skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> clearly philosophical detour

No. I am a string theorist. String theory was created by physicists to solve concrete theoretical challenges -- first the description the strong force (this did not work as intended), and later quantum gravity. These were longstanding open questions in physics. I am familiar with the history of string theory, and as far as I know no philosophers had any influence on it.

Perhaps my question wasn't clear, so let me rephrase. What contribution did philosophers make to science in the last 100 years?
There've been a few nine-figure acquisitions of companies that help traditional colleges expand online, with John Wiley buying deltak.edu for $220mm, and Pearson buying EmbanetCompass for $650mm, both in 2012.
That looks pretty neat. (BTW not a joke like my suggestion was)
LIFX rasies $12m series A with Sequoia; partners with Nest
Long story short:

The wealth of non rich Americans is almost entirely contained in their highly leveraged houses. If housing prices collapse, their wealth collapses.

In 2008, housing prices collapsed.
I've worked with and for a time within a few different public school systems.

>'I know of multiple school districts that are absolutely plagued by overzealous IT admins, including the director, who lock down teacher and student computers to the point where they're unable to install or use the software they need to learn...'

Locking down desktops is a pretty basic part of successfully managing more than a handful of them, particularly when they're distributed across an entire county. Obviously, there should be a better process for identifying and distributing (in a controlled manner) the software that will benefit these classes, but handing out administrative rights isn't likely a realistic option.

>'Watching educational YouTube videos? That's not even open for discussion.'

The reasons for this should be obvious and you allude to it just below.

As soon as one of the kids catches a glimpse of some cleavage in a recommended video or YT pre-rolls an ad featuring a girl in a bikini the system is looking at a lawsuit, the teacher - unemployment.

>'Most people here wouldn't believe what is going on in many school districts because of overzealous and incompetent IT admins.'

It's a bit much to pile this on the admins. In my experience, those jobs don't pay enough to attract/keep the level of talent they need nor are they given the autonomy to effect change on their own.

I think it's right to call it a structural problem, one with a whole slew of factors. To name a few...

* Vendors abusing E-Rate funds and the like to oversell districts on things they can't afford to maintain or properly utilize.

* The wacky funding schedules of school systems. They tend to get lump sums for 'modernization' and the like, but are restricted from spending it on services with recurring costs or technical hands to run them.

* Individual schools run like fiefdoms which work against centralizing for efficiency. A notable example of this from my own experience is project which could have served an entire county of 100+ schools for well under <$1M being dashed in favor of a grossly inferior, $50k per school solution.

* Super parents pushing their own agendas and self-interest. It's not at all uncommon for someone who coincidentally works for a particular vendor to decide that the vendor they work for is the only viable solution for the district and raise hell until they get their way.

* Inability to retain qualified help. IT people who want to get paid don't work in education. Experienced IT people who want to work in education anyway know to avoid primary education and aim at colleges and the numerous benefits like free-rides for their own children.
Free Will – In Our Time podcast
What alternatives are there really?
There are a bunch of these exploits — I remember one a few weeks ago that posed as a mind-reading survey — and I think they can only be well and truly solved by a same-domain policy for :visited links. In short, don't apply :visited styling to a link unless that link is the same domain as the host page. This is the general security model on the rest of the web and it'd work here.
Do you have an example? I'm not saying you're wrong, I just can't think of anything off the top of my head that wouldn't apply to an international student. The second amendment comes to mind, but there are Alien Firearms Licenses available.
>From a purely practical perspective, it is useful to assume the existence of free will because otherwise, why can't we predict these things?

Why? I've never heard a coherent non-religious explanation of what substance or system that free will is even supposed to be. I don't see how it could help at all from a practical perspective. Would it somehow help us understand next weeks weather (that we cannot predict with any precision or reliability) better if we assume that wind and water have free will?
Yes that is an important clarification. Thank you.
> # allow up to 999999 processes with corresponding pids

This is now the default in DragonFlyBSD: http://freshbsd.org/commit/dfbsd/3a877e444fff816b8a340d35fe3...
Let's get rid of ACs
Point of Sale machines, machine controllers, etc.
Not exactly. The 25th percentile's wealth was dropping even before the recession, which suggests some additional downward pressure, although I am not sure what that could be off the top of my head.
This study is misleading, because it uses 'household' wealth, instead of individual wealth, and may be incorrectly interpreted as showing a decline in the middle class, when it is really showing the results of changes in family structure over the past 50 years. This graph shows how this choice affects the results: http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-g3WZGpDibPM/Up3ZAPRtScI/AAAAAAAAJq...

The following blog-posts go in to more detail:

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-major-t...

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-widows-...

http://politicalcalculations.blogspot.ca/2013/12/the-men-who...
A $99 Gadget That Makes Your Oven Way Smarter
I haven't had this experience in 10 years of using a desktop system that updates the locate DB every night.
This surely depends on your own personal definition of good.

It's useful to have a definition of good that allows people to feel confident about their experience and good about themselves because feeling this way helps to engage them further in the practice.

What you actually just did was entered a group conversation to tell almost everybody there that they are bad programmers before doing a humility display for everybody to see.

When I think of the steady progression from apprentice to journeyman to master, I feel that what is good is the progression, and what is bad is anything that stops the progression: lack of confidence, over-confidence, or the kind of severe lack of ability that causes people to be rejected from a market before they are ready to compete in it.

I've gotten the feeling that you are quite confident so while it's great that you are dialling back any arrogance and concentrating on continuing to learn I wouldn't say that it's necessarily healthy for everybody in tech to raise what they consider "good" to be top-1% of Google R&D as this could just serve to stop them from even trying.
Which makes it weirder, in a way. Surely such a security guru is going to be tweaking his personal browser, especially JS and Flash settings, and probably finding himself locked out of something for not looking enough like a typical clueless netizen. Or, he knows better than most how sophisticated and adaptive lucrative botnets are, so why would he think JS and Flash are deep magic the bots can't do?

But, as others have noted, it's probably been boiled down into something dumb for the layperson, and their algorithms are more complex than you would think from that quote.

Edit: Actually, given their target users, I guess he wouldn't be locked out, just falsely identified as a fake ad consumer.
Regarding your sidebar, a good filter would be whether the topic and ensuing discussion are likely to be of general interest to the community here (vs. specific to helping you).
This case has nothing to do with freedom of speech, it's to do with the Fifth Amendment in the Bill of Rights. And it's not that the plaintiffs were deprived of liberty, it was that they were deprived of liberty without due process of law.

To this the Court has found that there was no due process, therefore the no-fly list - as it stands now - violates the United States Constitution.
The link above does not speak about different cancer funds. It simply shows that cancer patients without insurance just die.

That is obviously how it works without universal medical care; sick people don't just magically get better with magic money like a sitcom. They die.

But there are large funds for breast and cervical cancer and that is obviously very good.
Unfortunately there are not for rectal or colon cancer. Maybe because no one is going to run 10k for rectal cancer, maybe because it's too dirty a word to say on tv.

Either way, if you're poor, be sure to get the right cancer.

Or just fix your medical system.

Now if you'll pardon me I must take a break and let the dittoheads and digg-patriots catch up with downvoting all my posts.
This will probably not survive review.

The Department of State has always reserved the right to revoke/deny passports for all sorts of reasons that are not subject to administrative review.

Don't pay your taxes, no passport. Don't pay your child support, no passport. There have even been cases where passports have been revoked for people who have been remanded to mental institutions. Having had your passport revoked in the past is enough grounds to deny you getting one in the future all of which has passed muster at Supreme Court given State Dept acts with seeming explicit Congressional approval. [0]

You can in principle negotiate with the destination country for a visa and fly non-commercially. Can Google "Gilbert Chagoury" for example. He is wealthy patron of Bill Clinton from Nigeria who has been on No-Fly status for years but still jets around the US and internationally I believe on an UK passport on small planes.

Not saying it is just but that will probably be the legal basis.

This opinion is only a finding of due process. That DHS TRIP is not adequate. DHS will simply remedy that if it comes to it with some just as difficult process as it is getting a passport unrevoked by the State Dept (which is nearly impossible without political favor).

[0]: http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?court=US&vo...
It's a valid point but does it matter in reality? If it's not the FAA's then some other govt agency (or even a new one) will regulate things that fly around in our cities. The way I see it, the FAA is just getting ahead of future events.
Every heating system I have ever used has a double timer for two on off periods a day. But this is not in the US.
It does look like it has some serious side effects, including an FDA blackbox warning. You can find a more readable version of this FDA product label here: http://www.iodine.com/label/xeljanz (shameless plug)
Project it back a few years, and I'd bet we're poorer on average as a country than we were when I was born. Man, 43% decline for the median? Ouch.

I also like that the mean wealth in America is 6x the median wealth.

Actually, I find the numbers for the 75th+ percentiles a bit surprising, as my mental model had them with significant uptick after about 2011 or so. Kind of a wealth transfer from the lower percentiles. Whereas, this research seems to show that while erosions were smaller for the top (due to their non-real estate growth), no demographic they researched showed overall wealth growth from 2007 on. At best, they've gotten back to zero slope.
Motorcycles with defective (or removed) mufflers are banned in most places.

Airplanes with defective mufflers should be banned too.
Sadly that removes most of the user-helping functionality of the :visited class.
I will never understand this obsession with the concept of "free will". What the hell does the term "free will" even mean? In my non-expert opinion, apparent free will is indistinguishable from any other description of "free will".

I am thrown into existence, then I absorb information about how the environment works, then I make decisions based on that information. How else could it be? If my locus of control exists outside my physical brain, how useful could it possibly be since the data I use to make ALL decisions is stored in my physical brain? If we propose that information is also stored in some type of cosmic non-corporeal spirit-brain, nothing really changes, the same questions of agency simply move from the physical brain to the realm of the inexplicable spirit-brain.
If Guys Posted Like Girls Online
Ever wonder what it would look like to see guys post like girls online? Watch!!!
This War on Drugs has to stop. It is war against citizens, and more importantly, a war against human rights.
It seems like any video enabled device can steal your passcode if it sees you enter it. The phone they used did even better in glass from 10 feet away.

I hope this makes a push for more/better biometric locks on every day devices.
How Google I/O impacts Airbnb Availability
> I'm not sure what the takeaway is. Maybe the importance of owning your distribution channels?

Supply of all types of media content is way up. There are only so many hours in the day, so demand is comparatively inelastic. This means per-unit cost has to go way down.

This is the general trend for pretty much all media, including things normally categorized as something else, like news and stage productions.

On the plus side, distribution is basically free and gatekeepers are losing their monopolies and monopsonies, so creators and consumers of niche products can connect better than ever.
I got a job interview for ThoughtWorks
Hi everyone, I'm a software engineer and I got a job interview for ThoughtWorks. I read after scheduling the interview, that if kind of a really hard application process and now I feel kind of nervous because they work with really smart people and well I'm just trying to get better every day.

Any recommendations? Things I should read?

Thanks!
Marc I totally agree with you. I am a teacher from Ireland and now live in San Francisco. Thus I am surrounded by EdTech tools and products that claim to answer every problem they 'think' us teachers have!

I am part of and see daily the frustration that teachers have being bombarded with tools clearly untouched by teachers and where teachers have never been asked for their opinion and have certainly never been engaged or approached in the early development stage.

In response to this massive problem, I created a platform where EdTech developers can actually collaborate and share their products with our community of willing teachers. They get real time feedback and expert eyes on their products in the early stages. In your words, we hope that there will no longer be an excuse to not 'engage with teachers.' You can check out our site:

http://tinkered.co

We have 500 teachers onboard and they are taking on paid jobs for the summer to Tinker with new tools and take part in meaningful interviews and user testing studies. Their input leads to iterations of Edtech products that meet real classroom needs and solve real problems. It is a lot of fun and rewarding to both sides of the community, both teachers and EdTech entrepreneurs.
Stross keynote on Perl in 2034 at YAPC::NA (youtube)
I think a big part of why many physicists reject philosophy as a useful endeavor is that a lot of popularly-known philosophy places inductive reasoning below deductive reasoning.
Desktop and laptop computers. Also CAD plataforms (that are a subset of the first, but an important subset).
I feel like the problem would be generating enough illusions. They would ideally need to be used only once, otherwise a bot farm could recreate your illusion database in no time flat. Besides, CAPTCHAs are insecure anyways because if you try to protect anything valuable spammers will just hire humans to break them.
If I was a Facebook Stakeholder...
Wage freezes at nominal values which did not keep pace with inflation during the 2000s, I'd guess.
Were they serving a warrant, or just asking questions and eventually invited in?
Funny I've always worried about the mobile keypads because on top of that they "echo" the character you typed. I'm paranoid and often try to shield the screen when I type in my password. That said there are so many cameras everywhere it's hard not to think that somewhere they got a good clean shot and could figure out my password.

I don't use the same password on any two things so it's less useful to get my mobile lock password then it might be for some but if you have a lock screen pin or password you do get an amazing amount of stuff for free on a person's mobile device...
It's very common that companies have adverse candidate flow -- in other words, the ratio of 99:1 is not necessarily representative of the market; it's simply representative of the median candidate a particular company is attracting into its hiring pipeline.

Invest more in getting the right kinds of candidates.
Why don't you expect the FAA to "correctly regulate" drones? They've done a great job regulating commercial passenger and freight planes, leading to an excellent safety record for these vehicles.
An Oculus controller to go with the headset is looking more and more likely. I'm guessing that it will be similar to the PlayStation Move controller but with infrared instead of visible light tracking. They're already doing infrared tracking for the headset, so it would be easy to track a couple of controllers as well.
It's depressing how 1/4 households basically have no wealth at all.
Wow, very interesting that GINI by individual is fairly constant.

However, household GINI is definitely the more relevant figure, as most big economic decisions (where to work, where to live) are made at the household level rather than at the individual level.
In principle, yes. In practice its tough. You can look for parallels in what happened with Cricket in India, where it is huge.

A media mogul named Subhash chandra came up with the idea of "India Cricket League" (similar to English Premier league in English soccer. Lots of young cricketers signed up. When the Indian cricket association realised the money potential of this new tournament, they made declared that no one who participated in ICL would be allowed to participate in Indian national team, owned by India's cricket association. And since its the dream of every Indian boy to be part of national team (big bucks and media exposure), almost all players quit ICL...and teh league was effectively dead.

Moral of the story...How will you get players to play in your league?
The big problem that the artists are having is the fact that YouTube basically is aggregating illegal content.

So, even if you want to start your own service, you are competing against the illegal copies on YouTube.

What's worse is that, technically, I'm not even sure how you do anything about this.

You could remove YouTube's safe harbor (which, to be fair, they really shouldn't have since they are monetizing the content), but I still don't see how YouTube would then police this.
You know I don't. And I know you don't either. Unless we can run a study whereby some portion of the population is entered into a control group and doesn't have access to the internet, it'll remain a question about interpreting data and not of fact.
That would be awesome. The interface should be just like when you rebase and you get to select which commit you want to squash or keep.
This doesn't feel like a coherent response to my comment.
Editing Google Docs with vim
I have no concrete facts, but my intuition tells me that commodity CD-Rs played as big a role. I think that whole line about illegal downloads is industry propaganda. You never hear about how illegally burned CDs brought down the industry, when everybody I know was ripping CDs from each other for a period of years. Why? Because record labels' parent companies were the ones selling CD burners hand over fist.
Connecting with more people is only as good as your ability to monetize those connections, though.
Keep banging your head against a proverbial wall until there is no wall.
http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/reg/media/frnotice_...

This 2007 policy document clarifies the FAA's stance about drone operations, citing various FAA notices and arguing that commercially flown drones are subject to the standard Part 91 aircraft regulations and none are approved - thus, making them illegal.

http://www.faa.gov/about/initiatives/uas/media/model_aircraf...

This 2012 notice clarifies the FAA's stance that model aircraft are not all aircraft under 55lbs, but rather those that are flown by hobbyists non-commercially, again citing various FAA notices (but no actual rules).

https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/112/hr658

The FAA Modernization and Reform Act of 2012 gives the FAA explicit authority to regulate Unmanned Aerial Systems and requires that they implement rules within a certain timeframe (as yet, no rules are implemented - they work through this process: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Administrative_Procedure_Act ).

The FAA tried to fine a high-profile UAV operator (the founder of Team Black Sheep):
http://www.usatoday.com/story/travel/flights/2014/03/07/faa-...

The lowest NTSB court ruled that the FAA's current UAS regulations are unenforceable as the FAA's attempt relied on Notices to Airmen and FAA Policy documents, but no actual enforceable FAA Rules. However, the FAA appealed which immediately stays the decision (due to the procedure for NTSB proceedings).

Observers expect the appeal to fail, but by the time the court proceedings are complete there's a good chance that the FAA's actual Rules will be in place.
> they basically should just deal with being broke

If they aren't willing to compete in new ways and change their business models, yes.

Even television shows have this problem. Commercial revenues are down, so production costs go down (more reality TV) and the format of advertising has adapted (more GM cars featured prominently).
As other posters have stated, you could raise your rates until you have a more manageable amount of work. But some of the clients who are willing to pay those rates may be really annoying, and it sounds like you are looking for a lifestyle business.

So why not fire your least favorite clients, the ones who generate tons of work for little return, and keep doing so until the company finds its equilibrium. Keep the clients you love and you'll probably enjoy it more (it sounds like you're not going for hyper-growth anyway).

Congrats on even having this problem, by the way!
This. In addition to distribution being free, content creation has become far more accessible. Supply is way up.
I wonder what is considered "unlawful" data collection by Microsoft's standards? Most mass surveillance today is quite legal.

> "I want law enforcement to do its job in an effective way pursuant to the rule of law," he said. "If we can't get to that world, then law enforcement is going to have a bleak future anyway."

I wonder what is meant by a "bleak future". Law enforcement has always toed the line of legality; this phenomenon isn't really limited to the hypothetical future.

Mass surveillance has been here all along and it hasn't prevented an exponential growth in internet usage. Is Microsoft really afraid that this trend will change post-Snowden, or is the surveillance indignation just PR?
Oh neat, I thought this was broken at first since it said that I hadn't visited news.ycombinator.com. Then I remembered that after seeing a similar (though less clever) exploit a few weeks ago, I'd changed Firefox to not show visited styles. I'd call that a success.
Well, it is, but not at the scales we care about.
You're saying the AF doesn't care if a drone has a possibility of crashing into our own troops? That seems to be unlikely.