skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why necessarily? If GDP grew overnight by 10x, and 90% of that went to health care, and as a result (hypothetically) we lived to an average life span of 300, would that not be a positive result?
It's actually kind of hard to remember sometimes that cloud-compute providers don't employ some sort of homeomorphically-encrypted VM containers. Even though they are completely impractical and have never even seen a proof-of-concept, the idea is so intuitive that I bet if you asked a random non-IT manager if Amazon could read memory or CPU registers on the instances his employees have running on EC2, he'd say no. "Because obviously," he'd pontificate, "nobody would be using cloud-computation otherwise."
I JUST upgraded from free to DNS Essentials a couple days ago. I've notified Zerigo billing that I consider the change a cancellation of my service agreement "without a determination of misuse" as defined by their own terms of service, and have requested a full refund back to my card on file. We'll see how that goes.

So where is everybody moving? Any reasonably priced DNS providers that don't suck?
I was replying to this parent post: "I email myself my encryption passwords so that I - and any interested government agencies - can log in without me needing to remember them all the time."

Yes, you should protect your private key. No, protecting it isn't going to stop a government agency. A VM is not Schroeder's cat: you can peak without there being any evidence. That was my point. Apologies if I wasn't straightforward in my explanation.
Where are people suspecting the shipping carriers?
Irony? Rand was a very strong proponent of IP rights. From a quick search:

http://aynrandlexicon.com/lexicon/patents_and_copyrights.htm...

http://hallingblog.com/ayn-rand-on-intellectual-property/com...
Τεχνολογία Λειτουργίας Συστημάτων Συναγερμού
Are you willing to put you interpretation of copyright to the test? Why don't you write a modern retelling of Cinderella based on Disney's version and see how far you get. Next try a remix between Cinderella, Harry Potter, and the leaked Windows source code and see what happens.
Thanks for posting. Here's the book on Amazon: http://www.amazon.com/dp/B00HJ4A43S it's $0 for rest of the day.
Bridge Boys-From Cambridge Little League to The Most Unique Seed Fund in Boston
Lessons From the CEO Of The First Ever MOOC
The USA already has single payer systems for the poor and the elderly.
True, all new AWS accounts create VPC based configs. http://docs.aws.amazon.com/AmazonVPC/latest/UserGuide/defaul...
Not being an EECS person and having only taken a couple of Intro to Circuits survey courses, can someone fill in my ignorance?

EECS people make math convenient for themselves by pretending that voltage numbers and current numbers cancel out in certain ways. Otherwise they'd have to do really messy calculus. The problem is that this convenience is only true for circuits that are up to a certain speed. Past that speed, that way of calculating and engineering circuits starts to break down. We've hit those speed limits.

The field has chosen to react by instead switching to multi-core computers. The problem from a programmer perspective is that parallelism is difficult to write for. The reason it is difficult to write for is because of mutable variables, which are common in imperative languages. So that's driving the popularity of functional languages. However, not as many people are good at functional languages, since they tend to be more mature in academic circles, less mature for industry purposes, and generally more difficult to learn for people that are more used to procedural thinking than mathematical thinking.

So, if all those premises and implications are true that would mean that maybe if the EECS people stopped pretending that EECS circuits are simple and started doing the messy calculus, maybe we could start shrinking single-core chips again. But I'm sure I've messed up some of those premises. Anyone?
I agree with this.

If I want my data to be very secure, its going to run on VMs that boot and run entirely in RAM, read the encrypted data in from persistent storage, and have their power controlled by an intrusion detection system. If you attempt to open the rack, power is removed, unencrypted data is lost, and everything is safely encrypted at rest.

You would only need this security for the most sensitive types of data though.
beginners luck ;)
But you can trademark a logo or other distinctive marking. For example, I cannot trademark the baseball cap, but I could trademark a team logo's presence on said hat. I don't know, but I would expect a court to side with Disney on that issue.
> Is there any reason to believe that fraud rates will be lower with bitcoin?

Yes, the risk of fraudulent creation of bitcoins or of double spending of a well-confirmed bitcoin are essentially zero (assuming no major flaw in the current science of cryptography.)

Also, the odds of stolen identities (name/address/birthdate/ssn) would be zero, since those are not needed for sending bitcoins.

So yes, fraud will be a lot lower with bitcoin.
That contract doesn't have legal weight in many jurisdictions.
I don't know much about Bitmessage, but aren't messages dropped after two days? So a new follower / visitor would only see two days' worth of my microblog?
Some Guy Posted His Hospital Bill Online
Okay cool. I'll be sure to try out some new ones.
Coinbase is probably the most popular US exchange (no source on this, sorry... I just use them) and they charge $0.15+1%.

I think I have read that if you are a merchant and establish a merchant account that you can get the first 1 Million Dollars (USD) free of fees. I am not sure what bar you must pass to earn merchant status, but I do have a link[1] to back this up. Presumably it's not more complicated than "accept payments for services" -- you could probably fudge it if you were simply in the business of cashing out bitcoins up to $1M. I haven't looked into it further because I'm not a merchant and I have been more interested in buying than selling at Coinbase.

Are the Chinese exchanges still bringing money in and out? I thought I read this was forbidden, and that was the reason for the great dump of $1000USD prices a few weeks back.

[1]: http://blog.coinbase.com/post/59417545262/your-first-1-000-0...
The Mom Test book (how to talk to customers when everyone is lying to you)[1] sold roughly $5k in preorders and another $10k since launch ~4 months ago. Probably 50% of that has come from speaking gigs where the event bought a bunch of books instead of paying a speaking fee.

It's on Amazon[2] as a paperback via createspace[3] print-on-demand and as an ebook via gumroad[4]. Both platforms have been great.

It took 10 months part-time from first words on paper until the finished book was in people's hands. Editing was the most painful part and took 3 months. I did the first draft on paper, and the revising in scrivener[5], which also handles exporting to all the ebook formats.

I made illustrations for it, but left them out since the layout was taking more time than it was worth and I wanted to ship it.

Incidentally, I'm also working on a book landing page generator called heylookabook[6] . I'm building in some of the marketing best-practices that I learned from working on my own, so it's there if it's helpful!

[1] http://momtestbook.com
[2] http://www.amazon.com/The-Mom-Test-customers-business/dp/149...
[3] http://createspace.com
[4] http://gum.co/momtest
[5] http://www.literatureandlatte.com/scrivener.php
[6] http://heylookabook.com
The Linux desktop has no more difficulties than the MS desktop (which is also endless "poor UX, drivers, audio services, file system snafus, [...] upgrades gone wrong, bad advice on forums compounding problems.") With a billion dollar marketing budget (like either MS, Google, or Apple) and/or a hardware manufacturing company behind it, it would sell.

That's not even really a complement to the Linux desktop, it's more a statement about what a billion dollars can do.

The quality of the desktops of the members of this oligopoly has a negligible influence on the uptake IMO. The iPod/iTunes pair was one of the functionally worst (but one of the prettiest) products of its category. Android and iPhone have taken nearly a decade to reinvent basic functionality taken for granted on most computers. Doesn't matter.
Yeah, this is likely to be the case.

Part of the genius of the block award being so top-heavy in the beginning is that it made the network much more secure than it would have been if it had relied on transactions from the beginning which will allow it to mature and stabilize before supply & demand determines what the market is willing to bear in transaction fees.

In addition, it allowed a decentralized method of distributing the coins that isn't able to be gamed.
Digital Trends’ Best Product of 2013: Google Chromecast
Shipping companies largely silent on NSA intercepting packages
How do you create that initial AMI? CMs make answering that question simple.

AMIs are nice - but they're merely snapshots of an end product. Being able to get to that end product in a repeatable, idempotant and self-documenting fashion is just as nice.

So is being able to create a virtual image on your own machine with the same end product.

FWIW, Vagrant lets you specify an AMI in its box description, so you get the best of both of your worlds there.
Graphene is interesting, but nobody in the industry believes that it will be the holy grail:

http://www.techdesignforums.com/blog/2013/12/10/graphene-get...

(This is pretty different from what academia tells you...)
This article is preposterous sensationalist stupidity.

"Mobile Phones Stagnated" - backed up not by sales figures or technological hurdles, but "things aren't innovative enough," ie "I don't like this batch of smart phones." Bad year for tech... because I don't like profitable, more powerful smart phones.

"Wearables Were a Letdown" - more opinions without sales figures, but at least not as contentious ones.

"Former Giants Continued Their Inglorious Decline" - a corporate capitalist struggle between large companies is "a bad year for tech" because some of those companies are losing the struggle (while others are winning). Mobile still on the rise (see first reason why the year was bad for tech (???)) with desktop declining, which is here presented as overall negative for tech industry... because...?

"M&A Replaced Innovation" - which is somehow code for "corporate giants did normal corporate things." Microsoft bought Nokia instead of "innovating." Think about that. What in the world does the first half of the sentence have to do with the second? The tech industry is failing because Microsoft didn't invent a new smart phone, and they bought Nokia? That is a very compelling... argument.

"The Arrogance of Technology’s Ruling Class Increased" - and the explanation is that technology is taking the place of menial labor. Bad year for tech when tech continues to be more productive and accomplishes a wider variety of tasks. Bad year because advances are being made. Re: no jobs, I don't care what your political or economic ideology is, if you think wealth inequality is a direct consequence of technological advancement you're a moron. Maybe such an A -> B is a little simplistic? Maybe not quite up to what should be the standards of serious journalism (or casual thought!)?

"Social Media Became Profitable, If Not Compelling" - Unpacked as "neither I nor anyone else likes social media, but the profits are back up." How does that work?

"Media Ravenous for Stories Bought Into Techno-Hype" - by far the most ruinously idiotic bullet point. The suggestion that covering bitcoin was "hype" and not legitimate news... the author should be embarrassed. Suggesting that bitcoin is a phenomenon of sensationalism is a child's idea of how economic value works. Yes, and we all buy smart phones because we read tech blogs that sensationalized them.

"The NSA Spying Scandal Put a Chill on the Biggest Technological Shifts of Coming Years" - news stories bring surges of interest in cryptography, interest in tech in general, and shape future implementations of large-scale tech. Sounds like a Bad Year for the Tech Industry yes?

Printing this trash anywhere outside of "My blog about my feelings" is irresponsible and embarrassing.
Another interesting tidbit about US copyright is the Uruguay Round Agreements Act:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Uruguay_Round_Agreements_Act

One of the effects of this act is restoring copyright in the U.S. to foreign works of authors that weren't dead for 70 years on january 1st 1996 in their home country. Instead, works only enter the PD 95 years after publication.

So for example, the last paintings by Theo van Doesburg, a Dutch artist who entered the public domain in the Netherlands in 2002, will only be out of copyright in the U.S. in 2026. And that's why you won't see those works on a site such as Wikipedia, that is under U.S. law.
Apple is on the record as having never received an NSL. NSLs may prohibit you from disclosing information, but they cannot force you to lie (especially by one you've never received).
While this is a rehash of exactly the pattern we saw as Android grew ("Shipments not sales. Haven't seen one in a coffee shop. No one in my family. Some web stat source says..."), with the same players regurgitating their old hits, I do wonder why people trust StatCounter so much?

StatCounter relies upon subject sites adding a bit of code that reports back to StatCounter, giving them their metrics. Curious, I inspected every single site I visit in a typical day, and zero of them have the StatCounter code.

I am invisible to StatCounter. I don't roll with Chromebook, so not really relevant in this case, but it's interesting how frequently StatCounter is used to make some proclamation or other with no one ever questioning what their coverage is.
You won't have an argument from me there. I don't count myself among the PG fans.
Wait, so, not having ever done sales, I'm not sure what you mean. What is in the set of "capital-S-Sales" that's not "salesmanship?"
Even if 60% of Twitter's users were fake they would still have more active users than Pinterest so the title is still pretty misleading.
There have always been disasters, disease, and death. No financial instrument will 100% protect everyone from those things. Any scheme (market- or bureaucracy-based) that guarantees to cover everybody from healthcare costs is a fool's errand because people will spend themselves poor, lie, cheat, and steal to stay alive.

That being said, the best things to do are the obvious things. Take care of yourself (no smoking habits, no binge drinking). Tell your doctor about your family medical history so you can keep an eye out for hereditary diseases. Live below your means. Have an emergency fund -- a huge one if you're especially concerned.

But besides all that, bankruptcy exists for this sort of situation. Sometimes life sucks and there should be a way to hit a reset button and move on.
Agree with everything you said. Credit cards have useful consumer protections baked in. What happens when you look at it from the merchant's perspective? Lets say someone buys something from me with a card, I ship it out, but then it turns out the card was stolen. Who takes the loss? The merchant or the credit card company? I guess what I'm trying to figure out is whether or not the irreversibility of a transaction might be a good thing for merchants dealing with fraudulent buyers.
http://lmgtfy.com/?q=Superpower

None of your points address that the US is indeed the worlds only superpower (as is commonly and widely understood).
Yeah, agreed, the other half of things that I didn't mention is that when I do find a good stand-alone community around a technology, that tends to be my go-to place. Especially for free ranging conceptual discussions.

What I see more of these days is a Google Group, or mailing list, or forum with a lot of core users discussing things, planning the future, debating, etc., and then a lot of reference back to Stack Overflow for particular questions that get asked a lot.

And that's really the core purpose of Stack Overflow. When it comes to writing documentation, the area that tends to have the most potential but the least realization of said potential is the FAQ. FAQs provide another dimension to documentation because they address the, "Well, given that I read this documentation, I still don't get X" scenario. No matter how well written the documentation is, there will be things that are not answerable, because software is so multidimensional. Usually the way a FAQ works out is that the person writing the documentation remembers a bunch of questions that were asked and answers them in place. Hopefully people come in later and fill in more answers based on questions that come in later. In the end it languishes. People have tried to address this via forums, wikis, and mailing lists, but in the end forums are a good place for narrative discussion, wikis are a good place for writing documentation period, but both are poor for FAQ because of their built in time decay, lack of voting, etc.

In that sense, Stack Overflow is a FAQ engine is appropriately geared toward explaining particular answers to particular questions.

That said, Stack Overflow became more than that after its community exploded, and I share in the annoyance when some of the more interesting free-ranging questions get shut down because they're open ended. I am not wholly on the side of FAQ-type lockdown.
Well the most efficiently functioning welfare states are ones that serve small and homogeneous populations. The United States is neither small nor homogeneous (and it is incredibly geographically dispersed for extra kicks).

The largest country in Europe (Germany) has a population that is less than 1/3 the that of the United States, and more homogeneous than every US state (let alone all of them combined) with the possible exception of Vermont.

And I bet even within Europe you would find the best and most efficient healthcare, education and other public services come from the smaller countries. Finland and Norway likely to better than Germany and France.

Given how many of us deal with challenges of "scaling up" tech, processes and organizations as part of our jobs, I'm surprised more people don't really seem to consider the practical limitations of scale for projects of government.
Linux hasn't succeeded on its own merits but as an economical way for companies to bootstrap their own products...

That is one of the (biggest) merits of linux. Its a "compute core" that can be the start of many products, including but very much not limited to desktops. Sure we wanted linux to usurp the absolute power of Microsoft on the desktop in the 90s, but the "desktop" becomes less of a 'thing' every day, and linux (FOSS in general) is just getting started.
I'm talking about a world where the character is a trademark, a distinctive brand in and of itself and where the "creator" is no longer a living person, but a corporation that continues to create work with the characters. Steamboat Willy is a distinct piece of art. However, the characters in it have become brands unto themselves.

The world of trademark and copyright are colliding in a new way here if Steamboat Willy were to enter the public domain. Can you seperate the trademark "Mickey Mouse" from the work "Steamboat Willy"? Does the fact that some Mickey Mouse cartoons are in the public domain mean that Mickey Mouse the character is in the public domain? And how does that affect works still being created with Mickey in them?

But that's beside the point. The point I want to make is that Disney wants us to be confused. They want us to conflate two distinct intellectual property issues. Steamboat Willy should be public domain, period. The repercussions of that are interesting, but really a separate area of law. Mixing the two only serves to support Disney's argument. Creative works such as films and books should enter the public domain -- as is and open to redistribution and use in derivative works -- after 14+14.

EDIT: Just to provide a concrete example, there are Disney films made during the Second World War (Spirit of '43) that are in the public domain. The character in this particular case is Donald Duck. Off the top of my head I know of no particular case law so perhaps it's never been challenged, but though it is certainly possibly to distribute, screen and create derivitive works of that film for free (I've done it myself at a summer screening of old movies we used to host when I was in college), I really don't know of anyone who's has distributed new Donald Duck movies or stories and gotten away with it. It does make me curious if they could, however.
So many health care posts and rebuttals these days. Surely a highly important issue for us collectively. But, also so political, and as a side-effect so prone to defensive stances.

As hackers, perhaps a good approach to these types of arguments, would be to throw out far-out ideas, if even just to push the collective pointer one way or another.

So here's my far out idea:

Maybe, instead of a single payer system, the gov't should pay each family a penalty fee (scaled exponentially) for each each family member that precedes the average, current life expectancy target (or even acquires a terminal illness). This will shift focus to the very sick or those at risk of being very sick. And, it would thereby eliminate any particular diseases or genetic limitations that push down the life expectancy. Of course, the unintended consequences would be that some family members would start killing off other family members for benefit. But, this would just highlight psychopaths, and thus be a win-win long run.
>I think that the reasonable upper boundary one can place upon encouraging an artist to create new works is the death of the artist. To my knowledge, people simply do not go on creating things after they have died.

I will use funny examples here just to illustrate a point. Biggie Smalls has generated more money from his work after his death than during his lifetime. 2-Pac has published more music after his death than during his life time (obviously the music was recorded but not released). There are many examples of painters who's work only became famous after their death.

It is my belief their work should not lose protection and be entered in the public domain because of their death. People can still make derivative works so long as they do not infringe, but 1 to 1 copying would, and what I argue is should, be protected. As it relates to work with greater investment, $200M+ movies for example, yes I believe (and I think what most people do not agree with me about) is those would disappear if they entered public domain after 20 years (using your term as an example).
Makes a good guest/living room computer too
What you're basically saying, and I sadly have to agree:
Don't make an app that works with the music industry.

There was no need for any more words. Where would the music industry be today without any of the apps that currently have a licensing agreement? No music in Youtube videos. No Pandoras or Spotify or iTunes even. What would that internet even look like?

I just find it really odd that an entire industry seems to live to bite the hands that feed it. I may be entirely wrong in my assessment, so I'll take whatever licks may come.

As a developer first and a hopeful musician second, one who deeply wishes those roles were reversed, I have to always stop myself when I think of a clever idea revolving around music. It has to have such a rigid constraint that it is almost worthless to continue any endeavor.