skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In don't think "zero sum game" means what you think it means. Lots of people in San Francisco engage in transactions, and lots of people in New York engage in reducing transaction costs. Neither are "zero sum" endeavors. Insurance is a great example. My office used to sit in the shadow of the Met-Life building. They don't make anything, so they must be zero sum. Wrong. Insurance enables transactions to happen that wouldn't otherwise happen, adding value to the economy. That's the crux of many of New York's economic sectors: finance, advertising, insurance, law, consulting. Its abstract, and service oriented rather than product oriented, but its not zero sum.

Now one can argue about the amount of value created by these industries, or rather how much of the value created is absorbed by the industries themselves. You can also question how much value is created by yet another web app getting funded in SV, so I don't know if you're on firm ground there.
Non-US-based cloud services might be more at risk to bulk surveillance
I guess that's because back in the 90s there were no practical alternatives to NT and OS/2, then NT4 won. XP was an obvious migration path for the old NT embedded software.
As a guy still in school, a field changing has absolutely zero to do with book editions, and everything to do with squeezing more money out of the government money backed students.

Undergrad topics are not only stable but almost completely isolated from change. A bleeding edge discovery in physics is only relevant to a Ph.D. It doesn't, for instance, upend classical mechanics on an undergrad level. That small change will never (for the most part) ripple its way all the way back to classical mechanics in a way that warrants a new book.

So what changes from edition to edition? The ordering of the chapters, and the questions they contain. It is fundamentally bullshit.

When I took my first year civics course, I mistakenly purchased the previous edition. Upon realizing that the table of contents in my book didn't match the course syllabus, I sent a quick email to the professor explaining my mistake, the fact that money prevents me from getting the correct edition, and whether or not I could get by with the old one. Sure enough, the (awesome) professor explained that the only things that were different were the order of the chapters and their respective titles (she even gave me a mapping of old title to new). As a further point of cool-professor-ness, she acknowledged the bullshit of the new edition, and explained that the book choice was out of her hands.

That was the last time I bought a current edition (sans a few classes which had custom books). Every semester begins with an email to the professor asking if the previous edition could be used, and almost without fail the answer is yes.

And the people who make the books caught on. If students know nothing changes from edition to edition, there's no incentive to purchase the new edition. So, what the current model for text books? Required Online Access codes. New editions come with the book, PLUS the online portion where you can actually submit your answer to the book's questions. Lucky us. Did you pick up a previous version of the book? No problem, just purchase this $70 access code so that you can submit your homework.

It's bullshit all the way down.
I used a standing desk for about ten years, starting because of back problems where I couldn't sit down for more than 15 minutes. I also had a drafting stool (with a back) so that I could sit or stand. Some days I mostly stood, some days mostly sat, some very mixed. Now I have a different job and sit at a desk all day. I can't say I miss my standing desk except for its size (4' X 8') -- it was unmatched for working with two or three people.
To check, I downloaded Asrock X79 Extreme4's BIOS update and looked into it. It contains 2MB of ME firmware.

That's definitely not the vPro enabled version (which uses about 5MB), but approximately matches the regular non-vPro versions in size.

Maybe the "ME firmware N/A" field is meant to mean "don't bother, we don't want you to configure it"?

edit: updated with information from another bios update that isn't a diff
Moreover it's merrily intermixing entrepreneurs problems with banking problems.

This is a big problem with current envy-driven politics surrounding wealth.

A lot of people don't like seeing bankers with big bonuses after they trashed the economy for everyone else. They're suspicious of old money children who have inherited a fortune but seem to have contributed little of value themselves. They're envious of highly paid sporting or artistic celebrities who get more salary in a week than most of us make in a year.

And so they support punitive rates of tax for those who earn noticeably more than they do, not necessarily based on any rational economic argument, but more because they feel it's "fair" for the "rich to contribute more" or some such argument.

Unfortunately, what that usually does in practice is hit highly qualified professionals or modestly successful entrepreneurs. It hits the doctors who spent years training, then more years working long hours for little money as juniors, and who finally made it to more senior positions where they are literally in a position to save lives with their greater experience but earn a fair bit of money. It hits the top public servants: the veteran judges, the experienced military commanders, the senior civil servants, basically the kind of people who keep government actually working despite the whims of successive political administrations. It hits the lucky entrepreneurs, the ones who made it after maybe putting their lives on hold for years and investing their savings to build a real business that creates value and maybe jobs for other people. All of these people are the kind of people we really need in society to keep everything working, and usually they are people who have reached those positions not through good fortune or family connections but through a lot of hard work over a long period of time.

However, the people these punitive taxes don't hit are the ones that the popular moneylust craves, because the super-rich are the people who have the flexibility to move their assets and/or themselves around to avoid high-tax environments. Absent serious international co-operation to overcome the naturally competitive tax environment that today's globalised society creates, these people will continue to be super-rich no matter what.

I like to think that if the people supporting these high rates of tax for those with some above average level of wealth realised who they were really targeting, we'd have a different attitude to taxation today. As it is, I fear the politics of envy will continue to trump rational economic policy for the foreseeable future, and unfortunately the people who actually did earn their wealth will be the ones who suffer most for it.
It is clear (from reading HN) that some people exist who do not find this acceptable.

At the same time, the adoption rates for, say, Facebook show that "nearly everyone" are not actually concerned about such things in practice. There are those who might argue that people should be more concerned. I believe you may find that such conversations have occurred.

Regardless, it seems silly to pretend that Microsoft is making a principled claim, as opposed to mouthing what they hope are scary words.

Similarly, Microsoft isn't actually worried about the plight of young women who may be under the impression that they can pawn their chromebooks to fund a trip to LA.
That's true of pretty much any knowledge you don't gather first-hand, though.

It's not a binary thing, it's a spectrum. I don't have any first-hand knowledge that black holes exist, but there's a great deal of evidence that pushes me into the "95% sure they exist" column.

Similarly if multiple people tell me someone is an asshole, that pushes my needle on the spectrum to "66% sure this person is an asshole."

You can, and should, maintain skepticism about any conclusions you draw. But that doesn't mean you can't draw conclusions at all until you verify the information yourself and are 99% sure of something.
A psychiatrist cannot differentiate between "any regular person" and "significant degree of sociopathic behavior"?

No they can't. Psychiatric opinions are too mailable. It's not an easy assessment like diagnosing someone else's professional qualifications in a field unrelated to yours using a 2nd hand anecdote posted on the Internet. Now there's an analysis you can take to the bank.
Reddit's /r/forhire debates allowing jobs that pay only in Dogecoin
Completely unrelated to the discussion... And based on your previous submission of ponzidoge.com I am assuming self-promotion.
My largest fear with cryptocurrency is that my luck will run out (nothing bad has ever happened to my holdings) and I will lose a significant chunk of money. Most of my holdings are in cold wallets but news like this makes me shiver and makes me realize cryptocurrency needs more grown ups fast.
His interactions with Newton are what got me hooked on the book. Brilliantly done.
Let's suppose you're lost in the Amazon. Would you not prefer a professionally-drawn map of the Amazon over a "map" I whimsically scribbled while blindfolded? After all, my map might not correspond to the Amazon, but it must correspond to something.
And the grass is always greener...
Google Tools to Help Everyone Improve Their Writing Skills
>$286,000 on an armoured personnel-carrier known as a BearCat.

Or the town could have about 4.5 more teachers. I think the only way we will ever stop this madness is to put into clear terms what we are giving up.

Sure, the tank thing might make the town "safer," but is it is really worth cutting 4.5 teachers at YOUR kids school to pay for it?
SWF as an image format also requires a client side runtime be installed. A runtime with spotty cross platform performance and a poor security track record at that. The distaste for Flash is pretty well justified, I'll take the larger and slower SVGs over Flash any day.
FWIW, there exists a package for calling Pandas from Julia with almost no overhead. It lets you set and get elements of Pandas timeseries as fast as native Julia arrays: https://github.com/malmaud/Pandas.jl (I'm the author).

Thus Julia can be seen as a tool that leverages Pandas, not as a rival. In fact, most Python libraries are very easy to wrap in Julia because of the PyCall package (https://github.com/stevengj/PyCall.jl).
One more data point: Made the switch about two years ago here. At the time I was already fairly athletic, with normal BMI and in my mid twenties.

The first two weeks were incredibly difficult. After that you could feel the adaption kicking in, and by about a month I was able to stand for six hours at a time - punctuated by the usual trips to the kitchen and toilet several times per day of course.

Forget getting into the zone in this time. Compared with my peers, I would say I'm fast to adapt physically to new 'stresses' (from weight training and running in my experience), so I would judge this to be towards the 'best case' end of the scale.

Definitely agree that the author of this post threw in the towel too early. Standing for a full day is no mean feat. You wouldn't expect to run a marathon after two weeks of training having never run before.
The "$22 of ikea parts" approach looks like a torture device to me.

The tiniest tweak to standing desk height can make a big difference in resulting posture and comfort. (My exact height preference even changes from day to day, perhaps due to varying shoes or recent levels of other activity.)
Is this one place where the fabled BADBIOS could live?
Your essay http://paulgraham.com/cities.html really hit the differences between Boston, NYC and SF the best way I have seen.

As someone that spends time in NYC for work, lives in Boston, has lived in DC and Santa Clara the largest and most important distinction are how people measure each other.

While ideas are worthless on their own, they seem to be the currency that matters in conversations in SF. Money matters in NYC. Political affiliation and who you are affiliated with matter in DC. Boston has the most odd culture because people weigh each other on something that happened far in the past rather than in the future, the choice of school that they went to.

The thing that really makes SF stand out is that people are ambitious toward being part of something bigger than themselves and growing it to benefit many others.
If they add a second arm with a second carbon fiber spool, they will be able to do some amount of weaving. That would boost the applications of their product significantly, IMHO.

Two problems. The software for that is hard - it would take it out of the realm of "existing software modified for our machine" to "new algorithms". Second problem - it still wouldn't be able to do the standard carbon fiber weave (or the twill weave, for that matter).
Apologies if anyone has already made a similar suggestion... but, 1000 seems like an arbitrary amount of karma. What do you guys think of a fluid amount of karma required to post a non-pending comment. Popular stories on the front page can play by PG's rules. However, to encourage discussion on new submissions, scale back the karma requirements. The kinds of people who post obnoxious comments are looking for a crowd anyways.
Gates Foundation Picks Its Moonshots In India To Reinvent Toilets Globally
https://developers.google.com/speed/webp/docs/webp_lossless_...
re: your env size problem, sounds like you've built a 32-bit binary, so you can't use more than 2GB.

Also, please read the LMDB docs. Note that it is a single-writer design, so spreading writes across 16 processes will be quite poor.
Urgh. They are insolvent, but in denial. Who in their right mind would even think to trade on this exchange now.
22% of total revenue and 31% of tax base in NYC comes from the financial services industry. People don't realize what a one trick town it is
> They exercise privilege that they haven't paid into but simply possess on being there first, nor do they have economic incentive to see development that is beneficial for others.

It's amusing, because this is almost the exact opposite of the typical argument I see against gentrification of lower-class neighborhoods in Brooklyn or Upper Manhattan in which most of the longtime residents are not property owners (ie, "They were here first").
increasing evidence of illicit business practices among the highest earners

Corruption is the core problem. I think that worry about corrupt businesses is misplaced when a corrupt government is 10x worse.

everything from insider trading

There's a good example right there. Congress can inside trade. It's absolutely extraordinarily corrupt. They wrote a law a while back to prevent it when there was some press on it, but then quietly scaled back the restriction.

Consider this: Political office holders can lie to us outrageously and never face repercussions besides (perhaps) not being re-elected in a future cycle. You could list case after case of politicians who knowingly made definitive, verifiably false claims that have caused real damages to people. If they were officers of a public company, they would be sued into oblivion. They would be hounded by the Justice Department. But since they're in the political club, they've written the rules so that they can't be held accountable.
Perhaps -- just perhaps -- the authors, editors and publishers brought this upon themselves?
Until we get regulatory reform on a federal level, this will keep happening.

http://www.plainsite.org/issues/index.html?id=2
They were compromised in Janurary 2013 and made this comment:

> Before the wild speculations beginn, the service will be recovered and we pay the losses out of our own pockets.[0]

From the forums it looks like they lost funds again in May 2013 due to the RoR code execution bug (CVE-2013-0156):

> After investigating the security breach we have to come to the conclusion that the attacker has been able to get root access to the systems.

By the sounds of things they've been insolvent for over a year after both breaches and at this time just happened to get more withdraws than deposits.

Terrifyingly in January, they "cleaned up" the server and kept on using it afterwards[2].

[0]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135919.msg1448056#ms...

[1]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=49383.msg2102708#msg...

[2]: https://bitcointalk.org/index.php?topic=135919.msg1448204#ms...
Interesting reading the comments. You see the three big reactions people have to crypto-currencies: some people get riled up and are insulted it would even be considered, some people see crypto-currencies as the future and want to see it advanced, and some are pragmatists who view it as just another mode of payment like Paypal.
Back when I was in school, I had a plan to photograph (the quality was good enough) the pages of all my intro textbooks, burn them to a CD, and distribute a few copies in the freshman honors dorm before the term started (I figured they'd be more accepting of a weird format, and enterprising with recopying the cds). I never quite got around to it though, as the scanning took too long. It's too bad, even then it was obvious that the textbook market was a scam based on changing page/problem numbers so you'd feel behind or unable to do homework if you had a different edition.

For most books, you should hold off buying as long as possible as the class might not actually even use them. Some you may only need for homework problems, which you can usually borrow from a friend in class. If the prices have really gotten this out of hand, students should just start forming their own sharing/copying groups and make that the accepted norm. Let the publishers reap what they've sown and extract their pound of flesh exactly once.
But these things are not private and they are actionable. And they update the dictionary every year, because language changes. If you dismiss them out of hand, you will lose a lot of opportunity.

If greater concern, though, is that your contempt for non-normative identities is rather poorly concealed. Trust me- you do not want to speak to your users as you have spoken to me.
How databinding works in Angular JS?
What sort of activities do you change desk height for?
There was a walking desk near my desk at Google. I found the walking desk, with a large monitor for my laptop to be ideal when I had to catch up on email and reading. Typing while walking was not as good.

Since I normally work from a home office my wife has been trying to talk me into buying one. I probably would not use it enough because I have four different working locations at home.

One more thing: a "get up and walk timer" is a good idea. On days when I don't use a timer, I don't feel as physically comfortable at the end of a long work day.
Which federal level were you thinking of? US? What about the rest of the world?
Note to prospective Vibram users: watch your running surface. I had a good few months with Vibrams until I got a stress fracture in the ball of my left foot. If you are going to be doing long distances on a hard surface, you need to build up very slowly or use a softer shoe.
Looking out my window in MN, the ground is still covered with snow and it is 16 degrees (F). SF meanwhile will be in the 60s all week which seems pretty good to me.
After a story like this, how on earth could any corporation blindly trust a cloud provider with their data?

By using an e-mail service that does not have such clauses in their terms of service, or even better, guarantee that they won't read your e-mail. Because if they do, it makes it a lot easier to sue them.

Of course, e-mail is inherently insecure. Even with PGP encryption, the metadata is visible by every SMTP server on a message's route. So, don't expect privacy when using e-mail.
Not that I'm in the market, but a domain like "herway.com" wouldn't be appealing to me as a guy. It's one thing for a dating site to have a rule that only girls initiate contact, it's another to have a dating site which gives the impression that "Everything here is done the girl's way, guys have no say on anything and must obey or go away." It's just a bad first impression and very off-putting.
That link was the most interesting thing I've read on HN all day. Thank you!

My favorite quote:
"As a historical remark, it's interesting that the possibility of thinking machines isn't something that occurred to people gradually, after they'd already been using computers for decades. Instead it occurred to them immediately, the minute they started talking about computers themselves. People like Leibniz and Babbage and Lovelace and Turing and von Neumann understood from the beginning that a computer wouldn't just be another steam engine or toaster -- that, because of the property of universality (whether or not they called it that), it's difficult even to talk about computers without also talking about ourselves."
>Students are NOT the consumers of the textbook industry, professors are.

Exactly. Besides the conflicts of interest you mentioned, the actual contents of the texts are crafted for the benefit of the customers (the professors of course). Directly from the article:

>To get faculty hooked, Ahrens offers all kinds of extras for the instructor, like test questions, visuals, and homework questions. Not much use for the student's though.

And this leads to a situation where you, the student, are simply paying for the professor's laziness, as you put it:

>The problem as a student is that I need the problems in the back to do homework, and in many cases exam questions are drawn straight from those problems.

Those publishers sure know what they are doing...
I have a project that I've been working on (http://arturo.io). It does what you have described. It's not ready, but I want to have these and other books automatically generated from pull requests and converted to the major formats.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Attachmate
However be careful, catering for every customer feature request, change etc... can be a vicious cycle that does more damage than good.
On top of that, SPDY is an experimental protocol that may eventually (after enough iteration) make it into a standard (HTTP 2.0). It's not standard yet, and definitely not defacto standard.
In my experience, taking a bike on BART is a colossal PITA. Caltrain is years ahead.
The culture in the Bay Area seems to be to get people addicted to their employer as fundamental to their identity, not just the money it gives them. This may be because SF doesn't have the level of services you get in NYC, but that's a cause/effect problem from lack of disposable income and lack of population density.

For example, a Google employee that moved from elsewhere in the country to San Francisco, and takes the Google bus to Mountain View because they don't have a car has an absolutely terrifying dependency on Google that they would not have if they were freely spending their own money to get the same services.
In my experience, the rush hour commute on BART takes quite a bit of white collar people to/from the Market Street stops. Its just that when the BART strikes happened, a lot of people could work from home or drive or whatever. Imagine being a full time student at SFSU or something coming in from the East Bay.
Having lived in SF since 1996, I'd like to formally refute your point here. I'm quite happy with SF. I also live outside the Mission gentrification world, but do work in the tech industry. SF is still weird, it's still got its distinct character and it's still part of an incredible geography. I like being in the West because it's as much a psychological distance as anything. I say this as someone born and raised in Virginia.

I'm always amused at people's attitudes about San Francisco, and San Franciscans. Keep 'em coming.
Your last sentence is the most important.

The only reason I can think of to ask the user the question is for equalities monitoring.

Why do companies still want this information?