skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think there are two main things about LW that strike some people as cultish. (There are others, less important.) Both are less true than they were, say, a year ago.

1. Its distinctive brand of rationalism grew out of this huge long series of blog posts by Eliezer Yudkowsky, conventionally referred to on LW as "The Sequences". So: we have a group of people united by their adherence to a set of writings by a single person -- a mixture of generally uncontroversial principles and more unusual ideas. It's not a big surprise if this reminds some people of religious scriptures and the prophets who write them.

2. The LW culture takes seriously some ideas that (a) aren't commonly taken very seriously in the world at large, and (b) share some features with some cults' doctrines. Most notably, following Yudkowsky, a lot of LW people think it very likely that in the not too distant future the following will happen: someone will make an AI that's a little bit smarter than us and able to improve itself (or make new AIs); being smarter than us, it can make the next generation better still; this iteration may continue faster and faster as the AIs get smarter; and, perhaps on a timescale of days or less, this process will produce something as much smarter than us as we are smarter than bacteria, which will rapidly take over the world. If we are not careful and lucky, there are many ways in which this might wipe out humanity or replace us with something we would prefer not to be replaced by. -- So we have a near-omnipotent, incomprehensible-to-us Intelligence, not so far from the gods of various religions, and we have The End Of The World (at least as we know it), not so far from the doomsdays of various religions.

Oh, and LW is somewhat associated with Yudkowsky's outfit, MIRI (formerly the Singularity Institute), and Yudkowsky is on record as saying that the Right Thing to do is to give every cent one can afford to them in order to reduce the probability of a disastrous AI explosion. Again, kinda reminiscent of (e.g.) a televangelist telling you to send him all your money because God is going to wrap things up soon. On the other hand, I do not believe that's his current position.

For the avoidance of doubt, I do not myself think LW is very cult-like.
I'm wondering why they don't replace someone (professor or adjunct) who teaches Freshmen Seminar with a series of videos. The students don't listen and only recognize the value when they're failing Juniors.
Someone specced the field length and type for the database, and just said "enforce the same rules on the front-end."
It's entirely feasible that things are much better than they were a decade ago. I sure hope they are :).

Perhaps it's slightly more expensive to start with AWS, cheaper as you scale (WRT man hours) and gets (prohibitively) more expensive once you hit a certain scale.

I don't doubt there are plenty of reasons to be off AWS. Lots of evidence exists to support that. And vice versa.
Right, and that makes total sense. I haven't ran the numbers, but I know that if you have some amount of fixed capacity required, you would absolutely want to do reserved instances on all of those and consolidate as much as you can where it makes sense.

However, if the numbers don't work out on reserved instances and you have a pretty steady demand, going with your own infrastructure makes total sense.
Seeing has how YC has an equity steak in every startup, how is a startup who can't receive funding not a problem for them? From an investment point of view, they want ALL of their companies to receive funding. If signaling is negatively influencing how investors evaluate every company, than this policy makes a ton of sense.
I'm thinking that, by this time, Facebook already knows who you are, even if you log in anonymously. By that I mean, even if you don't log in at all.
We decided to view it from the opposite direction. 'Bench' time means lab bench, which works well as most of our actual employees[1] are grad students and postdocs. We support their research and have a publication policy that puts their dissertation work first.

When we have interesting RFPs from consulting clients, then we pull people away from the bench.

It's a great way to retain people, have flexibility in the projects we take, and have significant depth and breadth for a small firm.

[1] we also very heavily draw from a pool of highly trusted subcontractors, many of whom are former employees. Because of our experiences with them, we go to them first and they all give us first crack at their availability.
>It would take the strongest of will-powers to stay where you are and not move to some millionaire neighborhood; if only for safety-reasons.

Why would you need to live in a millionaire neighborhood for safety? It isn't like you'll be keeping wads of cash around. You can get alarms and such, and I'm sure that will be fine. I doubt you'll be a target anyhow, especially if you live in a modest house.

>And to learn how to maintain that money, you'll probably have to spend more time with people of the same financial level

Once again. Why?

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/lottery-winners-spend-money/s...

Mannix's ShopRite has been lucky once before. Six years ago, a group of 10 bakery employees split a $19 million ticket. Nine of them, says Mannix, decided to keep working and are still on the job. None went wacky or became a drunk or wound up in jail. Some, he says, "bought their dream house." Others salted away the money, to be used later to pay for college for their grandkids. Some paid off mortgages. A few took trips. "They didn't spend foolishly," says their boss. "They're hardworking, blue collar people. It's a great story with a great ending."

I also saw a special about celebrity lives and some famous country singer lives among the common folks, she does her own laundry, cleaning, shopping, lives in a modest middle class house, etc. People are sometimes surprised to see her at Walmart.

I know someone who lives in the same town as the guys from the TV show American Chopper. I don't know how wealthy they are, but they have a popular TV show and successful business at least so they must be pretty well off. She has seen them around doing shopping and such.

EDIT: According to http://www.celebritynetworth.com/richest-celebrities/paul-te... the older American Chopper guy has a net worth of $15 million.
My scale is simple - do not intervene at all. US pretense that they intervened purely on humanitarian grounds is a pathetic lie obvious to the whole world. After they intervened they left a mess that is worse then before. Besides, after infamous appearance by Mr. Powell at the UN providing undeniable evidence of universal evildoing, I think US would be a bit more, ...how should I put it..., careful about spreading justice around the globe.
What's wrong with example one, the fact that it doesn't explicitly say 'probably'? Just because something is a conclusion doesn't mean it's an absolute. When talking about real-life situations, there are no absolutes. Your premises can change behind your back.

Sometimes you have to go with the most likely option to not get stuck in a quagmire. Being imprecise for the purposes of focus is not an error.
I find that strace (or dtruss) is more useful when you know less about what exactly you're trying to find. A log of syscalls is often exactly the right granularity to find out the gist of what a process you didn't write is trying (and failing) to do.

So I think the comparison, despite the superficial similarity and similar mechanism of action, isn't really fair.
I just heard a talk with Sproutling's CEO Chris Bruce. He really recommended reading this book: http://www.amazon.com/From-Concept-Consumer-Ideas-Money/dp/0...

You should also attend the SF Hardware Startup meetup, run by my friend Nick Pinkston (great guy): http://www.meetup.com/HardwareStartupSF/

You should also come and join us at the Hackendo::Integrate conference in April: http://hackendo.techendo.co/
Does Guest blogging really dead? What you should all do in 2014
Totally agree, especially 1 is super important and not always easy. Plan for a dual-stage bootloader from day 1 so there's always some rescue code to fall back on.

The LED comment is interesting. I've been on several HW development projects with LEDs as the main UI and early on I decided I wouldn't participate in UI discussions on general principle because it got so contentious. We actually have detailed corporate standards on what to do with LEDs but I've also heard some interesting decrees like "User shall never see a red LED because it looks like the product is broken."
Money laundering happens to avoid paying taxes

hiding Jews from the Nazis was to avoid them getting shipped off to death camps.

The question is thus do you think that taxes are unethical? I don't think so but a lot of bitcoin fans seem to think so.
That's baloney, no one thinks that. Connections matter but if you're good, you can get good jobs, found companies and raise money.
That is genius! This would be a great way to get university kids to contribute to the OSS movement.
We do stress that point, that the barrier to donate should be as low as possible. Still, some churches go as far to say donations can't/shouldn't be made on credit do to their individual beliefs, and would only take ACH transfers as they pull directly from a bank account.
...why not?

"to render impotent or deprive of vitality"
Ask HN: Stackoverflow Careers – what does "remote" mean?
I'm living in the middle of nowhere right now, and thought I might try finding remote work instead of relocating. So I'm applying to a bunch of supposedly remote jobs on Stackoverflow where I meet or exceed the qualifications, and I'm hearing crickets. I haven't had problems finding on-location work in the past. Even when I was right out of college, at least I got responses even if they were negative.

Are these jobs actually remote, or just on a technicality, like you can work from home once in a while but they expect you to be in the same area. Or maybe they're just being bombarded by applicants? Some of the jobs are marked as remote, but then in the description say that it's on-location.

So overall just confused here, trying to figure out this whole remote thing. Has anyone had luck getting actual remote work (i.e. different city) on Stackoverflow?
I use Trillian and avoid going to FB.
Obama: Clapper (Who Fibbed To Congress) “Should Have Been More Careful”
Palantir cut ties with HBGary.

If government/banks/etc are going to use tools to pursue their objectives, they could do much worse than use Palantir tools. One important feature of Palantir's tools is the "need-to-know" capabilities built-in to restrain dissemination.
Solar panels have massive footprint, like leoedin already mentioned. The only way for islanders to be self-sufficient energetically is not to use electricity, and live in very small numbers. Sorry, technology is devastating. If not on your island, it will ruin landscapes somewhere else.
That was the most Orwellian sentence I've read in years.
Xio’s game didn’t copy any art assets from anywhere, as I can tell you, since I made all the art for it. [Mostly over one weekend, as a volunteer favor to the developers.]

The colors were not copied from anywhere, they were picked, by me, with no reference to any existing art, using a careful process designed to maximize distinguishability. To be specific, I decided that the colors should all be clearly separated in CIELAB lightness and hue, and then chose which lightness to match to which hue based on the gamut of then-current iPhones.

The result is a bunch of “bright” colors. But lots of games want bright colors, because they are the most easily distinguishable, and having easily distinguishable colors makes a game easier to play.

As for the appearance of the bricks, I cooked up a dozen or so possibilities in Photoshop, and let the rest of the team decide which to use. Again, created in a few various styles, but not with any reference to any previous game.
I want to work for you as a Senior mattress tester.

I've got no problem with sleeping most of the day.
Seems like a great idea, PG. Are the partners prohibited from signalling to favored investors their intentions? What's to stop someone from giving a wink to a friend?
I laughed at the "Rubish" sticker.
Office365 Need to Treat UX as an API if Customizations to Stay Off the Server
This article links to a heart-wrenching piece about a Dusquesne adjunct professor who lived in poverty and died of a heart attack [1].

I was struck by it, and subsequently found a Slate article which elucidates and provides more context around the incident. I can only describe it as very solid journalism. It certainly kept my attention, and is worth a read for anyone who found this topic interesting. [2]

[1] http://www.post-gazette.com/Op-Ed/2013/09/18/Death-of-an-adj...

[2] http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/education/20...
YouTube meets Pandora – automatic playlists for YouTube music
It's interesting how they mostly got a pass this past holiday travel season.

Barely saw anything about them. So even the media is looking the other way now.
Problem is, those who's own wealth/power depends on a large population in "poverty" will just redefine "poor" up - as they've done many times already. The value of money would reduce because recipients thereof trade nothing for it, thus raising the cost of goods accordingly, pushing some things back out of reach of the "poor".

We already give an enormous amount to the "poor". If you make less than a given amount, various welfare programs will fill the gap (some pushing you WAY above the line). It's enough that another problem is arising: many on welfare receive so much that they can't afford to work, lest they lose all those benefits and reap less net income as a consequence.

Again, I come back to the issue of defining the word "poor". As is, it's not objective relative to the recipient's survival.
The Match keyword does allow you to configure based on your local address, so on first glance it would seem like it would allow you to do this, but for some reason ProxyCommand is not on the list of whitelisted keywords acceptable in a Match block. :/ That's really a shame.
It reassuring to hear the rules make sense when you put them all together, but I still wonder if they are good rules. What is your take on it?
I really wish more people in government had the gumption that this agent has to speak out about how public trust is being abused.

On a different not, I'm certain that I'm not the only one who read the Selectee Passport List in the voice of Yakko, Wakko and Dot.
> Because you are correct, because it is possible to reduce (most) conflicts down to that, it is therefore vital to realize that and come to gripes with that. We aren't going to go anywhere pleasant by ignoring the underlying issues (hatred fueled by economic disparity and jealousy) just because the scapegoats are softer targets who are more fun to pick on.

If you want to talk about a particular phenomenon, don't pick the most highly charged and divisive example you can think of that in a minor way embodies that phenomenon. Perkins didn't just say something potentially offensive. He buried his point in an analogy that is, for substantially the reasons 'michaelochurch points out in a sibling comment, both historically questionable and clumsy to work with. It's not wrong to use a controversial analogy, but if you're going to throw that hammer strike, it had better ring true and pure.
Thanks, yes! We know and are in touch with all these guys (writelatex, mendeley, and peerj). Great stuff coming out of London in this space. Digital Science and Figshare are also there. We are very excited that there's a movement to change/improve academic publishing.
You will find priceless info on how to master the business side of the mobile app industry on the Mobile App Flipping Podcast, at blog.appFresh.us
EncodeURIComponent in Objective-C
> Elon Musk was a South African-born undergrad at Pennsylvania

Who first emigrated to Canada, where he attended Canada's most prestigious business school for two years before transferring to the United States' most prestigious business school.

> Peter Thiel was a German-born lawyer trading derivatives at Credit Suisse

After which he ran his own hedge fund for two years, then co-founded PayPal.

These guys certainly had more merit than many people, but to hold them up as people who succeeded with merit over connections is silly.
That difference being directly attributable to the criminal activity. If your business model is killing people and taking their wallets, you are unethical because you murder and steal, not because you have more money in your pocket after you do it.

There was an idea floated a while back about why 51% of the miners couldn't just disavow the Bitcoin that FBI seized from Silk Road users. The answer was that it would completely unravel the currency, and impose an ethical obligation on everyone to examine the source of coins before accepting a transaction.

Gold has no smell. If it did, it would all stink. Attaching ethical considerations to money itself places an additional transaction burden in commerce, such that even a tiny cost can grind everything to a halt, in much the way that a pinch of sand in your oil pan can destroy your engine.

Think about the ethical consequences of currency that is not completely ethically neutral, and compare with the consequences of one that is. In the one case, money laundering happens, and you cannot reasonably prevent it. In the other, black markets flourish as white markets fail, because currency can flow only between them in only one direction.
Man uses first-class ticket for year’s worth of free meals
Apportable: Wooga's secret Android shortcut
Can I piggyback on this and ask an unrelated question I'm curious about?

Let's say an online merchant gets a transaction they very strongly suspect is a stolen credit card (perhaps it's from a customer with a long history of using stolen cards) but it validates just fine. Is there any provision in the interface for merchants to ask the credit card company to perform extra fraud checks, like calling the cardholder?
Ask HN: What pattern you use to choose your passwords?
I am developing a tool which would guess what kind of passwords someone might choose by mining their social profiles (facebook for now). I have surveyed my friend circle for some patterns they choose. e.g one of my friends use his one of his siblings' name along with his, replace some characters with special chars (a with @ or 4).

Please help me telling what pattern you use to choose your passwords.

Any suggestions for making such tool are welcome.
Cool site, so I went to find a link to the RSS feed... "D'oh!" - No button.

So I added rss onto the end of the url (common practice)... "D'oh!" - error code dump.

fix that and I'll be back for more ;)
new hero! and his book seems like it will be good: http://playbooknovel.com/
It might be because Nexus 5 is configured to connect through their IPv6 routing. (Not that viclone.com seems to have AAAA record, but it's looking like all traffic are routed through T-mobile's 6to4 so it might make a difference, too.)
JS is far from an ideal language or technology for any task but it is the dominant browser technology currently in use. Like many other technology trends, the superior technology hardly ever becomes the one that's widely adopted. In this case, there doesn't seem to be a clear superior technology for multimedia in the browser, however. Between Flash's bugginess, Silverlight's lack of compatibility and adoption, and JS's "ugly parts" (inconsistency, unclear programming models, single-threaded implementations, low-level nature, etc.) there isn't even a good contender in the field. Touting a technology that has an almost complete monopoly over a domain as the best technology in that domain is nonsensical. That seems to be what the article is attacking.
I'm beginning to like how Snapchat handles the idea of segmented contacts.
I'll agree there. Haitians, on the whole, are indeed objectively poor: given the limited land to work with, the large & growing population, and the high cost of import/export infrastructure, there just isn't enough resources to support residents. This vs the USA, where there is enough resources, and the best answer to poverty in most cases is MOVE to where there are sufficient opportunity & resources (like the Dakotas, where even mundane jobs pay very well because they can't get enough people to do the work needed to facilitate extracting wealth from natural resources).
This quote has had me thinking all morning:

"The thought nagged at me that I was enabling the same government-sanctioned bigotry my father had fought so hard to escape."
In academia though, most scholars tend to stick to PDF for reading papers, see e.g. http://www.quora.com/Why-do-scientists-tend-to-prefer-PDF-do...
This API doesn't exist outside this article?
I looked deeper into gyft's business model and I was wrong, so I retract the statement above. I don't think they're engaging in money transmission.

Apologies to gyft, they're a great company.
Ditto.

I work for a lifestyle company with a lot of smart people, and I feel at home for the first time in my career. They get that I care, and they get that I have a life outside of work. Exactly what I'm looking for!
Just a quick smattering of thoughts:

You can get free DropBox space when you buy android tablets and phones. I think between a tablet and a htcone I scored like 500GB's at Dropbox.

Public cloud is not for sensitive data - its for transferring lame documents and media between places. Usually the people who are worried about security for data in public forums usually dont actually have any data anyone wants to steal.
Box Packing System
Timely, I signed up for Meetup ages ago and only recently started getting any use out of it.

A few things:

#25 - Please don't even suggest that a site shouldn't validate email addresses immediately. Validation isn't just about keeping spammers off the site. It's also about not spamming the poor folks with common names from the consistently amazing number of people who don't know their own email address. I've witnessed a constant deluge of everything from bank statements to party invites from sites that don't validate the addresses their users provide.

#26 - I'd be really surprised if "hour" was any sort of admission about things on the meetup end. More likely it's a wise acknowledgement of the reality of user email beyond the large, well-functioning services like GMail. If you say a "few minutes" you'll have people in a vicious circle of hitting resend then clicking on the now useless (expired) confirmations as they trickle through their half-assed Exchange system or budget spam filter.

#30 - This caught me up when I signed up for meetup. It asks for a "bio", but it's used more like a title or tagline as 100 characters or so accompany your avatar on membership/attending pages.
most online purchases ask for the person's email address.

Also, you've never shopped at Amazon? They ask for the phone number for the billing address. https://www.monosnap.com/image/4QZmCDNdlsqei8BLIsjw6Z3q00tml...
ShowHN: Recipes and notes on server optimization.
I do find it fascinating that every time someone tries to use historical evidence to show the dangers of a current trend, they are inevitably accused of making light of the historical event and people ignore their actual statements. We seem to be actively hostile to learning from the past as a society and just operate on faith that the injustices and atrocities of our collective past will never happen again.

Obviously anything to do with Nazis or the Holocaust triggers this reaction faster and more severely, but it can happen with any subject. Every argument of "Currently A is happening. When A happened in {time/place} it led to B and then C, and we all agree B and C are really bad" will be met with "How dare you compare yourself to {time/place}! B and C aren't happening now and will never happen again" (with no explanation for what will prevent B and C from happening).