skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"I'm not interested in rehashing those emotional arguments"

A nice attempt to inoculate your argument against reasons you don't like, but not relevant - the argument against what the NSA has done is emotional, specifically ethical, and you can't just dismiss that offhand by saying you're not interested.

Quite possibly limitations on further actions from the NSA, and GCHQ in my country, will put our respective nations at a disadvantage economically, strategically, and industrially, but that disadvantage is considerably less important than the freedom of citizens to live without oppression.

To wander freely down the argument ad absurdum road: should a government decide to enslave its entire population in forced labour camps so they could proudly say they're a global economic superpower, that would be wrong, even if other nations did it as well.
Overturning Net Neutrality Rules Harms Innovation
What I really hate about these sorts of stories and attending discussions is that we all pretend we know what "free will" is, when no one has ever come up with satisfying definition (just look at the Wikipedia page). My humble opinion: all hand-wringing about lack of free will should be put on hold until we can answer the following question:

In what way will an entity that has free will behave differently than both a fully deterministic entity and an entity that is deterministic excepting occasional random events?

I have yet to see either an answer to that question, or a definition of free will that leads to one. Until then, I consider all speculation and meditation on the "revelation" that we have none to be a tale full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.
I am failing to see how this is a counterargument. The mast has less to do with the accounting and more to do with how your webpage is getting to your users. You used math in several instances:

* implementing the accounting formulas

* Chrome interpreted your HTML code and calculated the layout for your website

* your ISP knew to attach your URL with your IP address and serves it to your users

* even the development process itself is iterative; building on previous changes

Algorithms were present in all these steps. Once you have users, you will need to keep track of them. Probably you will use an array, tree or other data structure.

As long as you feel comfortable outsourcing the hard stuff, you can put together simple projects like these.
Personally I don't see the problem with a politician figuring out what their constituents want and doing just that. I hear criticisms of weak politicians just doing whatever seems favorable... isn't that what they're there for? To represent the will of the people?

I don't want to elect someone who will force their ideas into law. I want to elect someone who will force the people's ideas into law. What's wrong with a politician saying "I had this idea, but I changed my mind because the people told me I was wrong"?
No, I don't believe in anything, not religion, ethics, or morality, just survival. It's an entirely fruitless endeavor. Where do I begin? Organize a friendly protest somewhere?

I think everything is just a tool, and those who see through them and utilize these tools to their advantage move up the ladder.
Lockit: express routes/interfaces for user registration/auth
It seems the point of the wishlist is explicitly to demonstrate how far short the actual announcement will fall. The reason it's so "lofty" is to set Obama up to fail - even if he announces some real reforms, it's completely unrealistic to demand all this at once.
Awesome, congrats guys! This is really cool news to see. Nice work
Losing money on property is a great way to make money. There are all sorts of tax schemes that let big real estate developers pool and distribute losses to offset taxes in profitable investments.

Often times, the exits for forlorn property make a bunch of money for the people speculating on them as well.
A HSM that locked me out after ~10 x 6 digit PIN guesses...

And now you've got a DOS enforced by hardware. Hopefully if I bring it back to the store I can get it reset? The existence of this reset sort of negates the point of an HSM.

However, I could see the point of an Android module that, rather than locking the user out, would simply delete keys the password to which had been entered incorrectly a configurable number of times. For an app like this, the user would simply have to enter a password and CC again.
I always wondered why people aren't grepping unreviewed code for `eval` or `call_user_*`
Yeah, I either have to make playlists or search for the things I want each time. So I end up with a ton of playlists, with no way of searching or filtering them.
The question of "Do we have free will?" always becomes a lot less confusing if you question the question itself, by asking what you mean by "free will" in the first place. There are some nice posts on Less Wrong that deal with this, they're worth a read if you're curious:

http://wiki.lesswrong.com/wiki/Free_will_(solution)
Please elaborate on this statement.
I've come to the realization not too long ago that some things -- even things that appear to be very influenceable -- you cannot change.

A school, especially a charter school, teaching an agenda that parents don't oppose is one of those things. Just like wages, unemployment or gas prices, there are larger, more primordial forces directing these things.

So what's the point of this article? A naive answer would be "pure exposition." But surely there's an agenda to focus on these institutions, and all it will do is further divide a country where each half thinks the other is evil.
Performance advantages of the new Google Cloud Storage Connector for Hadoop
The military industrial complex has been running the United States since WW2. It's best to take Eisenhower's speech as the acknowledgement of that. It was a sitting President issuing a dire warning of what can only be described as a coup to a free Republic.

The political power, the money, the might, the lobbying, the military budget slush fund, the endless scandals, the wars. It's pretty clear the military-industrial combination has done the most to shape the last five or six decades of America's existence.
> World War I and II were settled over some whiskey and a game of poker right?

It's interesting that you mention that, because at the meta level World War I and II were Germany's attempt to violently overthrow the status quo in Europe (which had long tried to maintain Germany as a divided non-power). The revolution failed and the status quo won.

> It's difficult to objectively say whether violent revolt works, because every single revolt has been in a very different context then the next.

Sure, but you can see patterns. From France to China to Russia to Afghanistan, etc, etc, violent internal revolutions are more likely to result in oppression than freedom.
This might actually hinder 'mass consumption' in Europe if Netflix decides it doesn't want to license broadcasting rights to public broadcasting, which often have their own online services. I think we should be at least somewhat skeptical of the rights-holder also controlling distribution channels.
That's pretty nice and using that SoC is very convinient. I got a wr703n for $23 and installed OpenWRT on it (http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/tp-link/tl-wr703n) to play around with GPIOs. It comes with 5V 1A USB power supply and case, so price wise it's still better than the DPTechnics module. I also got a $15 HI-LINK HLK-RM04, although installing OpenWRT is trickier (http://wiki.openwrt.org/toh/hilink/hlk-rm04).
Google must face UK courts over claims of privacy breach of iPhone users
So, as someone who went to a private (Catholic, even) high school in Texas that taught evolution, I'm often pretty frustrated by this. Aside from just waiting for those who set these kinds of policies in place to fade away, is there any specific voting pattern that would stop this? I don't live in areas that vote in people who set these policies, so I'm not sure I can actually even affect this.
> It is fascinating how people lay blame.

Oh, yes, very much so! For example, you seem quite effortlessly to lay blame on three hundred or so million people, and that's only counting those alive right now, with no consideration for those who've predeceased us, at least some of whom presumably could be expected, in your formulation, to have had a hand in creating the situation you so readily decry.

But laying blame, while satisfying, rarely does anything to solve a problem. In blaming "the American people" for the current state of things, you imply that they, all three hundred million or so, could have acted, and presumably could still act, to improve the situation. What would you have us do? -- all three hundred million of us, of course.

(For the sake of not seeing you wiggle out of the question that easily, assume in your answer that some method, not intolerable to the modern American sense of morality and ethics, exists of usefully coordinating the actions of almost half a billion human beings.)
Ever wondered why birds on power lines don't get electrocuted?
Actually, it wasn't the headquarters of AT&T and not even the headquarters of Bell Labs (a part of AT&T). The headquarters of Bell Labs was at another massive (though less beautiful) complex in Murray Hill, NJ

http://newprovidencedailyphoto.files.wordpress.com/2010/12/8...
What I'd really like to know is what process does the President-elect endure that turns him into an alien lizard from hell?

I mean, seriously .. its like black and white with Obama. Pre-Presidentiality, Obama was real. After-President'ness, he's become some obscure caricature of all other Presidents who came before him..

So is there some sort of secret Presidential chamber that all the past Presidents get to donate their DNA to, which gets injected into The New Guy, to make him into some sort of transformed hybrid clone, or something? I seriously wonder sometimes, if the enemies of the USA haven't realized that the real backdoor to infiltrating America and bringing it to its knees is in the Presidential Training Program that goes on with newly elected victims. It sure seems like the President of the USA gets a new skin, anyway .. I've only been watching for the last 4 Presidents or so ..
You might want to add a spoiler warning to that, as the actual mechanism behind it is not immediately revealed in the story :-)

Still, I don't see why the Predictor couldn't work in the same way - how would you determine that it doesn't?
I have unlimited data on Virgin Mobile for $35/$45/$55 a month (based on # of minutes you want), though I had to pay full price for my phone.
An interesting corollary to concept 5 (the fact that everything in Tcl is a string) is that this means that Tcl is actually homoiconic. It does it completely differently from Lisp, but still ends up in the same place: code and data have the same representation.
To be fair, the American people are and have been the most heavily propagandized people on Earth. I sympathize with your desire to tell people to step up and take personal responsibility, but the truth is that many people can't even think straight. Look at how many people consistently vote against their own interests, identify with their oppressors, etc.
As a counter-example, another modernist building by Saarinen is the IBM T.J. Watson Center [1], where "none of the offices have windows".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_J._Watson_Research_Cente...
TCL is great at being an embedded language, especially when you want something that looks like a DSL using safe-interpreters. (Basically, these are sandboxed interpreters with access to limited built-ins, plus any methods you might inject into the global namespace)

TCL lends easily shell-like syntax so it is great for adapting your DSL to a REPL and even maps fairly cleanly to REST.

Years ago, I built a REST-like API that had one URI to which one could POST a TCL script. That script in its most basic form would be a series of pipelined API calls. There was even limited transactional support. I saw this important for mobile applications as it would reduce latency.

While the scripts were technically TCL, it was easier for developers than Javascript or Ruby (which we also beta'ed). It didn't look as much like a programming language as it did a series of shell commands.

The biggest problem with the above is that TCL safe interpreter still allow loops and other blocking operations. It means that you need to write a reaper to kill long-running threads / processes.

Combining such techniques with ZeroVM (or even Docker, or both) would be interesting.
Well sure sometimes work is necessary. But too many people never question it. That is what I worry about. Working at the gas station will only get you through the day, it will never set you free.

I think there will be enough opportunities for the kid to learn about having to work (like household chores, school homework).

And actually even setting up for enjoyable work will probably have some less enjoyable aspects.

And also, creating your own business isn't easy.
http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?strip=1&q=cache...

The text on the scorecard picture is repeated below it in plain text, plus commentary.
That sounds great and exactly what I'm interested in. Thanks for the recommendation.
Hacking biases to establish pools of control. Humans are exceedingly good at this.
Study on what works in Social Media Marketing
WePay Raises $15M To Focus On Payments API For Marketplaces, Crowdfunding Sites
Diamonds are just as worthless.
I'm not convinced that blackmail is even effective today. You're assuming that politicians have a sense of shame. Maybe they did in the 1950s, but it's clear they don't today.
If a startup came to you with this sort of legacy thinking you'd laugh them out of the room.

In many circles, you would be laughed out of the room for cargo culting like this, and for trying to draw a bias against a legitimate deployment choice by declaring it "legacy".

There are many scenarios where hosting on your own hardware is a superior option for a variety of reasons: Financially, security, performance, flexibility.

In the case of HN it seems like it's on some pretty meager hardware, making compromises like software RAID. If this were a critical system for YC, they would have it on redundant machines with redundant, flash-based, hardware-RAID equipped platforms, clustered with redundant 10Gb cross connects, etc. Criticizing a deployment strategy because of the peculiar issues they have faced is like writing off AWS because someone's unbacked up small instance got killed and they had no strategy for it.
So in other words, the tax code incentivizes destroying great architecture? Fantastic.
Just because you can predict what simple decision I will make before I am aware of it consciously, does not imply I don't have free will. All it says is that my conscious awareness of some other part of my brain making the decision is delayed by x milliseconds i.e. we are not making decisions in the upper layers of consciousness, but below it.

When you think about it, it is what I would expect. Your awareness is the product of nerves firing, so they have to fire before it can be reflected in your consciousness. If you decide to recall some information, the neurons storing that information have to be activated (they have to fire). If you can create a device (and we have) to detect those nerves as they are firing you will know what person is trying to recall before (by some miniscule lead time) they are aware of it.
Couldn't agree more. E.g., when Digg got popular and redesigned their site everyone switched to the bare-bones Reddit.
Very few "real world" math problems reduce to easily computable closed form expression. You're almost always dealing with numeric approximations. So even when your problem has a unique correct answer finding it is either impossible or computationally impractical. A large part of applied math is finding newer, faster and cleverer ways of approximating these solutions. Making the best choice between all the different ways to get the right answer can often be the difference between run times measured in hours vs centuries.
I've just never heard a notion of "free will" that makes enough sense to even ask whether it's true or not. Unless you're talking about some sort of Cartesian duality where there's a nonphysical soul that determines your body's actions - which is at least a coherent idea, but not supported by the evidence.
Well, no. It was a joke, so it was 2600 baud, not Hz.
I'm intrigued, can you just be fired like that in the US? In England it's really hard to just fire someone without a valid reason (gross negligence, etc).
Why would a Catholic high school teach anything else other than evolution?
Hour of Code: Observations from a Middle School Classroom
I don't know which TMobile plan you're on. I have "unlimited" which throttles to 2G after 5GB, for only $30.
You Gotta Have Goals
It's crazy to think that a developer would publish an application that would store username/password in clear text. iOS has a keychain API that would require maybe 3 hours of work to make it work/test. I'm sure Android has something similar.
But just these kinds of things have been changed, thanks to organizations such as the ACLU bringing lawsuits, and many Supreme Court and other federal judges not all being insane.
Although this is a heinous butchery of education, it's been practiced for a long time and I do believe that all private schools (including charters, who have higher control of their curriculum despite receiving public funding) have the right to teach whatever inanity they decide.

It's depressing that such a primal culture of anti-intellectualism and deceit like this is thriving in the Deep South, but given the deeply ingrained religious paleoconservative culture, it's unavoidable and only likely.

It does however teach one that formal schooling cannot be trusted and should not be used as an accurate descriptor of intelligence and knowledge. The parents who support this have ideological agendas. If these institutions didn't exist, they would stick to homeschooling, as many of them already do.

It's a shame, too. Homeschooling is a viable alternative to the mess of public schooling, but too many people pursue it for wrong reasons.
And Texas continues to be the most backwards state and least progressive. Not really news though.
'I said: "either politically impossible or not within the President's power."'

Yes, and I'm not sure I disagree with that statement. My responses weren't directed to that statement, but to the more specific enumerated critiques. In any event, "X is seen as politically impossible" shouldn't become "never ask for X", or X will never be seen as politically possible because no one is asking for it.

'Recognizing foreigners as having "rights" that constrain the security-related operations of the NSA would be a political non-starter.'

I think that's something we should fix (and I think doing so would be in our long-term interest on several fronts, including security). We start by stating that it's something we want.

Re internet security: Breaking encryption standards, and then recommending that it's time to move to new standards when the breaks become sufficiently significant, is not undermining internet security - it is furthering internet security.

'Finally, while the President could theoretically instruct the Justice department not to rely on the doctrine, he can't "reject it" as the law of the land.'

"Rejecting" a law doesn't have a precise legal meaning that I'm aware of. The call is for him to 1) say that it's bad, and 2) to take steps to curtail it.

"He also can't, practically, tell the DOJ not to rely on it. U.S. v. Miller is the underpinning of a huge portion of white-collar and antitrust enforcement activity."

So call for legislation that restricts it without overly restricting it (granting that the costs of going all the way would exceed the benefit), or find some other means of enabling that enforcement.
The article specifically mentions legal action. I think they are hoping enough "exposition" might encourage parents or other charter schools to sue considering teaching both creationism and intelligent design in public schools has been ruled unconstitutional.
Given that public schools can barely teach reading, writing, or math I don't really worry too much about what they are teaching children about much else. It also does not matter what schools anywhere teach if your children do not attend that school.
I seem to have misunderstood your post (and possibly conflated it with others). I thought you were arguing that "free will" was a third possibility, distinct from a deterministic or probabilistic universe.

I am entirely happy to accept that free will is compatible with determinism, and it sounds like we have similar views on this issue. Personally I consider ownership of "will" to be a far more important notion than that of some abstract metaphysical "freedom".
Can you explain Story of your Life? To me it just doesn't make sense, our consciousnesses don't work like that - which undermines any point it might be making.
I was speaking more to the 10/11 year old, but I don't think 6 is too young to get a little lemonade stand going. It reminds me of a kid (about 8 years old) that was selling lemonade on a really dead street shouting "get your lemonade." The first thing that came to mind is that this kid will appreciate how hard it is to make a sale before he's a teenager.

My guess is that most kids would rather play than sell lemonade, so he was probably pushed by his parents to do this.
I LOL'ed so big just reading the headline. It is absolutely terrible, but I have seen this before with big companies that should know better. About 6 years ago I was working on a project for The Wall Street Journal (yeah; that WSJ) in which all customer data was being stored in the DB in plain text then exported nightly to an Excel report and emailed unencrypted to client managers so they could review daily sales.

On numerous occasions I told them that was extremely risky and that we were violating PCI compliance and opening the companies to huge potential fines in addition to just putting customers information at risk.

Every time I brought this up I was told there wasn't time to fix the application and that the client managers thought it was too difficult to deal with encrypted files so just leave everything the way it was.

Eventually they got busted on a PCI compliance audit and started using PGP to encrypt the files sent via email; but by the time I left they still were not encrypting the backend data or actually maintaining PCI compliance. Extremely sad; but this happens all the time.
Yeah, we are looking into it. Interactive provides great information to see what is really going on.
On [1], one interpretation of quantum mechanics says that the universe is the evolution of all possible future worlds through branching: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Many-worlds_interpretation

The other major interpretation would be that out of the possible futures one is randomly selected based on its probability. Determinism without branching doesn't seem like an option given the laws of physics, correct me if I'm wrong anyone?
AeroFS is hiring Technical Support Engineers
Yeah, perhaps unfunctional wasn't the best word I could use. Either way, I'm a huge fan of F# and I think it's imperativeness is all-in-all a very good thing for adoption of the language.
I've written more CRUD apps than I care to remember, and I have no idea what a Cartesian product is.

The fact is we might use things that have formal definitions without knowing what the definition is, or understanding the theory behind it, or being able to derive it from first principles. That's very definition of not knowing maths and still being able to write software.
Still Traumatized By Classrooms
The Why, What, and Who: Planning Content Marketing
Catholics are in general more accepting of scientific evidence than Protestants, the latter being far more concerned with dogma and traditionalism. Evolution is officially supported by the Catholic Church.

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