skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Human imagination cannot "trump" billions of years of random interaction of an untold amount of matter and the pressures of natural selection on self replicating organisms. The natural world may not have such high a density of activity as any created virtual world, and so it is different, but the universe makes up for its relative homogeneity by being big. Very, very big. So big that we can do no more than helplessly invent the exponent to help us cope with the size of it all.

Until we have the computational ability to simulate all possible permutations of the universe there will always be much to explore because no matter what technology you create, its own creativity is bound by the culture which gave birth to it. If intelligent life and advanced civilizations are even remotely likely, there will be many different forms of imaginations and virtual worlds created around the universe, each born of a distinctly different culture or artificial intelligence shaped by a distinctly different history (unless there is a global optimum towards which all greater intelligences converge on, essentially a global optimum for natural selection).

If you were born on earth and learned an earth language as your first, how do you come up with a language that is entirely uninfluenced by the culture you grew up in, a brand new protolanguage? How do you even confirm that anything you created is so new that it stands entirely outside of your culture's previous ingrained assumptions and interpretation of reality? If your imagination (and thus the collective imagination of the civilization) is bounded, as it is by language, your education, etc., how do you know it can ever "trump" everything this big, big universe has to offer?
Turkish users want their reviews to be seen. This sounds narcissistic to us, but for a lot of people being asked for their opinion of a product is a big deal. Rather than condemning the users, we should look for ways to improve the UX of the Google Play Store.

There could be cultural factors at play here as well. When I was growing up in Turkey, every so often there would be a fad that picked obscure artefacts of American culture and turned them into articles of social prestige. Cheesy American soap operas, songs and actors would suddenly and inexplicably become national sensations that everyone had to know. I assume something similar is going on with the Android Play Store reviews. Having your review on the frontpage of an app had become a point of pride, so much so that users are subverting the system to get there.
>There, in the company of jailed reporters in China, Iran and Egypt, is Mr. Shuler, the only person on the list in the Western Hemisphere.

Their list is out of date then.

http://freebarrettbrown.org/
I fear becoming what you described, I'm feeling what you described 3-4 months of of the year and it seems to increase a bit each year. Trying to force myself a bit less work, and more of the enriching things in life - it helps, just need to be consistent.

The good news for you is that your'e still breathing, so your opportunities to find love and fun exist. Be well...
The NSA is going to attack the weakest link in the chain. This proposal has some merit for hardening software against trojan and malware attacks, but realistically, the majority of people are running Firefox on top of Windows and OSX, and if governments want to plant surveillance, we know it's trivially easy to do so, especially on Windows.

Looking at the Snowden revelations, the NSA was attacking the client and server, but the server side a lot more. PRISM and MUSCULAR, plus intercepting people's actual hardware deliveries and implanting backdoors before FedEx even places the computer on your doorstep.

On top of all that, is actual browser security of the runtime. Do we have any evidence historically of government injected, or even large-org injected backdoors into open source projects in their closed source bits? Isn't it far more likely that the spooks would leverage traditional exploits of buffer overflows and use-after-free bugs to do their work? It seems as if we have evidence of the NSA maintaining a huge catalog of zero-day exploits to deploy.

In the end, if you are running Firefox on anything but an open source operating system, you can't verify the compete system. In this extent, Richard Stallman's warnings over the years have turned out right. Even down to the firmware in your harddrive, bios, or radio chip, binary blobs pose a threat.
I've seen that some bootcamps take a cut of salary. That feels so icky, like I'm taxing someone's ability to feed their family. On the flip side I do see a win/win in that they only have to pay me if I actually helped. I guess I'll have to see how people feel about paying up front vs the salary tax.
But that doesn't answer the GP's worry about lookup cost. The thing is, it is hard to keep direct references in a nested data structure (like a graph or tree) even in a language that supports direct references.

An example:
I want to create a tree in which each node keeps a track of its children as well as its parent. AFAIK, it is impossible to keep track of both children and parent (with direct references) in an immutable data structure.
I think maybe the whole concept here is based on a false premise, and the solution being offered, even if the premise was true, is a bad one.

First the premise; "software only needs to be paid for once" -in most cases I'd argue it is. A closed-source package for example (say, like, Windows) is a simple one-time purchase. Lots of people may be paying, and yes this company making it makes a profit, but the cost to 1 user is only a tiny fraction of the cost that it cost to make. Of course most closed-source software doesn't make money at all, never mind the scale of money windows makes, so Windows is an outlier here in terms of profit vs cost.

Indeed most companies probably end up making a loss, and going out of business. Maybe that means the model is broken, or maybe it's just inevitable that most of the software being created, closed or open, is pretty much crap.

Now to the proposed solution. Which can be summarized as "design by committee" - ill put in x$ if you complete feature y which I want. With the community dictating how much they'll spend and on what, I don't think an elegant well-thought-out beautiful product will be the result. Designing a whole system is often best done by the person who has the Vision of where the project is going, even if it takes 10 years to get there.

Yes, developers need to eat. Which is why the big open-source projects are funded in some way (like Mozilla is funded by google.) the little projects tend to get no funding of any kind. And even big projects (like say jquery) get by mostly on donated programmer time, not cash of their own.

I appreciate that many developers are between a rock and a hard place. They want to write whatever they like, and not have to work for some employer, but at the same time they want to get paid. But freedom comes at a price. And "doing whatever you like" is seldom paid for. And indeed the proposed model here is suggesting that a bunch of people will become your boss, and tell you what to do. Which I guess means you might as well just go off and get a job instead.
Show HN: FOLO, a sci-fi mono-wheel based electronics toy
While Google Music has a hard limit, if you use Google Music All Access you don't need to upload your songs, you can add any music they have to your library without that counting as part of your 20000 songs limit.

I don't know anything about iTunes Radio, but I have a feeling it's fairly similar in that respect.
In my opinion this is result of Facebook's focus on gathering information and capitalizing on it, which turned attention away from data quality and product (ads) quality.
They are not criminal, but it's possible to get a court order that says "cut it out", and failing to comply with that does lead to penalties such as being held in contempt.

If they believe that the order is flawed, the correct way to go forward is to still comply, then raise the case in a higher court. Not complying only means that the judge can hold him in jail for the rest of his life if he chooses to, without any impropriety.
Could be accounted for by apps with poor localization.
Visa and MasterCard don't own the terminal... The merchant banks or businesses do.
More well-known U.S. retailers victims of cyber attacks
Right, the trouble with RAM is that if someone wants to keep a pile of data in memory, it has to stay loaded. I would hazard a guess that memory consumption on servers tends to be much less spiky than CPU is, and that's part of why a "DigitalOcean of RAM" is difficult to do.
Worth noting that BitStamp has double the volume of gox recently. And Stamp actually acts like a liquid company, getting people their money without fuss.
My interpretation is best viewed through an example.

There are lots of mail newsletter providers (mailchimp, constant contact, etc.)

They aren't trying to compete against each other. Rather, they are trying to compete against nothing -- people with no ESP.
That isn't a fair comparison because your scope is only showing you an extremely precise, narrow view of the problem. It would be like having a software debugger that could show you the past and present state for all time slices of the values of the processor registers. For application-level debugging. it would be completely useless.
Why? It and Solaris are the only even somewhat known OSs that are 100% POSIX complaint...

All that aside, I understand completely not wanting a Mac. I don't know about the BSDs, but Thinkpads are wonderful with Linux.
How is that any worse security than keeping money in a bank account?
Evolution is actually quite horrible at engineering. Since it can only hill-climb, we end up with ridiculous designs stuck in local maxima. Evolution made video cameras out of jelly, a breathing tube that must be crammed full of solid foods every few hours, and (as Neil deGrasse Tyson put so delicately) a sewage plant next to an amusement park. No organism ever evolved radio communication, or the ability to transmit nerve signals faster than 0.000001c.

Still, why 8 hours of sleep instead of 2? The best explanation I've heard is famine resistance. Sleep conserves energy; until recently, humans were calorie-limited. Also, there's probably an advantage to remaining quiet and still in the dark, when human eyesight is at its worst and predators roam.
Data Mining Algorithms Map
You seem to have a lot of opinions on the right way to do this. What experience do you have that would encourage others to give weight to your opinions? Perhaps you can share a couple of your notable successes and a couple of instructive failures.

Having talked with a lot of people you consider "disadvantaged" about this, they mostly disagree with you. As do plenty of other people.

I personally find the framing of privilege useful in evaluating and improving my own actions, as well as evaluating the actions of others. Having never heard of Peggy McIntosh before this moment, I can confidently say that I'm not really interested in her definitions of who's privileged and who's not.

Having been born white, I do of course recognize that I didn't pick that. I don't think people are responsible for things they have zero control over. But when those things give them power, I do think they are responsible for how they use it.
My strategy is not actually always-cooperate, and I don't fathom how you got that from my words.
so swap the reference to the opsec of Overstock with coinbase's.

as soon as there's enough money, well funded organizations will start attacking, and robbing a bitcoin wallet is probably less risky than a bank...
if you are competing against non consumption, how do they stand out from each other?
Does using Bitcoin avoid the trip to the local government tax agency with $51,000 in hard currency? They'll accept payments in anything, as long as anything is US dollars.

Does using Bitcoin help assist someone who has a debit card purchase marijuana? Bear in mind that this person is likely non-technical. They're also physically present at a marijuana distributor, and sufficiently difficult processes will cost them a 30 minute car drive to another marijuana distributor, who transacts via cash and an ATM or using the ATm->distributor's account loophole.

Does using Bitcoin help Totally Not A Marijuana Dispensary LLC avoid the scrutiny of its bank's compliance department such that they can maintain a business bank account, write checks to employees and vendors, demonstrate a credible revenue/expense history and thereby secure credit, and otherwise plug into the mainstream financial system? For example, will large wire transfers coming in from an identifiable company in Tokyo, or their cutouts, raise less flags than dealing in equivalent amounts of cash, like every pizzeria, car wash, laundromat, video arcade, etc in America?

The last one might not be obvious, so as someone who has extensive experience with American and Japanese banks doing routine wire transfers between each other: this reads as Very Effing Exotic to risk/compliance officers and even if you're utterly aboveboard you'll be asked to explain yourself a lot. I get to have a quick chat with the manager of my bank branch for every single wire, and let's just say it is a very good thing that I have a US passport, an accountant on speed dial, a stack of invoices and contracts, sterling credit, and the interconnected stack of social privileges which let me convince skeptical people that I'm an "international professional" rather than "drug dealer" in five minutes of conversation.
This is why Haskell (ST)
and Clojure (transients) provide local mutable state in the form of "linear types" where it is impossible to read a mutable value outside of tightly controlled conditions.

As Guy Steele wrote, "Lambda, the ultimate imperative"
> I don't doubt that Bitcoin will become a revolutionary system of payments and money storage down the track

The tone I get from your comment makes me wonder if you really understood what GP meant. You could be both right, as in BTC being very useful to a lot of people, but still overinflated.
This is pretty obviously where terry pratchett got his idea for, and subsequent implementation for his (ostensibly fictional) game "thud" or "Hnaflbaflwhiflsnifltafl" in pratchett's dwarvish.

Looks like it's wikia page needs an update.

http://discworld.wikia.com/wiki/Thud_(game)
I'd try to remove complexity, not increase it, starting from:

(1) Replace HTML/Javascript with a Lisp and the browser with a REPL.

(2) Make a processor that executes only core Lisp axioms; there would be no other processor instructions.

(It would be comical if history found chip manufacturers to have over-engineered 99% of the problem.)

(3) Replace the Internet with a distributed, single address-space operating system. You won't have to worry about ssh-ing into and between hoards of cloud machines, or to install software; there will only be "The Computer", and you will be logged in when your computer starts.

(If there was only one way to make Linux irrelevant, this might be it.)

Programs can call any part of any other program in The Computer through Lisp function calls. The value here is the simplification of the programming model; no more APIs.

(4) Build a smartphone that is connected to The Computer and can be programmed only in Lisp.

(5) Write an AI program or mobile app that tells you the truth. You can ask it philosophical and life questions and it gives you congruent answers.

You can feed it HackerNews comments, it can reason about them and respond (or not respond). Like an Eliza or SHRDLU chatting up HackerNews users in the middle of a flamewar.

(6) Make future computers start with only one program, nothing else. No System preferences, no Facetimes, no browser, and definitely no windows and virtual desktops; just The Computer.

Possibly train humans to understand doing less and keeping things simple is good for them (I'm not entirely sure if it is.)
holy crap this is awesome stuff for those that are clueless about the data mining topic.
I usually start by writing comments first in plain English based on a variation of psuedocode. That way I'm focused on process first without distraction. Comments are the plan. Clearly articulated steps like any good cookbook. Easy to translate into any language.

// 1. Write plain English psuedocode.

// 2. Translate into scary looking code blocks.

// 3. If maintaining, remember to update comments first (goto Step 1, then Step 2).

The irony is another developer once claimed that my code was generated by a machine. Apparently it was too methodical to be human. Like that was some excuse for him to write crappy code. Urgh! To be great at anything, you need to have excellent communication skills!
Evidence suggests Kaczynski participated in MKULTRA:

http://www.theatlantic.com/past/docs/issues/2000/06/chase.ht...

If so, this would have been a likely explanation for his chosen direction.
You surely shared this so I can weigh in. No? Not really? Well, here's my opinion anyway. In this infographic Bret Victor claims that expecting college education to prepare you for a day job is an invalid idea. He also implies that an opinion of an MIT mathematician is inherently more trustworthy and correct than opinions of dozens of business leaders, politicians, educators, astronauts, and, oh, Stephen Hawking (“Whether you want to uncover the secrets of the universe, or you just want to pursue a career in the 21st century, basic computer programming is an essential skill to learn.“). Oh, you missed that in his infographic? It's probably because it conveniently wasn't there. Check out the full list at http://code.org/quotes

But really, is it fair to compare a long, structured statement with brief quotes that are meant to be an effective marketing tool? Before you cringe at the dirty m-word, consider what is being marketed here. Kids now learn creationism, liberal arts, and opinionated history at school. Coding is a refreshingly logical, concrete and objective field of study. It's worth getting it to the 90% of high schools that don't teach it yet, even if it ends up being trivial if-then-else turtle-make-30-steps-forward. We're at a time where it's more about simply getting the foot in the door.

Then again, it's easier to fire up Illustrator and call bullshit on an initiative to bring more rational education to the curriculum. This is the depth of thought that powers elitism and the status quo. Snarky infographics that suggest that programming is worthless without tying it to specific so called Powerful Ideas are harmful. Even if they're drawn by a world-class designer and electrical engineer. Or maybe especially then.
I read somewhere that it takes 15 years to become a professional at anything. So when I started, I told myself that I had 15 years to get it right, and to not give up before then. Has served me well, as I have improved significantly over time and feel the odds of when I get to the 15th year, I will be pleased with the outcome and with the journey.
Is it fair to equivocate the one or two sentence front-page hooks to the thinking that these people do on a regular basis?

edit: intriguing that ambivalence and I posted almost the same thing simultaneously!
Only half that statement is true. Twitter has tons and tons of custom infrastructure. Most of those projects are largely built and maintained by Twitter. But their business is built on network effects not trade secret infrastructure, so releasing it as open source helps more than it hurts.
What? The encrypted PIN block isn't on the card; it's generated when you type your PIN in on a PIN pad and is unique by merchant & payment processor.
Immutability is one aspect of the family of techniques called "functional". Yes, you can right immutable code in C or Java, but the compiler can't verify that intent in general, which means that a whole class of bugs are possible, and certain kinds of high-level general functions (combinators) and automatic optimizations (inlining and rewrites and skipping computations) are not possible to write/apply.
I once did iPhone app development. I'll always remember one app in particular that I shipped. A retro game. We'd see lots of "reviews" in the App Store where the user would leave comments like, "great game! loved it. but I really wished there were more playable levels for the 99 cents I paid. So I could only give it 1 out of 5 stars."

ad nauseum
Bitcoin Takes Stage In Texas Senate Campaign
The biggest problem I have with his statement is that it would be almost impossible for Snowden to receive what most people would consider a fair trial.

He likely wouldn't be allowed to argue his motivation and intention for the leaks, make the case that his actions contributed significantly to vital public knowledge about government activity, or that his leaks didn't result in any harm to the US.
zzz the mention of kurzweil makes me disbelieve the author has the ability to make documentary suggestions, that mention alone falsifies a lot to me, i hope someone can point him to more serious discussions on technology future
I am Turkish, I live in the US and run a startup. I conducted a small experiment (n=3) among my cousins living in Turkey aged 8-14: They don't understand that 3rd parties make these apps not tied to the device; and they definitely don't understand that the rating (in general) would impact someone making this app financially. Huh.
Thank you for posting this. My aunt bought a variation of this game for me (under the name "King's Table") when I was about 10 and it was one of my favorites. One summer when a few of my friends and me spent the summer at our college campus, we had a tradition of playing this game over breakfast. I haven't played in many years, but I highly recommend trying it out if you have the chance. Though I am not very well versed in old/ancient board games, but I found this one somewhat unique since you needed a different way of thinking depending on which side you were playing as.
Who do you listen to when launching a startup?
I obviously think this guy has a right to publish on his blog. But the story paints him as a kook who shot himself in the foot.

Even if you are 100% right, you don't represent yourself in court, and you certainly don't insult the judge or court. This is the quickest way to lose your case. If he's lucky, his courtroom trolling may have provoked the judge into overstepping the law and it'll be tossed out.
This assumes that the purpose of math is to prove things, whereas another worthy goal for me at least is enabling humans to truly understand why things are true, and not just what things are true.
So these apps have approximately equally good localization for every other language, except Turkish?
I can't help you with a defined origin, but check out the book "Focusing" by E. Gendlin for a good start on experiencing/understanding the concept.
No, he's just being effective. The problem with people who write a lot of meaningful things is that some of it is just useless.

The website design is good and effective and a lot of people need to learn from him. If you think his idea is bad it's not going to work writing this, you have to actually fight the war.
Probably this is the exception that proves your rule but:

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