skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You can provide a service that is a net loss overall, but still a benefit to a few. It's the tragedy of the commons.

Let's make it simple and say there are two villages. Some people in village A decide to start raiding crops from village B, because they find they can steal crops more easily than growing them, so stealing is a net benefit to village A.

Village B, noticing the theft, decides to start paying some farmers to defend the village instead of farming. This is a positive outcome for Village B, because the cost of their new security force is less than the cost of the stolen crops.

Ostensibly there are two positive outcomes; both sides now maintain a security service and find themselves at an equilibrium.

But if you look at Village A and B together, you'd see that they'd both be better off if there were no raiders and no defenders and could concentrate on farming. The overall drain on society gets worse as the situation escalates.

Imagine that Village A decides to create more thieves to overwhelm B's security, and that turns out to be profitable.

Now imagine that this exact thing is taking place, at every scale, millions of times a day.

Let's say I'm competing with Dave to buy a house we both want. The only thing holding that price down is our collective willingness not to borrow huge sums of money to outbid each other. Let's say the bank starts to offer a 60 year mortgage, so that Dave can outbid me by shackling himself to a loan he probably won't pay off in his lifetime. Dave is a moron, so he does that. It's a free country.

Dave, in this circumstance, is acting like Village B, where he shoots himself and the rest of society in the foot by dedicating most of his future income to paying a bank in order to get a short term gain and win a house bid with me.

But the real winner in the scenario is the bank, not Dave.

Edit to add: I believe the article was talking about "service" in terms of the overall gain to society, not the individual services that a bank typically provides, many of which are completely legitimate like helping you sell a business.
The only time I have personally left the office before 5, I was back on my MacBook at 8 until midnight. :-p
Just like the transportation industry parasites, all the finance industry does is move things around. Neither makes anything. /s
Easy tiger. The point was not all military spending is a waste.
Indeed. If you take a populist rant like this, and replace keywords like '1%', 'rich', 'banker' with words like 'Jew','Semitic' and 'Zionists' - you start to get an appreciation for how ugly these latest movements really are through the lens of history.

Do I mean that some of the public policy choices of the last decade are beyond criticism? No, definitely not. 'Too big to fail' is a terrible phrase because it calcifies economies and entrenches bad practice.

But the latest meme of 'if you're rich you're a parasite and should be stripped of your property' is disturbing for me. It lumps a class of people into a 'generally bad' category without looking at specific problems. There are angry young people out there who have been fed a simplified story and are running around with 'eat the rich' style placards. That is worrying to any ordered society.
What visa's did we get rid of in Canada?
How we overcame the security flaws of performing REST API calls in JavaScript
You have to admire the fact that the very first mistake listed is "listening to investors", given that the author is a prominent investor and managing director of Garage Tech Ventures
I find this hilarious. But only because it wasnt my place. I checked the URL twice to see if it was the onion. The comedian should have joined in.
So your view its "absurd" to consider what would have happened had a plausible scenario occurred to discover the implications? Clearly this is nonsense. Moving on.

>FFT, and things like it, are exactly the sort of software that should not be patented.

Again, you are judging patentability by the impact of the idea. This is nonsense. For every idea worth patenting that has been invented, the world would be better off if everyone could use that idea unencumbered. This is a tautology. The interesting question is: how many of those ideas would remain trade secrets if they weren't patentable? This is the meaningful question here.

Had IBM chosen to keep it secret (and perhaps it would have been a smart business decision to do so), the world would be decidedly worse off. If they had patented it, the world would be better off compared to the world where that invention was kept a trade secret. This is the meaningful conclusion to be drawn from the FFT scenario.

So you don't like hypotheticals? Fine--lets consider Watson. How it works is currently a trade secret. Is the world better off for them keeping it a secret or publicizing and patenting it? I'll let you decide that one.
The way I understood the poster, the harm came from the government canceling the old investor visas. That seems pretty easy to fix: just add new visas on top of the old ones. The consequences of the way it happened were pretty clear: a bunch of people who previously would use the old investor visas (where you could put up your own money, I imagine) now can't. The effects of this decision shouldn't have been surprising to anyone.
> What was once a process over which government had visibility is now in the hands of the private sector, with firms that have historically discriminated on age, ethnicity, gender, etc.

That logic would suggest companies shouldn't be allowed to hire non-immigrants without government approval either, since they've historically discriminated against people with non-immigrant hires too. But as far as I know, you're not suggesting you should have to apply to the government to get a job at your local IBM office, because that would be weird. We just make discrimination illegal and hope for the best. Why wouldn't the same logic apply to VCs funding foreigners?

Another problem there is the "we don't have oversight into how fair this will be, so now no one gets it!" which helps no one, including all those people you're trying to protect from discrimination.
"shared Dropbox folder" is still the cloud, just not Microsoft's.
I just created a post about this on StackOverflow...

Awesome!

http://stackoverflow.com/questions/22386214/whats-the-best-w...
To be fair, you get a lot more storage with OneDrive (I currently have 28 Gb.)
* The blind audition equalizes for more people than for whom it disadvantages.*

Maybe. Do you have evidence for this statement?

I haven't put myself to any sort of test, but my perception of myself is that I am far more attuned to lapses in English usage in the written form than the spoken. I don't think these interviews are very blinded at all. I can tell if you are ESL (unless you are very, very good), I can often tell if you are younger or older, I can tell if you come from my background or not. As well as if I were meeting you face to face? Of course not! But, how will I select people in each situation? Am I more or less biased in face to face or written communication?

We know tests like the SAT have a cultural and racial bias. I should hire programmers because they can deliver value to my company, not because they type like me. When I measure you by a proxy (how well you communicate via IM) I have the chance to make the wrong choice.

Don't get me wrong - I think there is a very good chance you are correct in that statement. But I don't believe these interviews are blinded (they are probably most blinded to gender, and least blinded to ESL), and no one has shown that the results are less biased than the alternatives.
Scammers Take Advantage of the Missing Malaysia Airlines Flight MH370
2) were first to invent, not first to file;

The bar for not being obvious should be high enough for this to not make a difference. If two people (or teams, companies, whatever) independently invent the same thing within... say, a year of eachother, that should be taken as proof that it's too obvious to be patentable.
exactly... they friggin switched CPUs
> I largely agree, but to act as a devil's advocate, what about cases when a police officer needs to resort to more heavy-handed methods when their life is in danger?

In those cases the safest thing for the police to do is to withdraw to a safe location and wait for backup, which is what they're supposed to do. Engaging in the sort of aggressive behavior that could be "mischaracterized" as police brutality in response to a potentially dangerous situation only serves to escalate the situation and make it even more dangerous.
Entrepreneur Visa Guide
Most people, even today, believe they own themselves rather than believing that the state owns them and they are merely paying rent on themselves.

"Victimless crime" pretty much means a voluntary act which directly harms only the actor. Sure, you point to indirect harm from the actor harming themselves. But if I fricken own myself, you cannot claim that my harming myself is any sort of crime. And the people counting on others not to harm themselves better give them an incentive not to do it rather than imposing a prohibition.
Do now. :) bitcoin:1NhTCJF9owKLxXhizSd57GiYWkBELFq2Jc
"Military costs too much until you get invaded" is a common thread throughout history.
Gossip in the Valley
3 17 2014 Hello to all, And, a pleasant St.Patrick's day, may you have. I am shocked, shocked gossip going on in the Valley. Play nice, be well and happy. Life passes quickly, does it not?
At risk of sounding flippant, I feel like you're bringing a certain amount of unwarranted pattern matching to this. The person you're responding to is 1. bringing up a cognitive bias, 2. positing that it might be the mechanism that's causing this treatment, and 3. saying he shouldn't exhibit that bias.

It's thoughtful, and while he's using different language, describing his approach here as "hiding" is pretty ungenerous. I'd guess that you're used to people being kinda shitty about this stuff, and so you saw someone say something that could be part of some ugly apologetics and just went with your heuristics.

(edit) Also, let me add, sometimes it's easier to talk about the mechanisms of sexism rather than the phenomenon. Ideologically I'm super anti-racist/homophobic/sexist/patriarchy/capitalist blah blah blah but talking about those things straight out often feels like the worst place to have a productive conversation from. Compare "The prison industrial complex is a function of white supremacy", vs, "dang, it's messed up that people of color on average get way harsher sentences for the same crime." Context is very important, of course, but sometimes using a lot of words is better communication.
I know it's somehow all about meeting people in bars in Silicon Valley, but really, is it totally absolutely necessary to come and live in America to start a new world beating company?

I work remotely, and do a fair job with my colleagues. Other more talented people work and produce entire operating systems while on different continents, and if you are working on something more worthwhile and less fad driven than Facebook for dogs the surely surely you do not need a visa or a relocation.

And if it is better/faster/easier today, why can't that be a reality tomorrow?
Are you sure? I'm pretty confident in this case the assumption is that the distribution is normal. With no knowledge of the shape of distribution, the 5 sigma bound is extremely weak (one given by Chebyshev's inequality [0], in this case, ~4%). Prove me wrong though, as I'm not a physicist or mathematician.

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chebyshev's_inequality#Sharpnes...
In REAMDE, not a 747 but a small private jet.

The story also had the jet ‘disappear’ on the boundary between ATC zones. This was actually the first thing that came to my mind when I heard the first reports about MH370.
It shouldn't be the only way to get a (nonimmigrant in this proposal, incidentally) visa. But I really do believe it should be one way--it's hard to argue that more startups would hurt the economy.

I agree with you that there is a level of discomfort inherent in letting investors influence who gets visas, but honestly they know more about what startups have a chance at great success than government officers.
... then maybe people will realise how unfairly vilified the police are, and what a tough job it actually is.

You would think police departments would jump at the opportunity to wear cameras for this very reason, but they have routinely fought it.

A town I lived in the cops fought dash cams for a long time saying they couldn't get enough money to install them. Finally the state supreme court stepped up and started throwing out all DUIs without dash cams and amazingly all squad cars had them installed very quickly.
Reviewing the history of the US's first six frigates is a very interesting take on a lot of sides of this issue.
I had this exact experience yesterday.

I was reviewing the code spit out by a Yeoman generator, while reading some Angular docs (admittedly out of order), and I has confused about how variables were being defined. I finally read something that explained what to do (add a variable using a specific naming convention to the function declaration). I realized the framework was doing some sort of backhanded meta-programming, and I didn't feel so bad for not understanding what was going on.

The problem with this is you can be a pretty knowledgable JavaScript programmer and still not understand the code or the documentation. For this reason, I've never been a fan of meta-programming in general. Not only do you (as an application programmer) have to understand the language as defined, you have to understand other frameworks' reinterpretation of the language. If you bring in multiple frameworks that do this, it quickly becomes more difficult to reason about what a program does by simply reading the code.
This is a good example of sexism. But also a hint of target marketing, a few things of note...

Since there are less women in tech, technical people assume they are boring most people with technical jargon including most women (probabilistically). I bet if you dropped some technical info early it would knock it out of that mode quickly. I know when a women knows or doesn't know about tech I do change how I talk but I do this with anyone that is technical/non-technical. The old Feynman tune it to your crowd when you educate/market type of steward.

Also since there are so few women in tech, men don't usually work with them during the day and aren't the most alpha, lots of them could be shy or even have difficulty with eye contact at all. If they are introverted even moreso like many programmers are. Many are also young and not married which leads to awkwardness at times with ladies.

I think there are lots of opportunities for really skilled women but these intricacies should be stated more often so people understand and correct their assumptions. People need examples like this to learn how subtle it can be because just hearing 'sexism' doesn't help educate, more women with more examples as it is eye opening and helps understanding of this problem.
That USCIS guide is strange... it lists H1B only under "Nonimmigrant Visas" even though the H1B is dual-intent.
This related post "Tech companies, stop hiring women to be the Office Mom" describes "empathy work" and how it has almost always been significantly underpaid.

http://qz.com/47154/tech-companies-stop-hiring-women-to-be-t...

I like the reference to the fact that for a large part of history, many women worked completely without pay doing empathy & ops work full time (mothering families and running ops for households and community groups). As a culture maybe we have some residual beliefs about this type of work (and women's time) being basically free/cheap.
Many of the millions of unemployed US citizens/voters would argue that there are a few thousand talented, motivated, educated, english-speaking entrepreneurs in their ranks from which YC can choose.
Why would the satellite logistics system get shut down but still continue to send hourly pings?
Really? My colleague still uses his original iPhone 4 and doesn't have a problem with the antenna. He bought it on launch day. (He tells me it is starting to feel pretty slow, however.)

The antenna thing was a non-issue. Steve Jobs arrogant replies on the topic ("you're holding it wrong") certainly helped it blow up in the media.
Agreed. Much, much better article. Thanks for posting. Please create a new post with this link if it hasn't already been done!
What about brewers and distillers? Alcohol is responsible for 10s of thousands of deaths in the U.S. alone.

Or maybe you like a drink now and then....
Actually, speaking of Amanda Knox & LW... http://lesswrong.com/lw/ju0/amanda_knox_redux_is_satoshi_nak...
But it is just pattern matching - 'sexism' seems to connote intent, or at least some kind of discrimination / negativity. Assuming that a woman you meet is more likely to be non-technical than technical is just probability - it's not a great thing, but I do it too, and I am a woman. It doesn't mean that I think women shouldn't be in tech, or that I'm surprised when they are - just more likely than not, in my experience, women in tech companies are found in non-technical roles.
I am pretty sure there are already mechanisms for the rich to buy US citizenship. EB-5. Secure funding for your start-up, boom you're a US citizen as soon as you invest in jobs, etc. in the US. The rich have their ways.

What if YC selected ~100 projects per year, gave each their $500k so they could buy their way in...
The article lists many things that "operations management" people in early-stage startups do that would be applicable to a remote company as much as an in-person one: taxes, accounts payable, hiring management, equipment management / basic IT, various accounting and finances, travel planning, and so on.

Having someone manage operations is just as essential in a remote company as it is in an in-person one.

I do agree that the crappy snacks management / trash organization facet goes away to a large extent in a remote environment, but I certainly don't think that makes the role described in the article any less essential.
You're A Problem
> Alcohol is responsible for 10s of thousands of deaths in the U.S. alone.

Nope: _Abuse_ of Alcohol is responsible for 10s of thousands of deaths in the U.S. alone.

You don't have to abuse cigarettes: you just use them, and they kill you.
The problem is that you and I don't control what the government does. Government stupidity is a reality that has to be factored into decision-making. And maybe there's a way around it in this case - perhaps whoever drafts & sponsors the Founder Visa law just needs to be aware of the potential pitfall and make everyone else involved aware of why there need to be separate founder & investor visas, most of the time stupid decisions are made because reasonable people don't have all the information necessary - but it's still really important to be aware of it so you don't create unintended consequences. Saying "Well, I had the right idea, it just turned out to be a disaster because of other people" doesn't stop it from being a disaster.
Good to see work is being done on it, but until it's in the main implementation for at least a year...I wouldn't trust it on anything that matters.

The advantage of kernel threads is that they have way less overhead than a process (both in context size as well as more efficient memory caching at processor and OS level)...though more than a user-level thread. If there isn't any sort of message passing between two processes, the only mechanism I can think of of sharing data is shared memory (i.e and mmap) which is just as efficient as threads sharing the same process heap...but awkward (yes there are sockets, file IO, signals, queues, etc, but not as efficient). Even if OCaml provides a way to abstract that to be more palatable + safe -- my argument is that in a multicore world, kernel threads must be a first class citizen and the programmer shouldn't have to resort to tricks to harness it -- otherwise it's a major flaw that is going to prevent future adaptation. Also, as the number of cores increase, this is going to matter more and more...so hopefully this stuff gets out in the wild soon.
Just a guess. May be they are trying not to appear to be hitting on you. Paraphrasing you ..."Being a man around women is like walking through a maze with minefields at every turn and never knowing which one you'll hit."
Totally dig this. Just a small nit, a volume control on the main page would be great.
"Neither of which are requirements to do serious damage"

777-200-er has the range of a tu with hunreds of thousands of pounds more payload and it hold 20x the fuel of a citation x with 10x the mass. It also has double the range of a 777 freighter, with a similar maximum takeoff weight. So these are not interchangeble, but yes they are options.
Surprised nobody's mentioned SliTeX either here or on G+.

Source is plain ASCII. Output is PDF. Interpreter is TeX. All three are very, very robust for backward compatibility.

That Microsoft is being promoted for backwards (and forwards) compatibility strikes me as ... comical.
Along the lines of UNLV, check out the 2005 draft with UNC. #2, #5, #13, & #14. I think that's the most lottery picks from one school in a year, and three were in the same class (#2 was a freshman)!
Did MH370 disappear using SIA68/SQ68 (another 777)?
Then get people to pay for "gems" which "speed up" construction.

Then this turns into Clash of Clans. =)
Bitwig Studio
Where did you hear the black box was turned off?
I know a lead developer who would complain to me about his team's problems. Basically "I don't care about your problem, just do your work - I don't care if you have an addiction, if you have family problems...". He also made a note to never work with software developers because "they are all crazy". Needless to say, the guy snapped over an issue is now no longer talking to me.

On another issue, I had a line manager that I had to report to. He was very "non-technical", for example in my last discussion with him after I quit I had to do some handover documents. He thought that because an API is "very technical" (does not even attempt to understand what an API is) it should be relegated to staff member who he deemed would be "technical enough" to work with APIs (this staff member was a freakin Director!!). Whenever he requested something from me, or makes some sort of demand (which makes sense, as he was a line manager) I used to get -very- angry to the point that I would physically freeze up out of anger and this is the first workplace where it's happened. Eventually, I gave my notice to quit.

Sometimes you can't choose your leads or managers, but you can choose how you react!! Don't leave it too late.
that's because PHP is such a horrible language you need static typing to make sense of the crap. </snark>
I think we have laws that cover those cases. Attempted murder not being the same as actual murder even though the only difference might be bad aim and all that.

If by firing randomly you were assured nobody else would be hurt, would anyone still care? The real problem with firing randomly is that you can't ensure nobody will get hurt.

Taking drugs is two steps removed from that. The idea being that by taking drugs, you are more likely to walk down the street firing a gun randomly, therefore a criminal. Doesn't make a whole lot of sense to me.
FP says the "entrepreneur visa", IIRC it required putting up your own money:

http://business.financialpost.com/2013/01/24/startup-visa-pr...