skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Brief rant whenever I read this tripe, and reading it afterward reminds me of psychobabble, but I am ranting against psychobabble anyway...

I thought the notion of willpower being a finite resource was debunked (http://lifehacker.com/5967249/your-willpower-is-only-a-finit...). If you believe your willpower is finite, then it is finite; if you believe it is infinite and powerful, then it is infinite and powerful. This "finite resource" notion is a feel-good easy path out, a way to comfort yourself that it is okay that your will failed you because, after all, you only had so much.

I see this article confuses willpower with motivation. Willpower is what you use when your motivation has waned. Willpower is a tool to help you rekindle the fires of motivation or to press forward regardless because of an oath you made to yourself.

It comes down to what you believe, what mental constructs you have put into place, to inhibit or strengthen your willpower. You have the power to choose, every moment.
30.
During my graduate program in Economics, I was obsessed with behavioral finance but couldn't do anything with it. I thought it was too late for me to learn programming. Finally I bit the bullet and learned to code my first trading algorithm in VBA(!).

It was so liberating, because I always thought I was destined to be a thinker and not a maker.

Fast forward 5 years, I am now building a tech company (big data on social graph) to implement my economic ideas.
Given that my logical conclusion was for the mortals to murder every immortal they can expose as an existential threat to themselves and their progeny, it is hardly surprising that I would also like to forcibly dissolve perpetual-duration corporations and trusts, particularly those chartered for "any lawful purpose".

You shouldn't have stopped raising the objection. You should have trusted your logic. As yet, corporations have no free will of their own, being directed by only semipermanent boards and managers. When you have a full-blown immortal, with its own interests and decision making abilities, the problems of those perpetual legal structures magnify.

Note that this also means it would be wise for the lifespan of artificial intelligences to be tied to that of specific humans.

At some point in the future, we as a species might be able to handle immortality in a more reasonable fashion, but for now, everyone should get the same deal from Death: one lifetime, with a beginning and an end.
Nashville startup gets tough love in Silicon Valley
Then let's figure out a way to demand that political scientists do something about the demand to do something problem.
> First, you cannot draw such a causal conclusion from statistical data alone.

From what else but (suitable) statistical can you draw such a conclusion?

> Does that sound stupid? I hope so, because it is.

Yes.

> But that's exactly the type of argument that this article is making.

No. The argument says that the attacks on society as a whole will likely remain constant regardless of airport security because there are many other, unsecured attack vectors.

Going back to your analogy, airport security is like allowing only passphrase-secured SSH keys of 8192 bits (say), while at the same time running a telnet daemon which gives root immediately – the latter corresponding to all the unsecured roads, malls, trains, you-name-it.

That is, if we don’t want to specifically protect airports but human lives, we have to consider not only the security gain from increased security in one area, but also whether this reduces the effectivity of attacks overall. If we want to protect one whole server and not just the SSH daemon, we have to consider not only making the SSH daemon as secure as possible but also all the other software running on this server – at which point we notice that it cannot be possibly feasible to secure this thing 100%, because nobody likes going through metal detectors to be allowed to leave their house.
It's very sad to see how the political/militarist propaganda is making an incredibly good job.

> The problem with the most common breed of terrorism is that it is entirely religiously motivated.

What's the religion supposed to be? Destruction of the USA? Do you think that terrorists target USA because it's written in their sacred books?

"Left to themselves, tyranny of the majority will soon ensue in those countries. Left to themselves, tyranny of the majority will soon ensue in those countries. Sure you could just let them take over and leave the problem to future generations"

There are many many countries with such regimes, and the majority of them is left to theirselves. Middle east countries are picked because they serve the political agenda.

Seriously, do you think that countries like Syria are the lucky ones which has been chosen to be "saved"?

And do you think that bombing a country will improve the situation? Hint: it won't.
What I find particularly evil about the TSA is their Pre program that lets you bypass security lines for $85. Mind you, you'll only be granted that sort of privilege after an approval process that requires you submit the non-refundable fee along with an application. So paying $85 doesn't even guarantee you a spot.

It's as if after implementing all this theater, imposing myriads of restrictions, that they realized it was all ineffective, and now they're reframing the entire situation by acting as if they're catering to customers by offering a program that reverts things to how they were a little over a decade ago, but now for a fee.
That was one of the reasons given in Cracked by some former Ben Gurion head of security.

http://www.cracked.com/blog/7-reasons-tsa-sucks-a-security-e...

(yeah I know it is a cracked article, but this time it is different)
And before security checks, they were even more common. Criminals treated them almost like bank robberies for a while in the 60's and 70's. Hijack a plane, trade the passenger for a ransom, fly off to some third-world country and live on the ransom.
When I was 15, I was also creating code. I met some "smart" older guy who worked as a product manager for britannica.com before wikipedia and the first bubble. I asked him for some advice on how to make a career out of it. He said, "you don't want to build shit, you want to manage people. Writing code is for the losers." As a young impressionable kid with no tech mentors, I listened. It took ten years to come back to writing code. Anyways, like the sillysaurus2 said, ignore the critics and keep doing what you love to do.
"The contract is attached to the iPhone"

This phrasing betrays a complete ignorance of how the mobile market works outside of the US. Most markets have decided that a device and the network connection are separate entities and a vast majority of the world's population buys their "device" and "sim card" separately.

Hence a device manufacturer trying to set the price of a related but distinct product (the network connectivity) is something like -- to pick a favorite American analogy -- Ford not only dictating what brand of gasoline you'd put in the car, but also dictating the price you'd pay for that gas.
The population didn't elect Bush II the first time [1]. The electoral college did, making it the fourth time a candidate winning the popular vote didn't win the electorate vote.

Would the alternatives of McCain or Romney have resulted in the current NSA scandal not happening? No, it's silly to think that way, especially because it was happening (on a slightly smaller scale) when Bush was president. How it's being handled now might not be the best way to handle it, but would it have been handled differently with McCain or Romney in the Oval Office?

And making a grand statement about how a vastly large group of people doing something you perceive as not being in their best interest doesn't mean they didn't believe it to be in their best interest.

1: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_presidential_elec...
Sensitive is a relative term. You do development, you install a private key on the VM, you grant that key access to your system in order to test new integration prototype, you delete the VM before you disable the key - and voila, you got private key with access to your systems in a hands of a random stranger. Of course, the solution would be to disable the key access first - but how many devs are trained in security procedures to this level? How many can follow them flawlessly over repeated tedious cycles of development and resist the temptation of make shortcuts?

Proper procedures should make it easy for people to do security, otherwise they are part of the problem.
Meanwhile, in Railslandia, the annoyance is how much time you have to spend updating your old apps that rely on ruby versions or other dependencies that are no longer supported.

I'm annoyed that it's looking like ruby 1.9.3 will be end-of-lifed sometime this spring, and I'm going to have to go and deal with updating a bunch of apps to ruby 2.0 or 2.1; it seems like it was just yesterday I had to spend way too much annoying time updating them all to 1.9.3 in the first place when 1.8.7 was EOL'd.

And don't get me wrong, 1.9.3 is _so_ much better than 1.8; and the update to 2.x will hopefully be not so bad, but it's still time I'm spending on the treadmill instead of new features.

Is there any path between the continual forced march of updates of ruby, and the lack of urgency so nobody ever upgrades of python?
> This is a false equivalency. There are numerous, perfectly good reasons why you should store hashed passwords in a database.

That is precisely his point. The TSA is in place not only to stop terrorist attacks (this is the false equivalency the article's author relied on), but ALSO to defend against a myriad of security risks, one of which happens to be "Terrorism".
> the goal of airport security is NOT to reduce terrorist casualties overall. It is to reduce violent attacks of any kind on airplanes, specifically.

OK, but this is an argument for throwing out airport security entirely. Is that what you meant to say?

If I owned an airline, sure, I'd be all about reducing airline passenger casualties by killing non-passengers somewhere else. But there's no public interest in redirecting attacks; the public interest is in reducing them.

> Look at it in digital terms--it would be like saying that we don't need to bother with strong passwords, because all those did was drive up the number of phishing attacks.

> Does that sound stupid? I hope so, because it is. But that's exactly the type of argument that this article is making.

The phenomenon of a counterbalancing reaction occurring when you make some change to a system is pretty general. How much of the desired effect (reduced casualties, or reduced breaches) of the change you made comes through, vs how much is eliminated by the reaction (increased effort directed to bombing theaters, or sending out phishing attacks), is an empirical matter; the fact that phishing attacks don't rise to nearly the level that password-guessing attacks were at before we started using stronger passwords (incidentally, we have weak passwords now, have always had weak passwords, and it is not generally felt that password strength is where we need to improve our online security), has no implications for the likely reaction of attacks to airport security.

The "type" of the argument is fine; it's broad enough that it can work in one domain and fail in another.
"increasing airport security just leads terrorists to direct their assaults elsewhere"

so in other words, heightened airport security has worked.
It's your perception that the good climber is causing harm to the poorer.

How about this scenario: if the coconuts are equally retrieved, both climbers will have their lives threatened. Is it unfair for one of the climbers to take from the other at that point, when simply by having an equal share they are both threatening the life of each other?

Of course you probably have a difference of opinion from your previous position in this case, though I'm not sure how you'll sort it out.

I don't believe there's any inherent right of the poor climber to demand something from the good one. I think he has the right to exist and compete for the same coconuts, and that wherever that lands him is fair.

I have a big heart, and I'd hope that any better climber would share his coconuts, but I don't believe they should ever be taken from him or that he should be prohibited from climbing just because he's good at it, etc.
this post is a great example of why python 3 didn't go far enough. it's too close to python 2 to be still called python and too far from python 2 to be still called python 2.

personally, coming from a country that needs to deal with non-ascii, i love unicode by default and there are b'' strings if you need them. str.encode is a non-issue - you wasted more words on it than the two-line function enc() it takes to fix it.
As I said, this is a very complex issue, I can't hope to address all your points here but let me try to address an important one.

You are equating science with government enforcement of majority opinion. Think back to the time of Galileo. Why would you want to make this equation?

You want to think that times are different now, that the majority is wiser than it used to be. Why should that be so, exactly?

Imagine that leaders in the software industry could prescribe what languages were "safe" and what weren't. Imagine what that would do to innovation. Isn't it better to let people decide for themselves?

You fear that lack of regulation would lead to unnecessary harm and death. Yet, what of those who are intelligent enough to know the risks and wish to try new things, knowing the possible consequences? What of the cancer patient who is sure to die in 3 months, who wants to try a new experimental drug, but is legally barred from doing so? How can you justify this tyranny?

You wish to protect the ignorant from their own bad choices, but does this make them more intelligent or less? And what of those who are smarter than you, who know better than you, and who you have banned from doing things to help themselves? What of the future people who would have benefited from what they could have learned, that you prevented them from learning?

These are the types of questions you need to be asking yourself. You also need to stop pretending that fraud is allowed on a free market. It is not.
This is a great idea! Airsoft is becoming so popular and using augmented reality to bring perks to real-life is exciting.
Godwin's Law exists for a reason, man.

(signed, a pro-gun liberal who loathes your bad line of reasoning)
This is actually an extremely good idea.

Make it a law or greatly encourage airlines to itemize the TSA inspection fee. Also list the prescreening fee for when they profile all your data before you even get to the airport.

What's crazy is people would be upset about the fee and not the procedure itself.
Perl 6 and Duke Nukem Forever are the geriatric poster children of vaporware, and always will be, even after they finally shipped. Being able to pick up a turd floating in a urinal does not in any way deliver on all the broken promises, rehabilitate the ruined reputation, or make up for all the blustering hype that was spewed for so many years about how superior Duke Nukem Forever's gameplay would be to all the other games that were already on the market. The damage was done a long time ago, and can never be undone. And Perl 6 is perfectly analogous to Duke Nukem Forever. Fortunately, nobody ever made such ridiculous claims about Python 3 as were made about Duke Nukem Forever and Perl 6.
The fact that DigitalOcean have no idea how to secure customer block devices makes me wonder what other security issues they are unaware of.
Just checked the github page for it. Looks interesting and useful. Could be used to push system monitoring data to a browser (among tons of other uses, of course). Trying it out ...
IMHO, nothing is going to happen upon IPv4 exhaustion. IPv4 will become a luxury good whose price will rise quickly.

Which leads me to wonder if the Internet at large isn't at a crossroad. Either IPv6 and Net Neutrality are adopted or a market (and a black market ?) is created for IPv4. Add to that the end of net neutrality and we'll enjoy the return of Compuserve/AOL and the demise of small independent entrepreneurship on the internet because of the higher cost of entry.

Granted, it's worst case scenario, yet not impossible.
It's worth noting that this isn't a cool github account someone's turned up of a surprisingly young programmer, it's a serial publicist [0-2] using primarily a game creation engine (which he doesn't acknowledge upfront) to build low-quality games and display them on an unsightly tumblr page. I think to heap praise on this because of their age alone is patronising. Encouragement absolutely, it's great to see young people interested in programming, but at what age would this has been flagged and removed quickly after posting, 17? 19?

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6864667

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6800925

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6799065
> On the other hand, if you purchase a gun without a license or attempt to hire a contract killer and it turns out to be a police officer you are in contact with, then that sting just save a life, which is good.

How do you know that? How do you know the whole thing wasn't completely created by the police, enticing unstable individuals to do things they would never have done without their help?

Stings are not just "slightly unfair", they are fake and immoral and the people who carry them out are despicable (as this story shows).
I read an insightful comment on Reddit regarding yesterday's Russia train station bombings. It went something like "Because of the long lines due to slow security screening, terrorists are opting to target the long lines at airports or train stations instead of targeting the planes."

So, yea, TSA isn't going to fix that unless you have screening before the screening, and then you just have another line.
I'm not coming up with much when I search for cognitive overload being debunked or being a myth. Do you remember the name of the study?

I agree that willpower and motivation are separate issues but I'd be curious to see further references on the issue.
Well, it's a good thing then that you can't make a direct comparison between the two OSes. Apple doesn't care about developers, quickly deprecating APIs. Therefore, targeting an Apple OS that's 1.5 years old is much more tedious than targeting a Microsoft OS that's 1.5 years old.
That's true, the rules of private sales can vary from state to state.

But it is absolutely in your best interest to record the details of a private gun sale for your own protection. If you purchased the gun at a licensed shop then your name is on record with the Federal government (US) for purchasing that weapon. If the gun turns up at a crime scene then you will most likely be getting a knock on your door at some point. Hopefully it's a friendly knock but you never know with the police these days wanting to show off their breaching skills.

In fact, I would never do a private sale of a gun, I would do so through a licensed dealer so that the same checks done to me would be done to the new owner.
They did what seemed obvious. They created a security bureaucracy, and gave it a ton of resources and a free hand.

Now, they can't stop it without looking "soft on terror". This is how bureaucracy goes awry (see "War on Drugs" for another example).
CentOS keeps the same major version of everything through the entire life of the OS; so, five years plus two more for vital security updates. This is by design, and a completely reasonable choice.

Often, you can install additional packages that bring newer versions into the system, but they don't become the "default". So, for PHP in CentOS 5, there was a php53 package (and maybe later ones, too, I dunno), that installed alongside the standard php package and didn't break compatibility but gave users the option of using a newer PHP version.

I'm pretty sure Python 3 is available in CentOS repos (it certainly has been in Fedora repos for a long time). It's just not the default system Python you get when you type "python".
pip warnings on non maintained packages perhaps?
You know what this leads to? Kids never getting anything accomplished. By keeping the scope simple and building with established assets, he was able to actually release something.

I encourage my kids to yoink assets for their projects. Once you've succeeded a bit, and feel comfortable with one piece of the puzzle, by all means, work on the next and make custom characters and graphics. It is non-trivial skill and experience, and come later.
He is chalking up a lot of things that existed before 9/11 to the TSA. 15 years ago we all still had to stand in line to go through metal detectors to get into the terminal. Also how can you compare loading time on a 9 passenger Cessna 402 to something like a 737-300 that can hold 120 people? That's silly. It takes more time to board larger planes than smaller ones and that has nothing to do with security.

I go through the TSA screening several times a month, and while I don't appreciate the invasion of privacy, it isn't really that big of a pain in the ass to stand in line for a few minutes and put all your bags through the scanner.
I strongly disagree with this.

When learning, quantity is often more important than quality. If you try to learn by building one big project to be as perfect as possible, you'll always be slowed down by the bad decisions you made early on. By building lots of smaller projects, you don't need to spend time refactoring and regression testing and whatnot, you just finish the current project and use your newly gained knowledge to better build the next.
I don't think the point is that he's produced a ton of useful things, but rather that he's completed a an awful lot of projects and has thus built a lot of useful experience for himself at a young age. At 15, I was still hand copying BASIC from the back of a magazine into my Tandy 1000.
I am not sure if you meant it that way but that came across as insulting.
Well, they can still shower shrapnel over a large area and crash into the ground, right? I'm not really sure what kind of bomb would actually explode a plane, or what kind of damage it could do on the ground as an undirected crash landing/explosion.
I don't think this would be an issue, since to have a world where people live longer, you also need to have fewer kids. You can only practice ageism if you have a surplus at the young end.
"the goal of airport security is"

to provide security theater. It would be a heck of a lot cheaper and more effective to just play rambo movies on the inflight entertainment system.
The author laments "all the waste that one stupid government policy can generate." But there seems to be little hope that any of it will go away any time soon.

Why? Because of a statement I've seen attributed to Karl Denninger[0]: "One man's waste, fraud, abuse, scam, and theft is another man's paycheck."

If there were no need for TSA-compliant messenger bags, Timbuk2 would likely see a drop in revenues. If there were no TSA, a whole bunch of people employed as TSA agents would be out of work. I'd expect everyone making money off the current system of security theater to fight tooth and nail to preserve the money they're making.

[0] See e.g. http://www.market-ticker.org/akcs-www?singlepost=3149840
That's reductio ad absurdum if I've ever heard it.

That's like saying "all the army has done is ensure that someday an enemy will attack with weapons so devastating that the entire country will be destroyed in one foul swoop."
Depends on what you mean, but as one example, you don't have to take your shoes off in most EU airports, which is really really nice...