loss for examples.
> You can see how tricky this can be if you try to do it by hand (unless you're Emilie, who found a solution in just a few minutes).

I got it on my second try, though maybe I just got lucky.
"Apple has never received an order under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act. We would expect to challenge such an order if served on us."

So are you suggesting they've received a NSL letter about nothing in particular forcing them to lie in this instance?
Don't listen to these comments. I urge EVERYONE to save their perm files somewhere. Trust me, the rist of getting compromised is nothing compared to the risk you're exposing yourself to if you don't.
Open-source iOS 7 jailbreak.
It's tax deductible for the company to offer employees health care, but individual plans bought by individuals on the exchanges are not. So it's effectively subsidized in one case but not the other.
That's not an actual quote. From the very article you linked:

> He also continues Rand's opposition to libertarianism, remaining sharply opposed to any description of Objectivist political philosophy as "libertarian" and to any collaboration with most libertarian groups. He has been critical of American foreign policy, including both neoconservative and libertarian views as self-sacrificial.

I will point out that your calling copyright laws "the government teat" is a Libertarian view that IP rights are coercive. Ayn Rand and Leonard Peikoff both argue that proper IP laws are non-coercive. For that reason and others, Objectivists don't want to be associated with Libertarians.
"I'd explain why, but it'd devolve into a huge rant about poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, grub upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems, all of which get brought up ad nauseum in any Linux thread."

Earth it all on a Web page somewhere and post a link back here. I'd be interested, with the exception of the bad advice on forums bit.
Looks like the link to my blog isn't working. There is a DNS issue. Go to the book link instead. http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HJ4A43S
I think you are seeing a dichotomy where there is none. Simon Peyton Jones is advocating a process for how to go about doing research and communicating your ideas. Bret Victor is advocating a method for better communicating ideas. One could easy do both.
Show HN: Track new year in every timezone at the same time on your iPhone
haskell solution:

import Control.Monad

queens n = foldM (\y _ -> [ x : y | x <- [1..n], safe x y 1]) [] [1..n]
safe x [] n = True
safe x (c:y) n = and [ x /= c , x /= c + n , x /= c - n , safe x y (n+1)]

main = mapM_ print $ queens 8

----
http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Algorithm_Implementation/Miscel...
Isn't that what https://github.com/miguelfreitas/twister-html/ is?
>> The only hard to replicate piece is the six channel PCI-E SSD (cost-wise)

Not really, all you need are a motherboard supporting (fake) hardware RAID (that's almost any over $100) and a couple of good 240GB SSDs. A RAID 0 will far outperform the MacPro in random access (e.g. OS drive) and in the worst case - sequential reading - will be no more than 10% slower.

The hard to replicate part is the OS, but IMHO Linux and Windows with some UI configuration are superior.
Pirate Bay Uploads Surge 50% in a Year, Despite Anti-Piracy Efforts
You basically ignored all I've said and went meta.
I also didn't include the fact that state income tax, and property tax are deductible from federal income. Also mortgage interest is deductible. So, back of the envelope comes down to closer to 42% taxation.

> The rest of your figures aren't really what I'd consider personal income taxation, although they're definitely interesting

I'd say that sales tax is personal, but property tax maybe not, since that isn't directly related to income. However, it still means that for every dollar that someone pays you to do work, you only get to spend 58 cents.
Ah. I'm not familiar with the author. It may not be astroturf, but it reads like it. That's a rather unfortunate direction the author took, then.

It finishes in a political argument, far from the interesting personal narrative about working in insurance that it initially seemed to be.
Planet likely to warm by 4C by 2100, scientists warn
Only DynDns top-tier products allow zone file importing (one of the features that sold us on Zerigo in the first place since we have 50 domains). And those packages start at $300/mo AND have a 1 year non-refundable contract.
Larger by land mass, perhaps, but much smaller by most other measures. And substantially more homogenous (not sure how you're getting a different impression). "Functioning" is maybe a decent description and a pretty low target.
Really small transactions (eg the reddit bitcoin tipbot, small website donations, payment for content) for one. iTunes tries it aggregate transactions to lower credit card fees, with bitcoin, you wouldn't need to do that.