skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Why would Robert Scoble compare Apple’s iWatch & Google Glass together? These two things are totally different. One is smart watch where as other one is a wearable computer. I don't get it. Then he goes on giving everyone meaning Microsoft and Google fair chance of disrupting market with some if logic. And, finally he says there won’t be any truly new-new things in 2014 which will be just refinement rather than revolution. But, what about other tech companies beyond these three biggies? They have as good as chance of disrupting the market with some new innovation.
So much pop Keynesianism spreading real misunderstandings. I really wish people who argued against deflation would take the time to understand the underlying theories.

Deflation means, that the most fundamental law of finance is broken. The law, that says: It is much better to be given one dollar today, than to have one dollar next year.

Deflation does not break this law. It is always better to be given one bitcoin now than one bitcoin in the future - if you get it now you have the option of spending it, which has value. (If 1 BTC is worth 4 bags of pot today and 5 next year, 1 BTC in a year is worthless to me if I want to smoke now.)

He then argues that investment vehicles with a positive rate of return reduces consumption. This is true of both BTC and SPY. Unless bitcoin has the highest rate of return of all investment vehicles, the effect on consumption is irrelevant. I.e., if bitcoin has a return rate of 1% and SPY has a return rate of 2%, bitcoin will not affect the savings rate or reduce consumption [1].

If you are worried about people investing in bitcoin, consumption is irrelevant - the worry is that people will shift investments from SPY to BTC.

The fundamental problem with deflationary currencies is nominal rigidity. If you argue against deflation without mentioning this, you don't know what you are talking about.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nominal_rigidity

tl;dr; Go learn Keynesian economics from a textbook that does math and carefully states assumptions. Don't learn it from newspaper columns.

[1] I oversimplify slightly. Since SPY and BTC are likely to be minimally correlated with each other, you can construct portfolios of both securities which will likely have a higher risk-adjusted return SPY alone. So the portfolio rate of return might go up a few bps, and consumption will shift a little bit towards investment. This is a small effect.
Wait for the Chinese clones of this that every idiot will retrofit to their car, thereby endangering everyone on the road like the do now with their illegal blue headlights.
The Next Data Privacy Battle May Be Waged Inside Your Car
Israel's ex-PM Ariel Sharon dies, aged 85
The part about credit sounds a bit fishy.

Ordinary people deposit money in the bank, and the bank goes then and invest it. If the investment is a success, the bank pockets the profit and repays the deposited money back when asked. If the investment fails, government steps in and repays the deposited money.

How is that system connected with currency, and why should its existence be critical for society?
Such posts, and similar sentiments voiced by likes of Paul Krugman, make me think that Bitcoin is doing the right thing.
There is far from a consensus on the dire consequences of implementing a gold standard. Just as one example: http://mises.org/daily/5379/
I googled "yellow phosphorus," and this page, run by an Angelo State University professor, says that it's the same as white phosphorus, which I understood to be dangerous.

http://www.angelo.edu/faculty/kboudrea/demos/burning_phospho...

The page explains: "White phosphorus is highly reactive, and spontaneously ignites at about 30°C in moist air. It is usually stored under water, to prevent exposure to the air. It is also extremely toxic, even in very small quantities."

Aside from cutting power to the headlights, I wonder how BMW keeps the white phosphorus from causing trouble during a crash.
Link is returning "page does not exist"
Yet another person who doesn't realize that the financial markets will price any predictable deflation into Bitcoin , as fast as they can predict it, until it is not longer deflating.
This: http://max.io/theories-on-artificial-expression/

Tl;dr: AI for Artistic Expression.
No, but Germany, for instance, isn't trying to whitewash history in its schoolbooks.
How does it compare to the algorithm used in FLAC or mpeg4 lossless? Is there a reasonable way to benchmark the differences?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Golomb_coding#Simple_algorithm
> It is not impossible to conceive of malicious code being able to exploit an unpatched browser flaw and overdrive the motor to destruction.

The vibrator motors used in phones are not that fragile and vibrate being stuck on will more likely just annoy you and drain the battery faster than usual -- that is, until you get annoyed enough to pull it out.

(Maybe annoy you, as a quick search shows plenty of people who want their phone to vibrate continuously... for whatever reason.)
Suiker- en glutenvrije seitan gezonde vleesvervanger: seitan op z’n Chinees
About nine person out of ten I know aren't aware of the fact that the rear view mirror in most cars can be manually set to "night mode". The rear view mirror has two positions: one for day-time and one for night-time (which dims the brightness of other cars' headlights).

There's a manual switch which accepts two position and which is located on the back of your rear view mirror.

It's something you need to switch manually twice a day: once in the morning to put it back in "day mode" and once at night, when it becomes dark. You don't need to reconfigure anything: the position of the rear-view mirror stays correct and you continue "viewing the same thing", just dimmed enough as to not be blinded by bright headlights in your rear-view mirror.

Honestly, as I wrote earlier, most people I know who drive cars are totally unaware of that switch even though they're driving since 20 years.
Author's reasoning suffers from the problem of trying to apply old models into new environments.

For instance, the mentioning of impossibility of credit, or how that manufacturers won't be able to finance new products with a long-ish development cycle, and how that is only beneficial for the wealthy.

He would be right if we lived in a world where the only possible way to do business is to create the product first and sell it later. I would argue the opposite. Futures markets already exist. I can buy a house when it is still just a blueprint and a folder with nice pictures. In fact, I wish people could do the same with phones, groceries, clothes, electricity...

The more certainty we have about money flowing around, the easier it is to have efficient financial products. The less risk there is. And the less risk there is, the easier it is to provide credit affordable to everyone, including the little guy.
Some explanation, Politicians limited the salary for ceo's of public companies where the governement has 51 % of the stocks. Interesting fact, there is a politician in the board of the directors.. oh yeah, there are elections soon...

Remember the county with the world record without governement. Jup, that was Belgium :-)
You could move some of the pics to your own server, leaving AWS to handle growth in storage only. The raw costs could be very significant, though most likely you would need another person to create that system make it fast, which in SF probably means losing all the gains at that scale.
I know people in the bitcoin world are sometimes overzealous and can sound like salespeople...

...However, it's articles like this that make me glad that bitcoin doesn't need much PR and will succeed (or fail) on its own merits.

No matter hour much baloney like this gets written, this guy and others like him can't stop people from using bitcoins, thankfully.

<sarcasm>

The dollar will never work because it's an inflationary currency, and if your money is worth less tomorrow than it was today no one would ever save anything and society would collapse the first time there is a drought or other calamity.

</sarcasm>
I don't even believe it's possible in the philosophical sense, but definitely AI. I would love to be able to create something that not only could pass the turing-test, but which could interact with its environment, and more importantly, be stimulating and entertaining to me.

Imagine an actual worthwhile conversation with a computer program that can interact with the world.

My stars.
No, it would be called "nut-hugging".
You did not bother to elucidate the point that you claim you were making. Instead providing just a single supporting example to illustrate an argument to generality. Even if we allow that "most countries' politicians" is supported by that single example and that the example is apt, your position on Japanese / US behaviour is only implied. I read it as "it's OK for [smaller country] as long as [bigger country] does it." My interpretation might well be wrong, but you could certainly do better in saying what you mean.
Well -- or just find a "no questions asked" retailer.
Actually, since PG is male, people defending him can't "white knight", since the term is quite specific (read redthrowaway's definition of it). OTOH it could in some way be applied to his proponents, seeing them as more general "white knights" in the defense of women in general only with the interest in what the term describes as the goal (per redthrowaway's definition).
There is a concept in mechanical engineering where something can have a "normally closed position." You see this often with valves. The idea is that the normal resting position of the actuator prevents flow throw the valve. The effect is that the valve automatically shuts itself in the event of power loss or system failure. I presume they have implemented something similar. I might guess that the lasers may not be turned on if the system cannot somehow validate the integrity of the lens the lasers shine into. Same thing with the part that cuts or provides power to the laser. It's been a while since I studied circuits as a mechanical engineering undergrad, but I believe that you can also design circuits that behave in a similar fashion.
I don't get why pg felt the need to write this post and don't think he should have. The last post clarifying his out of context comments was enough, but continually emphasizing "I am not a sexist" (when the majority of people don't believe it anyway) makes him seem self conscious and actually dignifies the argument that genus a sexist.

I think he should have written that last post, then released a post about how he expects 2014 to be for VCs or something and changed the conversation from this ycomb sexism foolishness.
Ideally, but who says things will be automated in that order?

The crazy thing is that when people are suffering, there is work to be done. If the 30%+ unemployed in that scenario could reorganize themselves into servicing each others needs, they would surely want to do that.
Maybe you have a nice subtle meaning for it, but 98% of the time it's used to describe any man who defends any woman for any reason, generally with the implication "I can't imagine any reason a dude would be nice to a lady except to get sex." It says more about the speaker than the subject.
NB: "highway" doesn't mean multi-lane controlled-access expressway or freeway. It's any road open to the public, though generally between towns (as opposed to a local surface street). In the UK it can refer to footpaths as well as vehicular roads.
>I will assume that we agree on the following statement

>To back this up

If we assume that there is no need to back it up afterwards. Why would you need to prove an assumption?
It has been advertised on the London underground here for a few weeks now with a January release date.
Part of it is that we don't expect any better of the DoJ. Being asshats is their job. But MIT, they're an icon and they've let us down.
FREE IM Coaching (it will be not there forever)
A new method stops cancer from becoming metastatic.
Proponents of the gold standard also ignore the slightly-less recent past of currency crises in Europe and Asia in the 80s and 90s, all due to fixed currency exchanges (which is basically just a variant of the gold standard, with gold being replaced by whatever basket you're using). The fact that we were able to print our way out of a crisis of confidence is a good thing, because in a gold standard world we couldn't do anything of the sort. A credit freeze would have lasted a lot longer.
Kinda strange, I cannot find the manuscript and not even his homepage (http://otelbaev.com) is updated.

Wouldn't one expect this to be reported either after a successful peer review or after publication of a preprint?

His citation index is not very convincing either http://scholar.google.com/citations?user=CU2sU8YAAAAJ

Smells fishy.
I really liked how you challenged the assumption of the entire post. I was waiting for someone to do that. This post was partially motivated by some personal situations but also because of an email exchange with an entrepreneur that was insisting his economic comfort was due to 'working his ass off'. When I mentioned that field workers work their ass off and are basically poor, he didn't respond. So I guess you had that one sussed.
Some solid-state lasers have pretty high efficiencies, as much as 74% in this case: http://phys.org/news/2011-05-scientists-high-efficiency-cera...

I think I've seen references to 50-60% efficiency for production lasers, though I could be mistaken on that. Given the very low efficiency of lighting systems in general (incandescent bulbs waste 95%+ of input energy, even CFLs and LEDs are in 20-40% range AFAIR), that's very high.
I can't even understand american sexism. Why do you divide coders, founders etc by gender? Why do you count gender statistics and want to change it? It's like Soviet Union in late 1920s but even more strange.
Yeah, every business cycle except the current one, when bitcoin takes over :-)
> You still believe in Hollywood-style good guys and bad guys?

Not all beliefs in good guys and bad guys are hollywood-style.

> Do you think that the Japanese believed then that they were the bad guys?

No, but I do think they were among the bad guys.

If everyone says "I'm not racist", you probably don't say "oh good, that's okay then" and decide racists don't exist.
>Fact is, without such freedom, banks would not exist.

Ok, if you say so. But wait, this is the next sentence:

>Or their functioning would be severely limited.

Oh, so the fact that banks would not exist is not a fact anymore?
Ariel Sharon, Fierce Defender of a Strong Israel, Dies at 85
Meh. I wasn't all that surprised by the NSA revelations. I think Snowden is a traitor and the US government (like any government) has legitimate reasons to spy on people.

The problem with this "movement" is that it fails to make an argument for its beliefs. It's just pure group-think.

> Today we face a different threat, one that undermines the Internet, and the notion that any of us live in a genuinely free society: mass surveillance.

An NSA data mining robot reading my facebook wall is no more a threat to my freedom than Google reading my gmail. The threat comes from the abuse of that information: that some politician (or Google employee) has it out for me and blackmails me (or something like that). Maybe I'll get upset when we have evidence of that happening a bunch.

And though many people don't believe it anymore, there is in fact a real threat on the other side of this: there are actual terrorists in the world who want to kill Americans.

Now here's something I can't figure out: the very people up in arms about the NSA spying on us think that it's a great idea for the government to know all the most intimate details of my life via a government-run single-payer healthcare system.

Uncle Sam reading my latest tweet seems a whole lot less intrusive on my freedom than him telling me I must go to the doctor, get insurance, quit smoking, lose some weight, not eat or drink certain kinds of foods...
> It's been a year since Aaron Swartz died at the hands of federal prosecutors.

I find it quite distasteful that the lawyers' info are linked in the two words "federal" and "prosecutors".

Also, and this is just my personal opinion again, I generally don't like when people assume what the dead (in this case, Swartz) would have wanted and wouldn't have wanted, as the post does all throughout.

That said, I think what they are doing is really great, and the post itself is rather well written (besides from my earlier points). Best of luck to PlainSite on the rest of their venture.
The Rust language: memory, ownership and lifetimes - Nicholas Matsakis
>a certain percentage are poor because their moral character is defective

That's really not fair in my opinion. You could say the same about the wealthy. I grew up in relative poverty in a wealthy environment and I really would say that character deficits can be found in the same percentages across the board. The difference may be that the wealthy don't have a need to expose their desperation in such public ways and if you're thinking of things like thievery and drug abuse you may be seeing things through a certain lens (not to assume anything about you personally).
That's one fugly blog.
As stated in the first sentence... I wasn't arguing against your points.
There was a time when high-quality articles got upvoted on HN.
Lock-free Multi-producer Multi-consumer Queue on Ring Buffer
Work queue has always been one of the most hot points in server software.
Here is how to scale it effectively to multi-core environment.
The confidence is not in the currency or the central bank.

The confidence (of the markets) is that the central bank (on behest of the government) will use currency as a tool in order to ensure that economies dont sink due due to negative outlook on the future.

There is nothing stopping central banks from creating their own cryptocurrency and controlling it by controlling all the mining (and hence being able to change the rules of deflation/inflation set into protocol). In fact a "bit-dolla" could probably be used much more effectively as such a tool since everyone would know what everyone else has as blockchain is public. Would these banks have gotten "too big too fail" if their "wallet addresses" were public?
Or maybe they had something happen to them or someone they know? Maybe they had someone's head on their shoulder crying their heart out? Maybe they tried standing up for them and were fired? Maybe for whatever reason they really understand what it feels like in a world where most people don't.

I'm one of those rage-queens you so happily deride here. I know it myself. I became one after I complained about a manager openly discriminating against gay employees and having everyone involved in the complaint, except for the manager in question, mysteriously being let go in the three months that followed.

Plenty of those "sexism-accusers" probably have similar stories so, pardon my language, but go fuck yourself for pretending we're all just some spoiled middle class rage warriors.
Linux: scaling softirq among many CPU cores 
How to scale efficiently on multi-gigabit traffic on multi-core machine.
If you are being asked to interview candidates (especially if you are being asked to coordinate/lead the interviews), then you should also have the time/bandwidth to do the follow-up work with the candidates, even if that means sending them a canned response.

Another comment noted that we're talking about common human decency here--a candidate took time out of their schedule to spend a good chunk of a day (likely more, counting phone screens and travel), and someone can't take a few minutes to even respond to an email. I'm not sure I'd want to work with/under someone like that.
Maybe I missed tptacek's tweet both times

relevant> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6986829
"If Google can't protect its datacenter traffic from the NSA, or from the law, what makes you think DDG can operate outside the law or protect itself from NSA snooping?"

It's not just a question of NSA snooping, some of us simply do not want our online behaviour tracked and recorded by companies to such an invasive degree.

DDG does not know when I print to my desktop printer or how often (but Google does if I'm using ChromeOS).

DDG does not know my journey within different websites, but Google does via it's analytics service.

DDG does not stitch together seemingly disparate journeys that I make online (e.g. browsing a product on a shopping site that uses Google Anlaytics, then going to YouTube to search for said product - Google undoubtedly connects these journeys)

DDG does not record every website I visit, every link I click. Google does if I'm using ChromeOS or if I'm signed into a Google account and using the Chrome browser.

DDG can not track my online behvaviour across desktop (Chrome and ChromeOS), mobile (Android) and tablet (Android) to the degree that Google can.

The extent to which Google can track and record online behaviour simply has no equal among online companies. No company that collects such a staggering amount of data about users should be free from scrutiny.

And finally, it's also about taking a principled stand rather than just shrugging your shoulders and thinking "Well, the NSA will snoop on me whatever service I use, so I'll just stick with Google even if I don't like their online practices"
It's not uncommon for VCs to have policies of not funding competitive startups, it's in their own interests as well as the startups.

If a VC has funded two competitors it means the startups become reluctant to share information with the VC, the founders of the first startup become unhappy with the VC and follow-on rounds become very messy and cause bad politics.

Certainly it happens (in some cases due to pivots, etc.) but I imagine it's something that most funds would prefer to avoid.
The Simple Trade System-bestcbstore.com
Oooh! Nice to see this on HN! If anyone has played soldat, this is a neat free alternative and one of the more polished opensource games today.
NSA's organizational structure
This is a cool paper, I love recommeender ideas. I've always set up a multi algorithm bake off for live systems. And every time, showing a block of popular links, either globally, or in the category gathers more clicks than any smarter algorithm. YMMV, but I always found this depressing!

Popular is popular is clicks.
First Month of Remote Work
> ...I know no modern country that currently adheres to gold standard and no plans for its return have emerged across a large number of economical cycles. This leads us to believe that the decision to abandon it was backed by real economical incentives to do so, not emotional or political.

Most "modern" countries also want to spy on their citizens, curb free speech, and spend their way out of debt. Since most of them do it, their decisions must have been backed by real incentives, not emotional or political. /s

The gold standard at least kept the money almost sane, but now any government can print as much money as they want. Inflation created as a result is one of the biggest hidden taxes on the poor there is. Giving governments a monopoly on the money supply is part of the reason our current currencies are worth less and less every year.

My favorite aspect of Bitcoin is that it isn't created by committee, and no secret team of government economists gets to control the supply. I personally think Bitcoin in particular will be supplanted by something better, but I can't wait until crypto-currencies become the norm and we look back to see that the naysayers were on the wrong side of history.