skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Great post Paras. However, I wish you would have addressed what you do with your new found financial freedom. I suppose running your business takes up most of your time. That's fine as long as it's enjoyable I guess.

The question here is, if something, what would you have done differently ? Or, going forward, what are you going to do differently ?

Also, the modern economy is poised against us in terms of preserving the value of our wealth. Because of this, I disagree with your final conclusion (the sweating over investments bit..). The hard part about money is making it, but it's also hard to keep it. Inflation eats away at what you have, furthermore, depending on your country (India in this case..) you don't have 250 years of documented economic history to make your investment decisions.

If you've reached your financial goal, mine is 25x of annual expenses then yes, maybe you are truly financially independent and now free. You have literally bought freedom. You're right, materialistic pursuits will probably never lead to happiness. However, for some the road to financial independence is longer than others. And yes, many people lose the plot along the way ;)

Maybe a more apt title for your post would be: "Having a successful business and a good amount of money buys you freedom" ? :)
Products Ganoderma lucidum Organo Gold and IM Global
I believe this Snowden case is orchestrated by the NSA itself. It might be to show its power and to intimidate opponents. Just a display of what we did and what we are able to do. Standard Sun Tzu tactics. It is dumb to think that there is not a single CIA agent to take him out inside of Moscow or anywhere else in the world.
Have a look at my Bluepass project. It uses a much more modern UI and has P2P sync built in. I did a (failed) fundraiser for it on Hacker News 6 months ago. After the fundraiser failed I continued to work on it in my spare time. See bluepass.org and github.com/geertj/bluepass. I'm about 2-3 weeks away from releasing an updated version.
Bush and Obama both got elected for second terms...
You can store the .kdb file on a shared dropbox folder. I know it's not as safe as keeping separate .kdb files (theoretically your dropbox folder can be hacked, but they still would need your master password), but to me it's a sacrifice in the name of convenience.
Pro tip: you can even sync to the minikeepass app on your iphone. It's great having all your passwords always with you!
Really ? Where were the technological improvements when oil shot up to $150 in 2008 ?

Sure technological improvements eventually got us to the energy level we were at in 2005 ... but only just barely and only for a week. Since then it's been going down, with predictable results.

And while shale (currently) provides a few years delay, it's only for a few years, and maybe even only America. That's the problem with these ass-saving technologies. The first few times they saved our ass for several centuries (coal + trains, which will keep working, later nuclear). The next revolution saved our collective energy-hogging asses for ~60 years. The next one, horizontal drilling, did for ~10-15 years. Now we have shale oil, which saves our asses for 5-6 years tops.

The situation is not as rosy as you indicate at all. We're effectively dependent on ALL technologies operating at totally maxed out capacity for economic prosperity, and a lot of these technologies are faltering all at the same time. It won't be pretty.

Frankly we have ~5 years to increase the efficiency of batteries (which have improved a factor 2 in ~100 years in mass/energy and volume/energy). Not by a factor of 2, but a factor of 10, to keep our society at the same technological level. Nobody has any even theoretical ideas to get a twofold improvement. We only have 5 years because of shale oil, and we knew perfectly well in 2000 that we'd need this super-battery before the decade was out, and humanity simply failed ...

I went to a robotic mechanics lecture 2 years ago. The opening line was this : you climbed 5 floors to get here, and you got seriously tired (the elevators were out). If you had been the best robot we have, with roughly half it's weight dedicated to battery you would have just used ~50% of the total energy contents of your battery. This is a problem that needs to be solved before we have any real hope of true independent robots.

Oh and let's feel inspired by nature. Wait. How does nature solve this ? Well, here's the basic formula for oil CnH2n+2. Here's the basic formula for human fat : CnH2nOOH. In both cases the energy is stored in the same chemical structure. The energy is pretty much stored in the exact same chemical bonds in the human body (or any animal) and in a gas tank. In other words : in 4 billion years evolution did not find a better way. Do you think humanity is likely to improve upon it ?

You best hope so. Or we'll see repeats of 2008, except without recovery.
By corollary, individual debt is fractional, voluntary slavery.

Or possibly it goes the other way. By being wealthy the truest freedom you enjoy is not having to worry about owing anyone anything.
Good to know, thanks for the info. Is there no way for carriers to apply these settings directly? I know Bell did some tinkering on my iPad when I got a SIM from them while traveling in Canada, but I don't know if it was anything more advanced than what the user can access.
Advanced Image Optimization Tricks
NSA Cryptographic Algorithms (JEP 129) to be included in JAVA 8
See also:
http://cr.openjdk.java.net/~mr/se/8/java-se-8-pfd-spec-01/

Search for "JEP 129".
Sometimes being right at the wrong time is better. Maybe we are only alive today because so many of our parents predicted Nuclear Armageddon and acted to prevent it?

It always depends. Every situation is different and it always boils down to a risk assessment. We have to make a collective call on whether the risks of doing nothing outweigh the benefits.

Unfortunately we can't rely on our current obsession: "the markets" to make an accurate risk assessment for us. Markets and oligarchies (and darwinism for that matter) operate within established patterns. They optimize and specialise for short term success. It takes external pressures to implement transformative change.

That external pressure will either be uncomfortably "communist" or the "creative destruction" of a global bloodletting that destroys most of our ecosystems.
Neuromorphic camera
I agree that the goal is moving on. However, I don't think the best way to bridge is to fail to acknowledge our history.

To me, it's important for a society to explicitly acknowledge mistakes.

FWIW, I'm American, and I wish that our government would formally acknowledge people who have clearly been affected by less than fortuitous circumstances.
people who like the non permanent nature of the social media activities should use this www.bablrr.com
Apparently, the word I'm looking for is "syllogism". For example "Criminals commit crimes, buying guns is a crime, therefore all criminals buy guns".
Chase in the US rejected my recently expired US passport as secondary ID, but accepts my non-expired Indiana vehicle registration, a document laser-printed on ordinary copy paper at the BMV with no graphical elements other than form boxes that'd be trivial to counterfeit. So it's probably safe to say that "difficulty to counterfeit" is not a criterion for secondary ID at Chase (nor, apparently, is mismatched mailing address, because my vehicle isn't registered at the address on my primary ID).
There's absolutely no reason the default map for ffOS shouldn't be powered by OpenStreetMaps
I wonder what the global equity market will be worth once the oil runs out?
I wonder what the really ancient Mac he links to was. The link is broken since Apple has since drastically redesigned their support site at least once.
How? Just apply to one of their secret agencies and promise he will never ever leak anything? He doesn't have superpowers.

Even when it comes to the NSA, let's make the most of what Snowden did do -- he might be the last whistleblower we've seen in a while, seeing how the NSA said they would seek to replace as human system administrators with automation where possible.
> What the hell was I smoking when I wrote this? I can't even read it myself.

It's what you get for being lazy (non judging here, I'm guilty of it too) and not naming your variables accordingly. When you write the code you probably know what ndi, q, p, lnk, etc. are supposed to mean. But then you leave the code for some time and when you return you are lost. Just write out variable and function names so that your code reads like english - programming Obj-C for some time really helped me there :)

And with pointer-heavy code I tend to create aliases for offsets so I don't have to write out things like *(q->lnk+!dec) every time I reference that specific address.

Yes, maybe it will cost me wizard points with colleagues because they start to understand my code but my sanity is it worth to me ;)

(Also trailing/leading underscores are the devil!)
So you support firing someone who is pregnant?

There are costs for using humans to do your work. Sometimes they get sick, sometimes they get pregnant, sometimes they have a super-productive day and sometimes they don't.
"Money is coined freedom" - Fyodor Dostoevsky.
French firm Carmat Implants first artificial heart in a patient.
This sounds really crazy and paradox. Thank you all for the insight.
This direction of discussion is exactly what I wanted to avoid.
I wonder why the creators chose this. Does it allow for a smaller footprint?
Much in the way that the NSA can bend the law to collect everything, the government can bend the law to use SAMs for whatever they want. You could say that any of the NSA revelations could affect some on-going case that has yet to be brought to court in Guantanamo, e.g. knowledge that a given prisoner's communications being intercepted could prejudice the case. The details of exactly how that might work out could be kept secret under terms of the SAM.
Worse for what? If you're gambling on the stock market then sure it's worse for you. If you're wanting to keep civilisation functioning well, then no; taking precautions is not worse for us.
Dropbox of course. There are some good mobile clients (i use KyPass on iPhone), so you can have your passwords literally everywhere.
There is a really great article in The Atlantic (from 2011) called "Secret Fears of the Super-Rich" on this topic:

Excerpt: The respondents turn out to be a generally dissatisfied lot, whose money has contributed to deep anxieties involving love, work, and family. Indeed, they are frequently dissatisfied even with their sizable fortunes. Most of them still do not consider themselves financially secure; for that, they say, they would require on average one-quarter more wealth than they currently possess. (Remember: this is a population with assets in the tens of millions of dollars and above.)

Link: http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2011/04/secret-f...
> Imagine if Google's next big product involved a brain-computer interface in which the mind communicated directly with Google search.

The term "Adsense" would acquire a whole new meaning.
GNU's Not Linux: A Primer On Nomenclature
I'm pretty sure thermite was in enter after cavalry charges stopped being a good idea (well actually as Poland infamously charged Nazi tanks, maybe not)
I wonder if there are networks of "think" tanks coming up with reasons to "stay the course" with our dependance on fossil fuels, similar to the one pushing global warming denial just recently exposed.

> Here's my prediction: We will switch to some cheaper alternative long before oil ever runs out.

But that's the thing, cheapness, or infinite availability, or both.. this threatens existing profits. Greater global good but less personal profit = not good enough. Hence my wondering about the existence of "advertising budgets" for steering away from that.
I would've thought Google would be smart enough to ignore multiple anchor tags pointing to the same domain on one page.
>A life spent mostly hoarding money and possessions is a wasted life

I find it interesting that an article whose tone is one of optimism is so judgmental.
The Spiritual and Secular Joy of Bach
For everyone who dislikes the UI there is also https://github.com/mstarke/MacPass
Also someone made a nice mookup how it should look like, but coding it is something different.
http://www.keepassx.org/forum/viewtopic.php?f=5&t=3382
While it's true that there is an "infinite supply of these problems", a good CS program it's supposed to teach you how to think, hence teaching you how to learn.

If you have a very solid understanding of the fundamentals, you should be able to go and solve problems you've never seen before. If you don't, you could be stuck using other people's solutions to your problems, hence not being able to solve new ones that you might encounter.
I just went through the first 30 titles in the AFI top 100. Out of those 30, only four are not available in the iTunes Store: Sunset Blvd., Some Like it Hot, Star Wars, and The Grapes of Wrath. The other 26 are available and cost $3.99 to rent – all those are also available to buy, for $6-15.

I don’t have the time to search for the rest of the 70 titles in the iTunes Store, but from a few blind tests I did, I’d say the vast majority is available there.
Bach wrote secular music as well as his music for the church.

http://www.gardnermuseum.org/music/listen/music_library?filt...

Click B for Bach, enjoy
They should give a royal apology
The problem is also that oil becomes more expensive along an exponential curve. We'd have to see ~4% per year efficiency increase in the entire economy, every single year.

That's not just finding more efficient systems. That's inventing them, engineering them, building them, replacing existing systems, and the ROI of the ENTIRE process (including the activity needed for said replacement) needs to be at least 4% of the size of the economy. Every year. Even the renewable technologies we have, like solar, fail this test because of their production energy costs.

When was the last year we saw 1% improvement in the economy ? Right.
When I read the headline, my first thought was, "How about humanizing people first?"

As much as I love technology, I'm afraid our technological progress is far outpacing the wisdom required to wield it well.

Highly advanced technology in the hands of unethical or short-sighted people can actually cause more harm than benefit.
they should give an apology
If you see something wrong with that statement, why not point it out?

If someone said getting hooked on heroin and dying with 16 is a waste of a life, would you consider that judgemental, too?

To me it's just obvious that people often confuse symbols and things, and not only hoard possessions and money, but other symbols as well. And if I forget that for a while, the advertisement geared towards them reminds me. If that is being judgemental, so be it. I like to think it as being unable to miss certain things.
Square has about 40,000 active customers. They "have a plan" to be profitable by 2015.

"Millions" of people don't want Square, a handful of underserved merchants do, and not being profitable means their customers aren't "paying" for the service yet.

If you hit it out of the park with a Twitter or Facebook or Google, you can get enough investors on board to make your next venture seem successful regardless of actual traction.

I'm not saying Square isn't awesome, you've just had too much kool-aid.
After years of the spec being nice but the implementations being very basic, the module versioning and installation implementation in Rakudo is finally shaping up. I anticipate it getting pretty robust over the next 6 months. Imo FROGGS' day 11 advent article is poorly written but might be useful:
http://perl6advent.wordpress.com/2013/12/11/day-11-installin...

Rakudo/MoarVM began running this month. As Larry Wall said a few days ago "failed 179 test files ... which ain't too shabby at this point"
http://irclog.perlgeek.de/moarvm/2013-12-21#i_8029074

Afaik the Perl 6 book is not really being updated. Maybe this info is of interest to you:
http://www.perlmonks.org/?node_id=1033899
I had discovered this link a few days ago. Added it to the resources section
They only have enough water and food because of constant imports of both. Without oil, Saudi Arabia couldn't realistically sustain 1% of it's population. Realistically, if the oil runs out, except for a few pockets and islands, Saudi Arabia will have to be abandoned.
Java is very heavily set on backwards compatibility - no new feature is allowed to affect existing code and any new features must fit into the existing features. This is different to Python for example where they had backwards incompatible changes in v3.

Another issue is the depth of the process on each change: there are a number of discussions on each feature with multiple proposals to determine the best way to implement any feature and how it will fit in, etc. The number of companies and people involved in the feature design and implementation in each change is generally an order of magnitude greater than those other languages.

Comes down to heavy bureaucracy and design by committee creating a very long process - but the end result is generally extremely well thought through and tested, so I'm personally not complaining since I'm not footing the bill.
I recall a colleague once (~10 years ago) telling me that some people he knew felt that 5k GBP would be enough to solve all of their (money) worries.

I thought it absurd, i.e. too low given things like planning for old age. I guess there are people who would think my estimate too low if I said I needed 5m for the same purpose. (not saying 5m is the right number for me or anyone else.)
"the pieces of green paper have value because everybody thinks they have value."

Freedom is fallacy.
Just go build bridges, open source software, medical tools, civil aircrafts, gadgets, computers, etc.

None of these engineering tasks require you to meet war things.
There's an interesting thread on Quora titled 'What does it feel like to be a self-made millionaire under the age of 25?' http://www.quora.com/Becoming-a-Millionaire/What-does-it-fee...

As you will read through it, terms like insecurity, worry, surprise on unchanged happiness levels would be quite common among the answers.

I have been thinking a lot about investments and have concluded that my main criteria is minimum management. If an investment requires active maintenance and management, it's not for me (unless I'm doing it for charity). This excludes many common investments such real estate and stocks. With others (say fixed deposits, metals, etc.) the post-tax returns are less than inflation so it may not be wise. Right now I have decided to invest mostly in mutual funds.

I'm okay with the risk because the biggest asset I have is myself. The insecurity about future never leaves us, but as long as I believe that I would be employable in future, I can always jump back.

EDIT: added ?share=1 to the URL. Thanks Casseres.
Some "pickpocket-proof" pants might be a good investment if you ever go to a concert, Mardi Gras, or other crowded gathering in the future.

I've never tried them, so be sure to look for reviews before buying. I have no affiliation with any companies selling or making clothes.
I wasn't being judgmental, mere factual. My hypothesis is that people want to maximize happiness/well-being and hoarding money and possessions is a suboptimal way of doing that.

On a slightly related note, Sam Harris has written an excellent book 'The Moral Landscape' where he argues that science and scientists __should__ be judgmental towards morals and life choices.
I'll confess, it is deliberately obfuscated. *(q->lnk+!dec) and the like were originally written in macro.
This. Great point!

"Firefox OS was created with the following main objectives:
- Create a Free and Open mobile source operating that is developed in the open."

If the goal is to be completely open, why use closed-source mapping at all, including Googles offering, when a good open equivalent exists?
Except that US crude oil production is now rising.

http://www.eia.gov/dnav/pet/hist/LeafHandler.ashx?n=PET&s=MC...
Yes, the thermal printing mechanism is very simple. You need a printing head, which you can get as pre-build module, and you need a mechanism to feed the paper.

Alternatives are for example thermal transfer printing method, where you have a roll of paper and a roll of ink on a film that gets transfered over to the paper on the areas that are heated. Technically this is more complex, but on a product like this, they saved on thew wrong end by using thermal paper.
Except for nuclear, what technologies are you talking about ? If we expect oil to do what this article says it'll do we'll need at least 50 new nuclear plants across the US in 10-15 years, maybe less.

They're not interchangeable with oil at all. Even if we did have those plants, we'd still need to replace half the current infrastructure.
> Now, some people like to think that stuff like "technology always improves in time to save us" is some kind of natural law.

Survivorship bias. If it hadn't worked that way in the past, we wouldn't be here talking about it :)
One would have been a true prophetic genius to be trying this in 1990.
One underscore indicates a pointer, two indicates a pointer to pointer.
Lavoro parte 1: Il contesto attuale
The more you get exposed to other people's code, the less likely you are to dismiss it as bad immediately. Your first impressions are built upon what styles of coding you're already familiar with, and aren't to be trusted as an objective measure of whether the code is maintainable. In many cases, what you might think is a good practice is really just a fashionable one, and holds little engineering value when examined carefully.

After enough projects, you get used to navigating codebases that are layered with multiple styles and grungy bits from years of effort. At that point, you have some hope of knowing what can and can't be maintained.
I cannot remember, but it was damn good stuff.
Thanks for your response, the Quora thread is very interesting.

Another question, and this is a little more personal. Also, I don't mean to be accusatory at all or anything of that sort so please don't take it that way.

Do you feel any new found desire to help those less fortunate than you ? I don't mean by providing employment, etc. I'm sure you do plenty of that through your business.

I just know plenty of fairly rich people who feel like they're not 'rich enough' to help those that are less fortunate (even people whose net worth is in the tens of millions!)
That'd be my second: http://www.ollydbg.de/Paperbak/index.html
One of the projects I want to do is to map living expenses, inflation and life expectancy to know exactly how much money is "enough". My problem is that we forget that we tomorrow should be more valuable to us than today and by the time we get this realization, we might have lost many years (of adulthood).
It displays without error, as far as I can see, but is just like the desktop site. One can zoom in on the center column of stories, but it was a little clunky on mobile Safari. And then, you can't see the vote icons or thumbnails without horizontal scrolling.

Bootstrap will make it easy to adapt to smaller screen, but one still must choose the appropriate classes for elements and build the layout knowing how bootstrap handles that ( something I've been learning recently).

I'd suggest adding breakpoints to handle iphone/small android at least - current layout is probably okay for tablets. Mainly the twitter box needs to disappear and I'd suggest making the voting/icons section and titles switch to being more compact or above each other rather than online,
I'll take that. Honestly it's sad when hacker news is one of the few places left to honest discussion of matters, and it's responses like yours that make the effort of a conversation worth having.

And all that time, having to think that the eye is watching.
Those stood out to me as the first design element I'd change, too.