skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
While I agree that it is no stubbornness to not to learn English (there are many factors), though learning it has certainly been better for earning a living for many Indians. It is also great for the world. Had the mathematicians like S.N. Bose, Ramanujan not known English as their second/third language, the whole world would have been at loss. India doesn't have a 'national language' which everyone must learn. English helps them (Indians themselves) stay connected and to be able to converse.
Same goes with the world. If there is a global language everyone speaks, it's good for everyone.

Though I think English is a bad choice for being the 'global language', but here we are, with it being the official language of most countries in the world.
How are hardware products developed?
Yeah, suggesting viewport dimensions was a lazily considered and unfortunate choice on my part. Screen dimensions -- probably in particular the larger device width -- would be better, and now that pixel density is an issue, that as well.
> create an "optimal" language (ie, glyphs only trace to possible human vocalization

There comes Chinese characters, which are exactly the opposite of your definition of "optimal": Chinese characters are not an alphabet, they do not carry phonetics, they carry meaning. And, guess what, this is arguably better.

Why? Because phonetics tend to shift quickly. In a few decennies any spoken language has shifted, vocalisation is different, especially when the language is used by loosely coulped communities. And then you have to adapt spelling to new pronunciations. But what do you do with old books? And how do you keep the language united? Chinese characters, by allowing different pronunciations without changing their written form, do fix this issue. This has helped China to stay centralized for a long time, and share one common continuous cultural ground.

So, if optimal means "can be shared by more people for a longer period of time" maybe the optimal language would need to add an articulation, and represent meanings instead of sounds.
Groove giving away $10000 worth of software tools
> the emergence of a parasitic, non-producing, and aggressively self-enriching elite

IMHO it's not just the elite that's getting parasitic and non-producing (how many people are on welfare these days?)
Moon is fantastic, but also no longer available for streaming on Netflix.
It seems like a lot of people share this sentiment that police abuse is getting worse all the time. An optimistic part of me wants to think that maybe the problem isn't necessarily getting worse, just getting more exposure than it has in the past. How much harder would it be for this same story to reach this kind of audience 5 or 10 years ago? Hopefully the spreading awareness will lead to improvements down the line.
I don't believe that is correct. The core devs relied on people implementing workarounds.
http://Facebook.com/selfxss is all it really takes.
No, it's more like you use your money and you get your own police force and set of laws and I'll use my own and get the same and then we'll figure out our grievances ourselves. Sounds like a workable system. :)
Because it's much easier to move if your government sucks?
Those primitive and brutish rules are sometimes easier to understand and follow compared to the complex legal spiderweb we have created.
Someone should try this and document their experience.
But how does one determine the right amount of development? When is a place "destroyed"?

Keep in mind that Silicon Valley was once a bunch of orchards. One could have argued that we shouldn't have built any industry here and kept it "pristine".

But wait, even the orchards are man-made. Maybe things were better before agriculture...

NIMBYs are just picking one point in time and declaring it "optimal".
I've actually used one of these once. Once.

If I cared that little about how my hair looks, I'd just get some clippers.
if Google would invest the same engineering effort in Python
I don't identify with the "social justice" movement for similar reasons, but that doesn't mean racism doesn't exist, and that certainly doesn't mean it's productive to try to remove discussion about racism from an arena so profoundly racist.

Look up "The Southern Strategy" and its relation to drug criminalization. Look up "Stop and Frisk". Look up the reasons behind criminalizing crack at a higher level than cocaine. Incarceration rates, prosecution rates, execution rates, literally everything even vaguely related to this topic. It's pervasive. If you choose to ignore that, minorities who think you don't have their interests at heart probably have a point.
Oh I totally misread your comment. I thought it was 90% each day, not each week. It still seems high to me, I bet there are more than 10% that are too young/old/sick to even use a radio.
This really confused me. They are complaining the high price of the rent. But instead of protesting in front of real estate companies, landlords, or those who rent their properties with high prices, they stopped Google buses, Apple buses and buses whose owners sell computers, build websites, share information across Internet. They really picked wrong targets. They can buy computers with low prices and the price is getting lower. Remember: Apple decides the price of laptop and/or desktop, not the price of the real estate.
The $2.2 Billion Bird-Scorching Solar Project
You really have trouble with this kind of discussion? I'm not sure what would fix this thinking ... Maybe you should read books or learn thought experiments or just start with basic metaphors ... hrrmphh! I'm stumped!
Two wrongs
> When you have a society that denies quality health care to the majority of its citizens

How does it "deny quality health care"? Not giving it away for free isn't "denying"; if you have money or good insurance, you get quality health care. The harsh reality is that health care costs money (in other words, resources), so it can't be free and plentiful.
I like what you did here. I like your photoshop tutorials. I think you should stick with those.

Your book on iOS design was, quite frankly, a waste of money. You touched the surface of interesting design topics and then never dived in. It's a lot harder to teach the principles of design and how to break down features into UI than it is to show pictures of successful designs. Your terminology for the standard controls in iOS was also incorrect.

You never went into why you design the way you do. By just putting up photoshop videos, you are able to deliver by not overselling what you have to offer. Please keep doing more photoshop videos.
I agree. I posted this elsewhere in this thread, but I want to say it again: If police officers are officers of the court, judges should have the authority (and use the authority) to strip the officer of the authority to act as an officer. Much like contempt of court, it should not require formal hearings or process to immediately remove bad officers from duty. At that point the police department would effectively have an ordinary citizen on their payroll, unable to wear a uniform or make arrests or risk being charged with impersonating an officer and kidnapping.
> No, it makes you look like you're isolated in a cushion of comfort specifically designed to protect you from having to deal with your neighbors. That's not evil, but it's also not the best way to make friends and otherwise seem engaged and non-aloof.

Ridesharing on a bus with other people is now considered to be aloof? I must have missed the memo.
Perhaps they could implement a bird hazing program to keep birds out of the area, as is done at some airports.
I'm a little confused, is the product just the software or the 'things'/system + software?
http://goatkcd.com/sfw
How easy it is to demonize others and erode the value of individual liberty.

The way that we react to people of wealth who act in ways we dislike is very telling of our individual values. It's one thing to say "I don't like the culture their creating, and I want to work to build a better culture". It's one thing to say "I think they are taking unfair advantage due to their wealth and influence". But it's something else entirely to say "they deserve to be hated for who they are and how they act". It's something else to say "we demand the authority to FORCE them to act how we want, with violence if necessary".

It's so, so easy to vilify the wealthy. They are "privileged", they can take it, right? They deserve something to offset their privilege and wealth, right? We've seen this script before, many times, it's not a good one, it doesn't end well. We should know better by now.

If you can't maintain compassion for the wealthy, then you don't have compassion. If you can't maintain compassion for people who have different values than you then you don't have compassion. If you have a desire to use force to make people change their behavior to something more desirable to you then you don't value freedom.
> I don't advocate a "tribes-and-warlords" system.

Please explain to me what prevents it from degenerating into such.
New Free Android App – Path Finder
tl;dr - Homeland Security is taking bids for software that will gather license plate surveillance data, parse it and consolidate it into a searchable database where they can track the movement of vehicles anywhere in the country.

The good news: What? They don't already do this?
The bad news: Phone call metadata is small time stuff. What Big Brother really wants is to know where you've been, anytime, anywhere.
Glad I checked back on this thread. This comment is very insightful.
U.S. Citizen May Be Targeted With Drone Strike
There's a reddit version of this idea called the "Reddit Switcharoo". The current chain has been going since 2011 and is (I believe) 10s of thousands of links long: http://www.reddit.com/r/AskReddit/comments/1xm5jx/if_everyon... http://www.reddit.com/r/switcharoo
When I think "optimal language", I don't think "optimal combination of natural languages". This is partly because I've been experimenting with constructed languages (conlangs) since the age of eight and partly because my ethical and aesthetic desires lead me to different (or at least more elaborated) goals than "better communication between the peoples of the world as they exist today".

There are many conlangs for various purposes. Esperanto and Interlingua are useful for facilitating communication between people, acting as geography-blind APIs. Lojban is useful for communication between humans and computers, as well as fostering a strict logical mindset similar to the effects of working with programming languages, mathematics or symbolic logic. Klingon, Elvish and many other languages of various semantic/syntactic comprehensiveness are created for aesthetic and/or fictional purposes.

I've been working through a new conlang idea in my head the past few days. It builds off of Lojban in that its tenets are (1) universality, and (2) ease of I/O by both humans and machines. But it adds onto that (3) an easy-to-use, potentially unconscious system of real-time abstraction.

We do this to some extent with all human-human communication, when we inflect or affect or twitch or sigh or use other non-verbal linguistic cues to impart semantic value onto entire complex utterances. The way that a hyperlink imparts the contents of its destination onto the meaning of the information between its opening and closing tags.

This could be significantly sped up through use of more standardized multi-sensory linguistic components, either attached directly to individual people or attached as a metadata layer readable by nearby people through an AR technology of some sort (glasses are the obvious choice, but let's not limit ourselves).

For instance, a speaker could say the word "lu" multiple times in the same monologue. Those around the speaker would grok the intended meaning of "lu" each time due to whatever technological cues were broadcast along with it. The cues could be a string of words on a HUD or a color tinting the image of the speaker or a soft harmony in the listener's ear or a distinct pattern of buzzes from piezo elements in an ankle bracelet or even direct electrical stimulus causing a particular mental state.

I'm getting ahead of myself.

The point is that this is the sort of thing I imagine "language optimization" to be. And this example is just scratching the surface of potential optimizations, because any optimization that allows for general abstraction opens up all the doors of Turing completeness.

Esperanto and Interlingua are patches. They are certainly useful for some things[1], but we can't know what they're optimal for unless we're also experimenting with entirely new systems not based solely on natural languages. We need to be able to treat real-time language as scripting — anything less and we'll be limited by the language rather than by our cognition.

[1] Try reading this wikipedia page. Note how your reading speed increases exponentially as you go down the page: https://ia.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interlingua
You can't (reasonably) apply the hierarchy of disagreement to someone who is not actually disagreeing. He's not saying this to contribute to the debate, he's trying to encourage the community to express itself in an appropriate manner. Zed has made it pretty clear that he has no interest in factual debate. Multiple people have tried to point out the misunderstandings expressed in his posts and have been met with accusations of hypocrisy and/or avoidance of the actual points raised. He's firmly in the range of DH0-3. I'll admit I'm pretty new here, but this seems to me like behavior that the community should try to discourage.
> Weird, I work in China and have never heard C++ referred to as C加加.

We actually call C++ C艹, and call C# C井
Have we gotten to the "threaten the dissenter with bodily harm" bit already?
IANAL but I'd suggest you go further and stop using your computer as soon as possible. Use linux to DD the drive onto a secondary backup drive as a bit for bit archive, put the existing drive in the possession of a third party and then start from scratch. Each time you use the computer you're damaging your credibility in a potential lawsuit.
Just more leftist protection scams. Stay safe fellow nerds.
It's much more about desired usage patterns than amount of storage. Cassandra and RDBMS's differ quite a lot in how you replicate, consistency guarantees, performant read patterns, performant write patterns, how you handle recovery, etc... If you intend to bring anything to scale it helps to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the underlying architecture.
> Many people really, in a practical sense, do have to have the Internet, and at reasonably high quality. Work and school being two common cases.

Work and school are economic investments with concrete returns; financially, you get more out of Internet access than you pay. If you didn't need Internet for either of these, and just used it for Netflix or World of Warcraft (or any kind of recreation), would you reconsider paying for it?
Likewise the market is probably a very efficient resource allocation mechanism, but only for economic goods. There are many other types of "goods" out there that can't be quantified in dollars and cents. How much is, say, human dignity worth? Child labor? Sadly they both have prices, but I'd like to think we're better than treating people only in terms of their economic value today.

You're confusing "price" for "value", they are very different things. The libertarian argument is not necessarily predicated on the market (and not just of commodities and goods, of charities and services, of creative expression, of ideas, etc) being efficient, but the market being moral.

The corollary argument is that in most cases government is immoral, hypocritical, and in many cases inefficient at managing all sorts of this wide array of goods. (note the careful choice of qualifiers)

The distinction between an anarcho-capitalist and a libertarian, is that a libertarian will outline a specific role of government - generally: to manage situations where force or coercion (specifically, the threat of direct force) are used. Thich covers "child labor" and certain, non-squishy aspects of "human dignity" like chattel slavery, physical torture, etc. An anarcho-capitalist thinks that these should also not be entrusted to a single monopolizing entity.
There is a revolution happening in Venezuela right now.
Don't know whether I should spoil the secret or keep it to myself, but why don't you submit again? and again. until it gets in.
Prepay for a year doesn't imply that they will get money back if they cancel. Unless of course that is the way you make the offer.

But even if there is a liability you have to calculate the percentage of people that will want a refund. If it is "high" (whatever that is..) you have a much bigger problem (people don't like your product or service).
Sidewalks and public "spaces" I'll give you, but access to actual roads themselves is in every legally defined way a privilege. Traffic laws are laws that "prevent free circulation on public roads".

Communities end up getting some control over what goes on with the roads that pass through them in the form of: speed limits, crossing signs, speed bumps, bike lanes, third party bus stops (as in non-city transit, these do exist), parking spots, etc.

While there's nothing legally binding yet, communities do exert a degree of control over what goes on around them and they could theoretically block the Google busses. Local DOTs respond to community action.
Probably, but that syntax is awful.

This syntax makes more sense to me:

[{"tagName":"div","class":"a-class","children":[{"tagName":"span","innerHTML":"you can use all of your json tools to edit the DOM"}]}]
So what do we do? Tons of us live here, we should be doing something. Squad up and protest? There has to be a decent number of us who have flexible ours, how about we team up and manually surveil officer Kaur for a week? Is there someone would should be calling to complain to that will hurt this persons career?

I don't know what to do, but this city is tiny and there are a lot of us, surely we can have some effect. My email and website w/ pgp key are in my profile, email me if you're interested in trying something.
Isn't this the site where everyone is always saying you undervalue yourself and should raise your prices?

I actively position myself as a discounter. I figure out what my price should be, then I price higher than that. I discount down to halfway between the advertised price and my "should be" price at the blink of an eye. I almost always get higher than my "should be" price.

No one pays retail, they all think they are getting hooked up.

Any further price discussions end pretty easily with me starting with, "Well, we've already given you a good discount..."
BEST of AI in search
> try it next time you get a traffic ticket and tell me how it goes

It worked quite well, thank you. I did not say a word, gave the cop my license and registration as required by law, signed my ticket, and hired a lawyer to get it thrown out later.
more like "who cares?"
Just a note: this paper includes a small introduction to ideal lattice based encryption, but it's topic (homomorphic encryption) is not necessarily tied to lattice based crypto; the author has since provided different and more efficient constructions.
Did anybody read the links about the guy that is suing the same cops? http://www.plainsite.org/dockets/index.html?id=2989730 Poor guy got really messed up, has huge medical bills, and obviously filed the lawsuit himself because he has no money and can't spell. Feel way worse for that guy than the OP. If something positive can come out of this story, maybe that guy can find some help from people here.
Usually people who get burned by hypedb think twice before making the same mistake again.
This isn't "a position of power" in an office sense. When a person is in a position of power in an office, those the power is over can quit. Still quite a different thing.

And beside that, it's certainly the case that incompetent assholes should be pushed out in other circumstances. It is simply far less crucial when it's not as likely to end people's lives.
"But why not the cars? There is no greater symbol of frivolity and privilege than owning and driving a car in the city."

Does Google supply their people with cars? Do cars use the city bus stops? Most people do not share your "no greater symbol of frivolity and privilege than owning and driving a car in the city" view. Cars are still part of the US's culture.

A private bus that uses city stops is seen as a much bigger symbol of privilege than any car. It is a single focus point and can be spun into the "let them eat cake" vibe a protest like this is looking for.
Thanks for answering Gwern. I admire your work, trust your opinion, and it resonates with my impression.
I request you to look at India's e-retailing industry. Most people don't have CC and those who have are also not scared as there is three tier security system in place. The online retailers are fighting with each other to provide best services in terms of quality, cheaper price, speedy delivery and great online shopping experience. Exchanges are also relatively hassle free which are very important in clothing and other wearable items. It is just going great!!
Two websites if you want to explore further:
1. www.flipkart.com
2. www.myntra.com
Cheers!
The Star Trek Economy
I am totally not convinced by AWS, but to be taken seriously you will have to factor in the initial price of that machine if you make a comparison like that.
Clearly, we all need to walk into our local police station, sing a bar of Alice's Restaurant, and walk out.
Seems like you could get around that with a meta tag on the claimed site? Meta tags are basically never commenter-editable, and are usually owner-editable, they're basically a perfect fit for this. Alternatively there's a site/.well-known/keybase style URL (I have no idea what the best-practices are for .well-known. Personally I prefer meta tags.)

Obviously Twitter isn't likely to implement either of those, so some high-value custom implementations are still great. But if Maria owns maria.com and can assert it automatically, that's pretty strong supporting evidence.
Anonymous Is The New Black. But Is It Working For Us?
For me personally, I hate it. Mainly for ideological reasons. I believe that when I'm "programming," most of it is spent in thought or jotting things down on paper. When it comes to actually typing things on a keyboard, I've already figured out exactly what should happen. Pair programming goes against this work methodology, so I don't subscribe to it. Naysayers tell me that I can work through the "thought process" in a pair too. No, I can't. That's not how I work. I'd be happy to discuss my thoughts after I've had alone time, but that time is critical for me to get things done at a reasonable rate.
On top of the growing mass of lonely single dudes

If housing were actually affordable to anyone other than (predominantly male) tech engineers, this would be less of a problem.

Hence, suppressing growth in housing makes the problem worse, not better.
Ridesharing on a bus that is only available to the blessed employees of a rich tech company using publicly funded stops can be presented as very aloof.

Stats and logic are poor defenses against symbols, demonization, and rhetoric in politics.
> Sorry for going into defensive-weenie mode and attacking your positive post!

No worries. One of the reasons for my post is to learn more about what's available on current Plan 9. Besides, I don't mind having my misconceptions corrected, as long as it's done politely. Thanks for taking time to do that.
It depends. Because software has so little capital costs and some marketing is free or cheap because of internet, most of the cost is labor.
Rusher News

1. Mine Plundered: $2300 in Nuggets Stolen!
(439 points)

2. Gold Is Where You Find It
(102 points)

3. Show RN: A Better Shovel
(32 points)

4. WANTED: No good pickaxe thief, DoA (8 points)