skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
And a reason why the west survived the onslaught of the Axis powers -the sheer grit, determination and bloody mindedness of the Russians. I recently discovered that the fall of Berlin cost more Soviet lives than the whole war cost the UK. http://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_War_II_casualties
Researchers present new view of myelin
Peeps are disgusting. Unless you eat them like this.
Perhaps I should have used a better word than "unintended". Sadly I'm out of the editing window for that post, so I can't really change it. Sorry about that.
Ask HN: 20-year-old Canadian w/o a degree offered 100K+ in SF. Visa advice?
Hi guys,

I deferred University to pursue a bunch of opportunities that came up -- working in China, starting a business, and now getting an offer in SF (a lot of it was luck, so not saying that the no Uni path is for everyone).

This is from a very notable company(maybe a degree away from google-level), but their law firm says that I won't be able to obtain a visa because of the degree.

Is there an optimal path I can take to resolve this, or is the best bet to go back to University?
Most new cars will be electric in 10 years. Then instead of oil, coal or nuclear (power plants) will be the primary power source and ethanol for automobile fuel will be a minor issue.
Regarding sustainability, Charles Stross has a fun thought experiment over here: http://www.antipope.org/charlie/blog-static/2009/11/designin...

> We humans are really bad at designing institutions that outlast the life expectancy of a single human being. The average democratically elected administration lasts 3-8 years; public corporations last 30 years; the Leninist project lasted 70 years (and went off the rails after a decade). The Catholic Church, the Japanese monarchy, and a few other institutions have lasted more than a millennium, but they're all almost unrecognizably different.

> So. You, and a quarter of a million other folks, have embarked on a 1000-year voyage aboard a hollowed-out asteroid. What sort of governance and society do you think would be most comfortable, not to mention likely to survive the trip without civil war, famine, and reigns of terror?
You could argue HP lost the culture first, at least at the top when Carly Fiorina who was a marketer rather than an engineer put into run a company that had always been about great engineering. Then wallop as you say.
A beautiful new article template for LaTeX
When you look at the "rent a castle" or many of the featured locations it is clear I am not a minority. It was this change that made them a $10b valuation company instead of being what ever valuation all the other couch surf websites are.

There are other services for furnished short term rentals. Few of those let you do 3 day rentals. I am on some of the ones that allow 1 week rentals. So there is competition in that space, and has been pre-airbnb.

So yes, they have a "franchise" this analogy is falling down because they are more like Amazon and I am more like one of the providers who lists on them. Or, Ebay listing my car for me.

When Amazon, or Ebay have support issues, or performance issues, or "image" issues it effects those "self entitled" sellers who are trying to make a living on their platform.

And yes, just as ebay and amazon if you don't do a good job the providers of what is sold will leave.
Our parents and grandparents were the joyriding dipshits.
the argument is that modern day USA actually has more inequality than old Rome.

There might be technicality on the economic points of view since slaves were not people but goods.
Haha yeah, the difficulty scaling may need some work, but at least it was an accurate description :)
I agree with your response to your parent post, but I have one clarification to add:

aggregate return on capital (i.e. the sum of profits of all firms i.e. all the money that rich people make)

Actually, as I understand it, the term "capital" as standardly used by economists is broader than this. To see the difference, consider: if you are doing work that requires skills (as I'm sure most HN readers are, since computer programming is such work), those skills are capital that you possess, and your pay, according to standard economic usage, is partly return on that capital, not compensation for labor. (Basically, the difference between your pay and the pay of an unskilled person, like the burger flipper at McDonald's, is return on capital--it's actually not quite that simple because variations in productivity at similar skill levels, due to automation, also come into play, but that's the gist of it.)

I have not read Piketty's book, so I can't say for sure how he is using the term "return on capital", but it seems to me that in order to properly interpret the data he appears to be using, one has to pay very careful attention to the distinction I made above. Otherwise one might be incorrectly estimating return on capital.
Yup, Cosmos was on tonight, subject: lead. It's nice to see it got some brains fired-up.

PBS also had a great series the Poisoner's Handbook about different poisonous elements and the one about lead was more in-depth about leaded gasoline. Charles Norris was an amazing person! http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/americanexperience/features/introduc...
I glossed over the equation reading it as the rate of return on capital vs labour. That is, capital increasing faster than wages as a share of the economy, overall. I don't know if that helps or obscures.
One way is to give more interesting work and/or work that is a natural possible progression in the employee's career. That technique helped my company woo me over into staying, along with a modest salary bump (although I was seeking much more - career progression mattered a lot to me).

From a personal perspective - I've turned to the quit mentality due to boredom after my first job after not having enough to do, and at my second job I converted over after immense deadline pressure for half a year when combined with significant underpayment (extreme frustration).

The best pre-emptor would be to be proactive in addressing these problems. If your company is exerting too much pressure on developers, then you probably did a poor job hiring enough employees or incentivizing them enough - I'm looking your way startups.
gotcha. good to know. i have the capresso which is electric and have had it for a solid 2 years at least. if you keep it clean, say, every month or so, it's really convenient.
I don't know that it is. What is controversial seems to be what comes next. Do those capitalists get to use those fortunes to wield massive political power? Do they get to make rules that benefits themselves even to the detriment of the larger society? Do they get to leave their fortunes (and corresponding political clout) to their children, who may be far less talented?

I haven't read this book, and maybe this isn't really the question you were asking, but it seems like there is some confusion about why people like myself have problems with capitalism. I have no particular problem with smart people being rewarded to some extent for finding new ways to make life better for others (Adam Smith's baker making bread for the town not to feed the town but to enrich himself).

But I do have a very, very big problem with the idea that just because someone "won" the economic contest he or she is somehow fit to make social and political decisions or somehow deserves greater consideration in the social and political spheres. I also have a huge problem with inheritance, though I don't really see a non-"radical" way to solve it.
The Corporate Leadership shapes culture through their actions, and the tolerance of others actions.

If you have no walls on your office before taking money, and move to a corner office with a close door after, you change the culture.

If you work flex hours and let the staff do so, then change, the culture changes.

If you hire guys who wear cut-offs and have unkempt beards, but later switch to only those who are straight laced you change the culture.

Amazon everyone used to have a Door with saw horse legs for a desk. That changed along the way. And the culture changed.

You can't keep the Garage culture, when you move to a skyscraper, but you can keep hints of it if the executive team works hard to make sure it happens.
you might be interested in this work: http://research.microsoft.com/pubs/176601/js-star.pdf
Dieta para bajar 5 kilos en una semana
No funciona sola, la dieta para bajar 5 kilos en una semana, sino que para ayudarla debemos de realizar algunas actividades que complementen la ingesta de los alimentos balanceados y seleccionados, ya que si no tomamos algunas acciones la dieta sola no nos servirá de nada.
I agree with you, but battery technology has some pretty serious problems for cars that can't be ignored.

How do you deal with the replacement cost and lemon risk (battery leasing and warranties).

For me, cars are for road trips. How is that usage addressed (open question, aside from putting superchargers everywhere usable for all electric cars).

How do you deal with the power grid costs? Power mains aren't build to handle the kind of scale that rapidly charging electric cars needs (???).
Piketty's argument, as well as the findings of the IMF report, is that what you've called relative wealth and absolute wealth are linked: greater inequality leads to lower growth rates. The entire economy suffers for the benefit of a few. Eventually, inequality might choke growth out entirely, leading to crisis.
Don't forget -we are in America- that islam seeks to re-introduce slavery. Another one of those non radical positions (America forced most islamic states to give up slavery in 1950 or so, and they haven't really done so [1], only legally abolished it).

Oh and islam denies equal rights to muslims as well. Members of the state apparatus are also elevated, and one of the rights they have is to kill anyone they please. Also islam prescribes death for freedom of expression, for singing (yes, really), ... [2]

[1] http://www.independent.co.uk/voices/commentators/johann-hari...
[2] a search for 'asma bint marwan' will quickly yield the rules for this

The problem is that the moral values the world currently has are distinctly Christian values. Yes people like to pretend they are atheist values, "humanist" (you'd think scientific education would prevent people from thinking moral values are associated with a natural object like that, but I guess not) ... yet they defend equal rights for all people, equal rights for the sexes, protecting the weak, they go very far in the rights of children, pro-adoption, anti-war (in the sense that they are against war unless in defence), they defend freedom of trade, ... All very much Christian moral positions (well, especially that specific combination is distinctly Christian. E.g. islam does have freedom of trade, as it is mostly based on Roman law), distinct from other religions. If you judge any other religion by this modern standard it will fail badly. Especially equality is rare.

The problem is that islam is just a very bad example of a religion, but it is not special. It is not the worst (certainly natural religions are far worse), but none of it's rules are exceptional at all.

The norm in human history, and likely the majority position of all humans worldwide is what one would consider bad religions' positions. Death for gay people, or generally any sex outside marriage. Death for freedom of expression. Death for sex outside marriage. Religious or physical leaders get to execute people. No separation between church and state. Neutral or pro position to slavery. War as the default position due to religious or ethnic "eternal" conflicts or "holy" wars. These things are the norm, not the exception.

So what does one do ?
I think you're probably a troll, but I'll bite anyway:

I've been active in general aviation for years, and I've never met one these pro-lead strawmen you write about. Since you seem to have all the answers, can you put forward a rational solution to the problem (that isn't "Just throw away all the airplanes")?
Some North American airports have sleeping pods.

I think I last saw them at YVR (Vancouver).
As someone who has let his flat on airbnb for pocket money - or a bit more while on hols at least some of us do that. It was fairly win win. I got some money and central London isn't exactly overrun with cheap half empty hotels for me to take business from.
No, I didn't tell you that, although I suspect that for most of the world it's the only realistic short-term option. What I told you is that you should read that book, because it's an extremely interesting and balanced view on alternative energy, from someone who actually knows what he's talking about. He doesn't push a particular agenda or lead the reader to any particular conclusions, he just lays out what the implications of the various options are.

For example, for solar or wind to play a significant part in the UK's energy requirements would require the aforementioned country-sized installations. Do you think that the British people would be willing to accept 10% of the area of the country being totally dedicated to energy generation? How would they decide which 10% it should be? Do you think that they would accept tidal generators along the entirety of the coast of the UK? That's the order of magnitude that is required.

Additionally, since renewable resources tend to be variable, you need a storage mechanism. You either need a lot of hills to pump water up, or you need your entire population to be using electric cars and to have smart chargers that allow the grid to draw back from when required. Are these things possible? Absolutely they are. However MacKay leaves the reader to ponder how likely they are to happen in our current political environment, and I shall do the same.
I want to chime in and say that I've found your blog wonderful, and since you're too modest to post a link, let me do it: http://jeremykun.com/
On Brazillian law the engineer is held responsible for everything that can go wrong, unless he proves it was not his fault...

This mean in Brazil there is a lack of experienced and honest engineers (the scumbag ones know how to not get shafted, the honest ones go to other countries, and the non-experienced ones... well, more meat for the grinder).
moreover, Gladwell's use of practice in the book I think is more meant in the general sense (as in practicing an art) because those 10000 hours are not necessarily "sitting down and playing czerny on the piano" but also things like "playing around on a mainframe" - basically anything that gains you experience, which is usually going to be more variegated in the way that the article suggests.
I once attended a conference in NYC early in my career where I stayed with friends in NJ to save on costs (I was just starting a fledgling business). The conference would end in the afternoon around 3-4PM or earlier and then have social events a few hours later around 8PM. For 3 days I faced the dilemma of making the commute back to Jersey to get maybe 1 hour of solid rest (minus the commute time) or hanging around a cafe in the city and networking later with an exhausted mind and body. I tried both and neither was optimal. I would have loved to have a service like this around at the time and would have gladly paid $25 for a solid hour to decompress and rest.
I don't know what you are asking. The skill I'm referring to is capital allocation, and the capital that is growing is necessarily invested in something other than a savings account.
"Lisp can give you that performance" is, however, more an article of faith than actual reality.

Yes, it comes within a 3x-5x factor, on a good day. And for many applications, that's good enough. However, for either heavy-duty computational tasks or very responsive interactive tasks with a strong computational component, it just doesn't work.

If you have evidence to the contrary (for non-trivial examples), please share it. It's not my love for the exquisite language design that keeps me with C++ :)
> He's pointed out that capitalism is flawed -- that inequality is not an unintended result, but rather an inherent feature of it.

Of course it's an inherent feature of it. If, by some mechanism, every one was economically equal, what would be the point of anyone bothering to try to do anything?
That was six years ago, out of context of the extended support they provided.
Source number 8 might be the wrong link… should that be something about opto-genetics?
The conclusion that you have drawn is based on a misinterpretation of what constitutes as "capital". If "capital" meant "government debt", then the rate of return on capital would indeed equal the interest rate on government debt. However, when economists refer to capital, they are referring to the market value of the cumulative stock of a nation's capital.

What is "capital"? Piketty defines capital as:

"the sum total of nonfinancial assets (land, dwellings, commercial inventory, other buildings, machinery, infrastructure, patents and other directly-owned professional assets) and financial assets (bank accounts, mutual funds, bonds, stocks, financial investments of all kinds, insurance policies, pension funds, etc.) less the total amount of financial liabilities (debt)."

Furthermore, national capital can be broken down into public capital and private capital:

"[National capital is] the sum of public capital and private capital. Public capital is the difference between assets and liabilities of the state (including all public agencies), and private capital is of course the difference between the assets and liabilities of private individuals."

...and can be broken down into domestic capital and net foreign capital:

"Domestic capital is the value of the domestic capital stock (buildings, firms, etc.) located within the borders of the country in question. Net foreign capital...is the difference between assets owned by the country's citizens in the rest of the world and assets of the country owned by citizens of other countries."

The rate of return on capital:

"...measures the yield on capital over the course of the year regardless of it's legal forms (profits, rents, dividends, interest, royalties, capital gains, etc.), expressed as a percentage of the value of capital invested. It is therefore a broader notion than the 'rate of profit', and much broader than the 'rate of interest', while incorporating both."
In those ten years the US will spend ~100 billion on ethanol subsidies [1].

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethanol_fuel_in_the_United_Stat...
Of course Pickety doesn't mention it. That would ruin his narrative. And it wouldn't back his central thesis and proposal to tax the living excrement out of the rich. You know, to fix a problem none of us ever knew of until he "told us" about it in his giant weary book.

But I'll hold off on a proper rant about him and his book once I've read it.
Asimov had something to say about that:

http://www.themathlab.com/writings/short%20stories/feeling.h...
I started reading this expecting not to like it, because a lot of blog posts with gratuitous F bombs in the title are by morons. Totally not the case here. Plenty of honesty and inspiration. +1
> because it can't hold atmosphere easily

But neither can Mars. Most of its early atmosphere was blown away and that will continue. There's nothing we can do about the lack of gravity.

The problem with Mars is that it is cold, terminally. The nuclear furnaces have gone out. I haven't seen a proposal from the terraformers that counteracts that. You might be able to counteract it with CO2, but then that gets blown away by the solar wind. It's crazy hard to fix.

Don't get me wrong, I would love to see us on Mars. Unfortunately, the engineering and science obstacles are huge, enormous.
I'm still looking for a proof that income inequality is a "threat" to "democracy"... Or as he put it, the "meritocratic values of democracy". As if we have anything remotely resembling a "meritocratic" society, even if it was a democratic one.
I know that this concept it pretty ingrained in American culture, but there's like... decades of psychological research on the topic of motivation debunking it - not even people who believe this principle act according to it.

I don't believe for one second that your prime motivation do make D was economical, for example.
It doesn't seem optimal for sex because there's no bed or bathroom in the room. Especially regarding the bathroom - who wants to get dressed and walk through a commercial space right after having sex just to use the restroom?

Meanwhile, in NYC there are plenty of options for "hourly" hotels that get you a room for 2-3 hours for 50-60 dollars, which is about the rate of Breather.
Regus already does this, without the mobile app front-end. You can book offices on an hourly basis starting around $30/hr in Manhattan.
And 5. Physical location matters, even if you are legally located in US, if you live/work outside the richer centers it is difficult to earn more.
Haha, fifteen minutes of Googling later, here you go:
Slides: https://www.defcon.org/images/defcon-16/dc16-presentations/d...
Talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IkXG14MA3M4

I kept missing the search term. It was "data exfiltration" not "dns tunneling."
Thanks so much for your your recent feedback and comments about ImpasseBreaker. It was extremely useful. I've added a variety of new features to IB, along with two test accounts so people can check out the platform anonymously before creating an account. And a new term-sheet wizard allows users to create term-sheets with non-financial terms to accompany negotiation invites.

All feedback is welcome. I'm particularly interested in how non-lawyers view the platform. I've heard from plenty of my fellow lawyers. I'm curious to know what non-lawyers think. Is this something that you see being using person to person or b2b, without a lawyer? Or in its current version does IB feel like a lawyer's tool/platform? This is a very general, subjective inquiry, but the gut feedback is quite useful.

From a law firm economics standpoint, something like ImpasseBreaker may be perceived as a threat. If it works in the disputes context, a lawyer loses money. So although the dynamic is present in many, many negotiations -- negotiating over nickels and dimes, while everyone knows what the final number ought to be -- this is a problem that lawyers may not all want to see fixed. I'm curious if and how this will work for non-lawyers.

Many thanks,

Stephen
Given the size of Big Oil, Big Agriculture, and Big Auto, I don't think you'll see a major shift to electric in 10 years.
> Piketty claims that the average return on capital

So you've discovered that one data point in a set is not precisely equal to the average of the set.

And you think that means...."loses all credibility".

Oh boy.
I think you have missed what people are getting at with "humans are not rational". The argument behind Capitalism is that people will do what is in their self-interest, and more generally will be rational actors, and as such the outcome of the market will reflect what people want.

However, people often act against their self-interest either naturally or because of manipulation, and short term self-interest can conflict with long term self-interest.

A good example of this is "austerity" in hard economic times. When times are bad the reaction of many people is to "tighten their belts" and decrease spending, and in the short term that provides some protection against things like being laid off. However, if large numbers of people start doing this then the amount of economic activity is significantly reduced and those people who reduced their spending now risk being laid off.
This is starting be very widespread and it is embarassing because the primary cause is a vague idea that it is "more educated" to say "I" than "me", which of course backfires horribly when you reveal publicly the fact that you don't know that "I" should only be used as the subject of the sentence.