skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ghost Tour a rip off – St Augustine Florida
Why to people continue to trust their funds to incompetents and fraudsters?

Because they live in a world where they can trust the system. However, in bitcoin land, they still behave they can still trust the system.

Bitcoin and the core developers are the only group you can trust to any extent, really.
What’s the Point If We Can’t Have Fun? (Why the Universe Plays)
It's a feature that Silver's group is approaching data from outside of the circles of the various fields of study.

Krugman is probably worried about what pure stats will say about the predictions of most economists.
Does anyone know if it is possible to get a dump of the firmware running on the vPro? I'd like to take a look in IDA!
I agree that some people who collect and use guns have excellent ideas of safety, and that giving all children a gun safety course would prevent some negligent discharges.

But do armed citizens really still think they can defy an out of control state? Didn't that line of thinking die with Waco?
They better meant "finished"
> Regulatory reform does not prevent bank thefts

Of course it does. Not 100%; but mostly. Your bank has multiple people handling all cash transactions, mandatory account balancing on at least a daily basis, all sorts of controls on its operations that you have no idea exist because the system facing you doesn't show them to you. It has these because they are required by law. Your bitcoin exchange has none of these.
Which will shift the burden to individuals to secure their safetyboxes and safe, and backup their computers. However, it's a hell lot better than losing everyone's coins in one fell swoop.
The few articles that I've read on fivethirtyeight so far have all been of excellent quality. While Krugman might have some ideological grievances with this website, there are no concrete flaws that he can actually point to, therefore his criticism remains very abstract, and for practical purposes moot. I would take his criticism a lot more seriously if he can pick out a handful of articles published on fivethirtyeight, and show that their conclusions have been refuted by various expert researchers in that domain (while saving the data).
What bank pays 3%?
I've done that with hardware that got installed in a factory.

Why not? You pay a one-time, small license fee, you get years of free support from a major company, I don't have to document all the details of my stripped down kernel and how to recreate it, you can hire anybody off the street to work on it long after I am gone (and I am long gone from that company, but the hardware lives on), they didn't have to pay me to build out a unique OS, the low power computer we had could more than handle XP, there was (and continues to be) continued new, unknown requirements and upgrades, the people required to occasionally touch the interface had more PC experience than for any embedded or linux OS, and on and on.

Why wouldn't I slap a copy of XP on there? Well, this story is the counter-argument, of course. I still think it was the right decision.
Seems so. The independent CPU has access to system RAM, that is pretty much game over. SMM (ring -2 in the slides) may be another good choice. [0]

[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/System_Management_Mode
It's also the case that a lot of people at the NYT disliked him already

(see e.g. http://publiceditor.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/07/22/nate-silver... )

and now they no longer have any reason to hide it.
To what are you referencing with the word Idiocy? Minsky winning a prize?

"But the evidence is overwhelming. The evidence cannot be denied."

OK, so provide the irrefutable evidence instead of your opinionated, anecdotal "evidence" that computers cannot associate meaning with a symbol. You make an untestable claim that computers cannot do semantics, perhaps they can and we haven't built the right type of computer. Then you use circular logic to "prove" that a computer can only do syntax. Of course a computer that can only do syntax can only do syntax. The first rule of tautology club is the first rule of tautology club.

I have not read the Nagel book, and I am not saying you are wrong, I am saying that nobody is going to believe you if you don't substantiate your argument with real evidence.

If your "idiocy" claim was against Minsky, I would urge you to read even a small portion of his work, particularly Causal Diversity/the Future of AI [1] which is a short technical paper where he talks about how computers will not be able to advance in many areas until they can understand word meanings (semantics).

[1] http://web.media.mit.edu/~minsky/papers/CausalDiversity.html
Nick Confessore had a great tweet about journalists' resentment of Nate Silver being rooted in the subtext of journalists knowing stats being worth more than journalists who don't.
A design deliverable for the post-PSD era of responsive design
What is truly amazing to me about New York is that you can live in the suburbs and still not have a car. I used to live in Westchester, 20 miles north of midtown, and drove maybe once a month. My commute was amazing, 35 min straight to midtown on trains that ran often and on time. Nothing else in the US comes close.
Let's not forget all those benefits were made possible by the people adding value and selling something (each in their own way, some products, others selling their craft of just their time). This adding of value was then taxed. (I'm not protesting to taxes, just showing all those benefits were made possible by the people and executed by the state).
Ironic, and telling, that Silver presents a viewpoint against Krugman's and backs it with data, while Krugman simply refutes his arguments by espousing on his same opinion with no data whatsoever.

This statement from Krugman, to me, flies in the face of scientific thought - "you should be very wary if your analysis runs counter to what a lot of professionals say." Not at all true - the "lot of professionals" should be wary if a scientific study runs counter to their analysis.
Is it just me, or was anyone else taken aback by an academic article using a linkbait-esque title? I'm sure the title is perfectly reasonable, given that it's a survey paper, but the past few years of being bombarded with articles like "10 weird tricks to optimize your everything" immediately triggers my skeptical meter. Funny how the internet warps the brain.
Even if Krugman is right he should support Silver's experiment. This is how it should work. Krugman asserts one thing, and Silver assets another thing. Silver creates a way to test the theories. I like it, regardless of who is right.
I've been using standing desk for over a year at work, and the first month went similar to the way the OP described. Unlike the OP though, it was never my intention to stand all day. I stand when I feel like, and sit (on a tall chair) when feel like it (right now it is probably 70/30).

I have a bar running across the bottom of the desk 1 foot off the ground. I can put my foot on it, so I can bend my legs and move around quite a bit.

Trying to just stand stationary all day, which appears to be what the OP was trying to, sounds very uncomfortable and counter productive. The whole point (at least for me) isn't to not-sit-all-day, but to able to move legs through the day.
I had to look the term up. I'm not convinced it's the right one, as the etymology (according to wikipedia [1]) comes from military personnel acting without consent on foreign soil. What I understood was more like jingoism in action.

On the other hand, if we use the second paragraph's description: "... are irregular soldiers who act without authority from their own government, and are generally motivated by financial gain, political ideology, or the thrill of adventure." -- We get something that has only partial overlap with mercenaries or privateers. I still don't see how the term applies in this case. "Without authority" is a pretty steep accusation.

Maybe I'm missing some cultural context.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Filibuster_%28military%29
I had similar ideas.im working ona different project but canwe pleasechat? @puppetmaster3
European hackers test their skills in Geneva
I disagree. The psychological element of gun ownership is a substantive issue. I find your post attributing to me an interest in "small penis" arguments inflammatory and unconstructive.
Taking a bike on the subway is much harder, and usually seen as rude, because our cars are much smaller. Thankfully, our bridges have bike dedicated bike lanes, so taking them on the subway is not necessary.

I was astounded when I visited SF, usually seen as much more bike friendly than NY, and I saw that east bay riders still had to rely on the BART to get them into the city. The fare between West Oakland and Embarcadero alone is more than a subway ride.
Blame ruby...
Blame malleability
Blame ...

I wish a real security expert would publish good practices for using crypto wallets
> I don't think that investors (even Andreesen Horowitz) look at ANY investment and think, "Well, some of my investments are going to fail, I can take on this one and accept the hit to my returns."

I'm not sure that's what the OP was saying. a16z is a $2.5b fund, so spending $100MM is only 4% of their fund. The point that he's making, is that the micro risk gained on just GitHub decreases the macro risk overall the whole portfolio. In other words, keep the assumptions concrete and businesses that utilize those assumptions will flourish.

Imagine you're an auto company, and money stops going into road construction, and therefore less people use the roads. A smart auto company may invest in construction companies. The only argument here is now do these constructions really need any extra money to keep them going? (I would argue no, they're already making enough money) In the same vein, does GitHub need more money to be motivated? (the answer is probably no, but as you point out, it's an extremely safe bet) That being said, it doesn't hurt to throw a small percent of your fund into road construction.
Unfortunately, Silver seems to have taken the wrong lesson from his election-forecasting success.... What he seems to have concluded is that there are no experts anywhere, that a smart data analyst can and should ignore all that.

Doing your own analysis doesn't mean you believe there are no experts. It means you believe experts are sometimes wrong and there's value in doing original analysis from the source data.

I love that about 538. Most news sources are writing based on the same small set of sources and quotes. Even if I don't agree with 538's analysis, it's useful to get the perspective of a critical outsider armed with data.
> Google's ad mechanism reads all emails sent and received by all gmail users,

Exactly like Microsoft, Apple or Yahoo! does.

I don't know where has started that urban legend that only Google scan the emails, every email provider that does anti spam, auto categorizes or does full text search read all the emails.
Idea Hub
You have considerable risk keeping the wallet locally, just of a different kind. The most common way people have lost money locally thus far is probably just losing the wallet file without having backups. A worm or trojan whose payload steals people's bitcoins is also plausible, though afaik there haven't been any yet.
I found these parts interesting:

> Now, obviously, anyone is free to agree or disagree with Snowden’s framework for how these materials be handled and reported. I personally think the process of government consultation is often used to suppress newsworthy information, though for the NSA stories I’ve worked on, government arguments to suppress information have been rejected in at least 99% of the cases; I also think non-traditional outlets such as WikiLeaks have done a superior job in many cases with reporting classified documents than government-loyal traditional outlets.

Ok, so mention how people can disagree with Snowdens framework, mention suppression of information through traditional media outlets (NYT, Guardian, etc), mention the superior job non-traditional outlets have had when it comes to classified documents with WL as the example, and some how trying to put Firstlook on the same pedestal indirectly if we ignore or are ignorant of the conception of the two identities/orgs? Amusing.

>But what you shouldn’t feel free to do is ignore that this is the framework on which Snowden insisted. You shouldn’t demand that journalists violate their agreements with him (by publishing all the documents) unless you are willing to admit that this is what you’re advocating. And you definitely shouldn’t pretend that it’s Snowden, rather than these media outlets, who are making the choices about what gets published in order to demonize him for the latest disclosures you dislike while cowardly refusing to criticize the media outlets that actually made the choice to publish them.

Because amongst this "public service" that is to determine what is "public interest", there remains the profiteering of the "leaks" (that have been mentioned to the public by Binney, Drake and many others in the past to some degree), kind of makes this moral argument to the sanctity of an agreement between multiple parties (founded on treasonous grounds if you would ask the Five Eyes) pretty laughable.
Thanks for the response.

I logged in today to find 3 predictions that were double my actual salary. Maybe if you include an option to add your real salary, the salary predictor bar only allows guesses within a specific range outside of the real salary. It might keep the predictions more realistic.

Also, I received an email confirmation from SalaryFairy. What is the purpose of this if I already logged in with Linkedin? Wouldn't my account already be verified if I have a Linkedin account?
The Best Places To Launch A Startup In 2014
<quote>I think that worry about corrupt businesses is misplaced when a corrupt government is 10x worse.</quote>

Worrying about private sector corruption misplaced? One shouldn't have to tolerate _any_ kind of corruption.
One thing is collect data, another is scanning all the emails and both of them do that
It's disingenuous in the extreme to suggest that AML/KYC policies and banking regulations have anything to do with a significant proportion of all Bitcoins ever in circulation having disappeared from counterparties claiming they were hacked. Real, regulated banks do not simply lose significant fractions of dollars in circulation.

It has a lot more to do with bad code, bad storage policies or bad intentions on the part of the exchanges, and most of them point to transaction malleability - a design flaw in the original protocol - as their excuse.
So this 2048 is the new Flappy Bird.
The first 2048 game I've won!
Hi Steve,

I also have a language learning startup at http://www.nihongomaster.com which is targeted purely for Japanese learners. Your post is an interesting read because I've gone through all the phases you've detailed. It's a uphill battle but overall a great experience.

I emailed you so we can keep in touch. I think entrepreneurs in the language learning space can help each other out and encourage each other to succeed.
If he had NSA he couldjust predict noncompliant individuals.
Unlike most Top 10 lists that are deliberately designed with unexpected choices for shock value, the paper cites exactly how the 10 were chosen and attempts to justify why each choice was made.

If the paper was titled "Wow, The Top 10 Algorithms in Data Mining Are Incredible, And I Can't Believe Where Naive Bayes Placed," then yeah, that might be link-baity.
There's not much to publish. If you can't view the source, and it doesn't run on your computer, and you can't easily migrate from one to another then you can't trust it and shouldn't use it.
My favorite hacker koans are the vim koans: http://blog.sanctum.geek.nz/vim-koans/
> The freezing of the balances is a one-time action, it does not affect future deposits in any ways.

This is laughable. No effect on future deposits? Who in their right mind would continue to use them after this?
Yeah, this is quite a bit easier.
Why do those people think "it's ok" for NSA to hack Huawei's servers? Is it ok for China to hack Google's servers, then? You can't have it both ways. Also, I remember Obama saying that a "cyberattack" is just as bad as a real world attack. That reinforces the fact it's bad for both China and US to be doing these sort of attacks - unless they are outright calling each other "war rivals".

This is still very much WW2 thinking that you need to have spies within a country and hack into them at all times. It also exposes US for its hypocrisy, because until now they've only said about "how bad China is for hacking others". Something tells me they'll shut up about that now.

I also disagree with the Lawfare guy. Here's the thing, if either NSA or CIA starts conflicts abroad, then it's very much in the interest of the US public. The people deserve to know when it's the US starting conflicts for various reasons, otherwise they'll only experience the backlash from those conflicts, and they'll wrongly think that country is the aggressor. And of course the US government will do whatever it can to paint them like that, too. This is why it's so important in such cases to unveil the truth, even if it "damages national security".

Governments are often led by corrupt psychopaths, and the people should know the truth so it can stop its own government, before creating a major crisis that everyone will pay for with blood. The American people deserve to know if the US gov is pissing off China with its hacks, to the brink of war, just like the Chinese people deserve to know if its own government is doing the same with its cyberattacks against US. Either way, the people need to know, and secret ops should be kept at a minimum.
Interestingly enough, WebP is a great format to use if you don't want users saving your images.

More than once I've right-clicked an image to save it to disk, only later to discover I have no program on my computer which can open or view it, except for Chrome! No thumbnails, no previews, no Photoshop, nothing. (I know there are plug-ins, if I really wanted to.)
Here’s an idea: Let’s put aircraft black boxes in the cloud
There should be a technical solution to this problem. Emails should be saved encrypted on microsoft servers and microsoft should not have the key to decrypt them.
By the professionals Krugman does not refer to political analysts/hacks that spew opinion. He is referring to scientists. He is cautioning Nate Silver against dismissing the work done by scientists who use scientific methods. Nate Silver's crew ignoring scientific studies would be no different than political analysts ignoring Nate Silver's work based on anecdotes.
10 seconds into the game and I won. The key is to press only three directional keys randomly and you'll win.

Hell, this is the first 2048 game in which I've won!
From the essay: "Despite the problems described above, most of us remain safe. Prosecutors have limited resource [...]"

This reminds me of the issue with warrants and GPS tracking devices on cars. Police have argued that attaching a GPS tracker is no different than assigning a patrol car (or unmarked car) to tail a person. But there's a huge difference. Up until recently, our expectation was that assigning a tail was an investment of rather limited resources, thus giving us some assurance that police would be precluded from tailing anyone but bona fide suspects. With the proliferation of GPS devices -- the cost of which will most certainly continue to come down -- the number of people police can track approaches everybody. That's living in a very different world.

Wait until prosecutors have the computing power to track people's activities and flag "crimes." The "Mother Teresa" parlor game will be made automatic and expand to include everyone. That will be a very different world, too.
I won on my first try in under a minute. That was super fun though, great work on the game mechanic, but I think it needs work.

It is possible to get the game into a state where holding one direction makes to score climb forever.
Time till the page is usable comes under consideration. You can load the relevant html then begin the bootstrapping of the app.

If I recall correctly, Twitter had this problem. The size of their apps + templates bloated to 2MB or so - making that initial page load pretty bad.
Drum Cover
Krugman does, in fact, link to more detailed criticisms in his article, specifically this: http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3416369/538-clim...
Not really clear why we should be incentivizing mistakes. "Just say whatever," you might say, "If someone really cared; they'll do the research for you."
This article was eventually expanded into a full fledged book with more in depth descriptions of each algorithm:

http://www.crcpress.com/product/isbn/9781420089646
Is it common for chinese citizens to do this , or is it only done by some tech guys ?
Which indeed is my #1 fear, something nasty can be one `pip install` away.
The updates are being applied to the same components found in XP Pro. XPe is essentially a nLite-customised XP Pro with a support contract. If Windows Updates worked for nLite-customised XP, then I can't see XPe updates being majorly different.
Watch: The Making of Neon Signs
Have we still not agreed to stop paying attention to Paul Krugman altogether? It's been sad watching the quality of his column tumble since 2009 or so - one column in January 2014 actually referred to Amy Adams's cleavage[0].

> But data never tell a story on their own. They need to be viewed through the lens of some kind of model, and it’s very important to do your best to get a good model. And that usually means turning to experts in whatever field you’re addressing.

His first two sentences are spot on - data must be matched with a story (I might not use the word "story" here, but the general principle is right).

The amusing part though is that he assumes that Nate Silver isn't an expert at this point. I've been following 538 since before 2008, and the quality of analysis from a non-statistical level was consistently far higher than almost any other publication (except perhaps the Economist).

If anything the quality level once 538 signed with the Times decreased slightly, but only because a number of the other contributors (Andrew Gelman, etc.) stopped contributing at that time.

[0] Krugman hit an impressive low in January with this column - a rather vapid dismissal of the Silk Road as (and I quote) "libertarian derp", devoid of any actual analysis or supporting arguments whatsoever: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2014/01/19/derp-pirate-robe...
But calling the problem there "sexism" has two major negative effects: it can lead you to believe that correct sexist arguments are flawed by their sexism, and it can lead you to accept affirming-the-consequent type arguments that aren't sexist. If something's wrong, you don't want to slam it for orthogonal traits, you want to slam it for the things that make it wrong.
Getting a real security expert and swapping from Ruby to Haskell or something is not the solution - you can still have bugs. Most security bugs come from misunderstanding some layer of abstraction or failing to check permissions in all possible branches, etc. These bugs are usually small logic errors and are completely independent of the technology used to transfer algorithm to machine code.

There is no silver bullet. The only secure software is software that has been used by millions of people in millions of ways and been slowly but surely improved. This software will still have bugs to be found, but far less than something newly written.

EDIT: And unit tests are not the solution either - do you have a unit test to check for a timing vulnerability? I thought not... (Counting off one of the many ways I've heard to make secure software)
He does point to concrete flaws by linking to this article:
http://thinkprogress.org/climate/2014/03/19/3416369/538-clim...

He does not rehash them for brevity.
Robotics at its best (Real life Transformers)