skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I buy widespread incompetence in government IT management in general and the IRS in particular. (Not commenting on the political valence of this, in observance of the HN politics rule.)

Last year, after requesting an ITIN for my wife (who is not a US citizen and thus requires an SSN-esque replacement to be able to file joint taxes), we received two letters from the IRS. One had the ITIN. The other denied our request for the ITIN on the basis that "We have already issued her an ITIN." Apparently, the IRS explains, that second letter should have immediately set my accountant and I to doing forensic debugging of their protocols, because it means that something "seriously wrong" happened to our returns.

What? Glad you asked. See, the IRS had lost my return. "What?" The paper was "in the building somewhere" -- we had gotten a receipt -- but they were unaware of what desk it was at. (Their first hypothesis was "You failed to file", and they threatened penalties for that, until being confronted with a Post Office return receipt. Which is, by the by, why you should always get a receipt.)

My accountant took over yelling at them for a while to find the return, and they eventually did, and -- miracle of miracles -- they typed it into the computer. Twice. Thus generating two separate and equal returns going through non-idempotent processes, such as ITIN generation.

When those two returns met up in the reconciliation stage, they blocked each other from processing. No one at the IRS noticed this, for approximately 7 months, until my third call to their CS line got someone to actually look at the file. She hit "delete" on the duplicate. (I really hope she was simplifying that for me, because it scares me if they can actually delete anything.) Return processed almost immediately, refund check cut 48 hours later.

I almost feel sorry for them on being unprepared to unearth potential political malfeasance, because that is after all a distraction from the day to day administration of the Revenue Code, but processing returns is, as the saying goes, "their only job."
Are there really a sizable amount of people who deny climate change itself? Or do they just deny/question humanity's role in it?

Denying climate change in the face of conclusive data probably wouldn't have any legs to stand on. What is causing it is harder to prove/deny, though.
You would think someone at Facebook is already looking at this question...
There are probably more fundamental classification dichotomies than absolutism vs. relativism. One example is cognitivism, which is the belief that moral statements are propositions and can thus be true or false (absolutism and relativism are both cognitivist theories), vs. non-cognitivism.
I'm fond of attributing this quote to myself, but I may have the causality reversed.
The IRS's policies on e-mail storage were primitive even by the standards of 15 years ago

What? I'm almost certain the hard drive I had in 2000 was less than 10GB. At 500MB per email user, that's 20 users per entire disk...
>There was a time in the recent past where any college degree could get you a good job in nearly any field.

When was this? I graduated a long, long time ago and don't remember any such time.
From the article:

In February, he sued the city on behalf of medallion
owners, brokers, managers, financiers and cab
affiliations. The suit argues that the city has violated
their rights by allowing new companies to provide an
essentially identical transportation service without
complying with existing regulation. By eliminating the
exclusive right of medallion owners to provide that
service, the suit argues, the city has taken away the
thing that gives medallions their value as property
under Illinois law.

“If you think it’s an improvement to change the rules,
maybe you can do that,” says Edward Feldman, a partner
with Shakman. “But you have to provide compensation for
the property rights you’re destroying. And that’s the
Constitution.”

Medallions represent a promise, he says. And on that
promise, medallion owners took out mortgage-size loans.
If the city backs out of that promise, it must make them
whole.

So, if I buy a fishing license but fail to catch any fish, can I sue my state's Department of Fish and Wildlife for a refund of my $50? I wonder what people would say if I tried?
The federal budget is very loose (unless Congress specifies something specific.
For example, According To The US Government Printing Office, Section 554 of the Bipartisan passed H.R. 4660, An Act Making appropriations for the Departments of Commerce and Justice, Science, and Related Agencies for the fiscal year ending September 30, 2015, and for other purposes.

"Sec. 554. None of the funds made available in this Act may be used to carry out Operation Choke Point."[0]

My point is that managers and execs have a lot of wiggle room and the ability to make a number of funding transfers and decisions. They could clearly use budgeted funds or make a request for funding to accomplish actual data retention if they wanted to.

What makes you think that the Republicans involvement will make sure that "this will never happen". It doesn't matter what the Republicans do when the Democrat administration under President Obama just ignores them and the law.

[0] http://www.gpo.gov/fdsys/pkg/BILLS-113hr4660pcs/html/BILLS-1...

Edited to change the source material because some people could not handle the link originally used and to add the second sentence in the 3rd paragraph.
I think I know what you are trying to say, but my understanding is Amazon fails to report profits because they are heavily reinvesting into the company. I don't think it is because they are taking a loss on sales.
> I don't know if any respected analytic philosophers take moral relativism seriously as philosophy; you can't ground the foundational meaning of the word 'good' as 'different cultures think different things are good', since there's no base case for the recursion.

Wouldn't the meaning of "good" be "considered to be good by the given culture, group, or individual"?

> Well-known mainstream positions in metaethics hold that moral language is not meant to express statements which are either true or false, i.e., it is not semantic or truth-apt;

Do you have any data on the percentage of philosophers who subscribe to various beliefs? It sounds like you're describing non-cognitivism, which I'm fairly familiar with, although I didn't think it was a widely accepted view.
I want to enjoy reading this as much as it deserves to, but there are so many typos ;_;

Nevertheless, I shall persist and so should you.
Ask HN: What are good places to market services?
Obviously Ebay and Amazon are good places to sell products but usually not services. Also, are there big players that are not centered in the U.S.?

For a little bit of background: My website, ktbyte.com, does automated java tutorials. Some of the full classes (200 lectures/problems or so) will be on sale for 90% off this summer, and I'm not sure how to get the word out.
Skype at one point was somewhat decentralized, but now the main hubs are located on Microsoft's servers to my understanding.

urls included in Skype chats have been known to be visited by bots at Microsoft owned IPs so no end to end encryption of urls at the very least. If I remember correctly Microsofts reasoning is that the bots at Microsoft check to make sure the links are not infected with malware.

That are the two pieces of evidence that I see brought up when people have conversations on the topic.
Thanks for the extra reply effort, didn't mean to make you do extra work. I'll keep my eyes open and see if I can work it out (but I'm way behind ux, who's more likely than I within any reasonable time).
No, it's still an important distinction, because there's a lot less to JIT in Python, compared to Java, which is why I specifically mentioned that bit.

And to prove my point just bench PyPy against Java on any given machine of your choice, and then come back to tell me if the distinction is important enough.
Will there be a way for users to transfer bit coin to each other similar to what Venmo allows people to do?
None (Edit: I'm talking about digital data retention) of this even matters when you take into account the fact that it is IRS policy to print out each and every e-mail sent and received by their employees. One would assume that this is required to maintain a permanent record of all communications for the Federal Archives and for legal matters that arise for confidential taxpayer cases.

"The Treasury Department’s current email policy requires emails and attachments that meet the definition of a federal record be added to the organization’s files by printing them (including the essential transmission data) and filing them with related paper records."[0]

[0] http://www.irs.gov/irm/part1/irm_01-010-003.html
Glad you liked it! If you use RSS you can add this link [0]. I enjoyed writing this so I'll probably do it again when I finish any other projects.

[0] http://jontelang.com/blog/feed.xml
Trying to utilise 20 years of startup experience
Smalltlak?
News Busters is a far-right wing rag. I don't trust them any more than Mother Jones for reliable information.
The term "democracy" is kind of a fuzzy and abused word but if we limit its definition to include only the governments run by civilians voted in by fair enough, regularly occurring elections you could do worse. Democracies can have secrets, and in fact must if they want to achieve their interests. I am not sure why this would surprise anyone.
> Could it suggest a cyclic pattern?

We already know that we are currently in an ice age that goes through cycles of glacial periods (such as the colloquially named "last ice age") where a lot of North America, Europe and Siberia are covered in ice sheets; and warmer interglacial periods, such as this one, where the poles are covered by ice sheets (and also Greenland and various glaciers, and at high altitudes).

Outside of ice ages (which is more common for Earth, when considering its whole history), the poles aren't covered by ice sheets.

> And, perhaps we are acting as catalysts to climate change with our greenhouse gas emissions?

Perhaps. And if so, whether that is for the better or for the worse in the grand scheme of things is yet to be seen; geologists say that we are "due" for another glacial period, based on previous glacial and interglacial periods. But human emission of CO2 could keep things from spiraling towards a cool down, which might delay the next glacial period for a long time. Or perhaps glacial periods are mostly caused by cosmological forces, which are out of our control; there doesn't seem to be any clear answers.
Take a look at PhilPapers Surveys, maybe: http://philpapers.org/surveys/

the rough gist (from http://philpapers.org/archive/BOUWDP.pdf) seems to be

14. Meta-ethics: moral realism 56.4%; moral anti-realism
17. Moral judgment: cognitivism 65.7%; non-cognitivism 17.0%; other 17.3%.

The results are also here: http://philpapers.org/surveys/results.pl (set response grain to "fine" as the note at the top suggests)

correlation results should also be interesting.
> Are there really a sizable amount of people who deny climate change itself?

Yes, there are many people who deny the existance of any climate change, not just anthropomorphic climate change.

There are a couple here on HN - searching for arctic ice will possibly turn up a few posts.

Your last sentence ignores he reality of belief: homeopathy is nonsense yet people are convinced it works and they apy mone for it. Alien probing; biblical literalism; 911 truthers; Obama is not American; the Queen of England is a lizard; there are many weird stupid beliefs that have little to do with truth or evidence.
Hadn't heard of all of them, great to add these recommendation to my reading list.

I recently read another which I feel fits in this list:
The Silence of the Asonu by Ursula K. LE Guin
http://www.lightspeedmagazine.com/fiction/the-silence-of-the...
Luckily, in general the larger a quadcopter is, the more expensive it is, and thus the less likely it is to be used by an irresponsible person. This obviously isn't a perfect solution; there could be some rich person willing to spend big bucks on a quadcopter while having no clue what he or she is doing, or in the future there could be a $500 off-the-shelf quadcopter with 2 foot rotors (unlikely for quite a while, but possible). So these things self-regulate to a certain extent. That's why you hear of far fewer problems with 700 sized RC helicopters than with DJI Phantoms, despite the former being far more dangerous.
Politics might be appropriate for some discussion on HN, but your comment had no substance or value outside of democrats/republicans evil/good. Take that shit to reddit or the comments of a partisan news site. Like the link you posted. I'm sure tons of people in the comments would love agree with you.
From here on I will "Yo" twice. No more, no less. Cool post thanks for sharing
tl;dr: yoyo
If the only difference is the scale of risk, then you should include many other things, like paper airplanes, kites, and baseballs.
Actually PLOS, eLife and PeerJ are all Open Access publishers and explicitly condone this kind of scraping of their sites. They want to promote reuse.

ScienceDirect is owned by Elsevier and is a different kettle of fish. One we all hope to boil in the very near future. However, the title, authors, etc. are not copyrightable and are explicitly free for indexing in the ToS. This is not crawling, only scraping from an already rendered page. They really can't complain.
The reason they use the word "drone" for all unmanned aircraft is because the word "drone" has been used to refer to unmanned aircraft at least as far back as World War II.
Why would they encourage bitcoin usage with discounts? They want people to use bitcoin to improve margin so why would they turn around and immediately cut into that?

Also with cash back on so many cards now the discount would have to be >2%. Probably more like 3-5% for people to switch. The savings from not accepting credit cards won't make up for that.

Side note. Why did you create a throw away account just to comment on this topic?
"Follow" is not a verb used in the context of books or Wikipedia articles. Any neither characteristically provides ideas in a "shorter, clearer form". Your request was, to any reasonable observer, explicitly a request for a content-driven site or blog (i.e., a "single newsfeed style source"). Denying it when it's so clearly a falsehood only undermines the rest of your assertions, and casts into doubt your commitment to the (accurate) assertion that we should care about methods of disrupting existing controlling systems... perhaps to the point where it would not be unreasonable to conclude that you're explicitly attempting to undermine good-faith attempts to produce new stable systems.

So who are you working for?
The rising cost of education coupled with systems that work best with future-low-income-earners will likely push the smartest people out of schools.

I am concerned that making it all the way through a degree program has already started to indicate you aren't world-class, and things like this will only accelerate this trend.
Uber is evil because it doesn't publish the conditions under which surge pricing will occur, and because surge pricing often happens when there are plenty of drivers available.

Uber collects when surge pricing is in effect, which means that there's a conflict of interest in how it manages this algorithm, which is not really a free market. In a free market, drivers and riders (not Uber) would decide on the price point for each level of service and availability.
I'm quite interested in seeing this evolve, but for your purposes will postMessage not do?
Yep, the vast majority of 2.4 GHz hobbyist RC aircraft do this, but you're still subject to noise floor issues. It might take a heck of a lot of power, but there's no technical reason why this stuff still can't be jammed, and it's not that rare to have signal drop-outs caused by (presumably) unintentional interference.
> The x86 string functionality that I'm aware of was directly derived from C string functionality, and any decent library of course uses them.

The string instructions tend to be slower than using generic instructions, especially in the presence of SSE.
If someone just predicted 30% every day, you'd notice the lack of samples for any other predicted probability, and no one would judge such a discontinuous calibration graph as well-calibrated.

Calibration graphs can still be gamed - you can predict dishonestly to "dent" the graph. For example, if your 70% is happening 60% of the time, predict 70% even if you're 100% sure an event will happen.
The Strange Resilience of Coin-Op Laundromats
The Lambda Calculus for Absolute Dummies (2012)
You can't "solve" this problem in the same sense that you cannot develop a universally consistent foundation for mathematics. Goedel is there preventing you from EVER proving that one set of axioms is better than another.

I again wrote a longer response but have shortened it because the author seems to have committed a rather grave error which is to assume that human moral 'intuition' is in any way consistent. There are heaps of evidence (cue the trolley car) that human moral judgements really should not be considered a guide for anything. The fact that we can capture the disasters of collective morality observed under various regime's during the 20th century ought to tell us that following those models as a universal foundation for human relations is a terrible idea.

Might also be worth paying a visit to eigennicolo and not adhere to such rigid systems.
Using ARIA in HTML
I like that they limit the number of commenters to a curated list, which reduces the noise.
That's an invalid analogy. A valid analogy would be that you purchased a fishing license from your state's Department of Fish and Wildlife because you were told one was legally required to fish in a certain location, but the Department of Fish and Wildlife then failed to take action against others who began fishing in that same location without a license.

Good idea or horrible idea, certain cities created licensing regimes that promised to protect taxi drivers from competition if they paid for medallions. Now that others are flouting the law and circumventing the licensing regime, the taxi drivers want their protection money back if they're not going to receive the protection they were promised.
WHy do you say "must have secrets"? What part of "democracy" (or even "representative democracy", a republic perhaps) axiomatically requires secrets of any sort? Trade agreement negotiations almost axiomatically do not require secrets. If they're "negotiations" then everything ends up coming out in the wash, eh?
Microsoft: NSA security fallout 'getting worse' ... 'not blowing over'
This is why pilots absolutely need to be trained to very deliberately rely on instruments and ignore their "feelings" when they get into a tricky situation. There are tons of well-known sensory illusions in aviation: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_Illusions_in_Aviation
"Such policies indicate either an agency that is not concerned with preserving good audit chains or one that has an extremely penny-wise, pound-foolish approach to IT policy."

I think AND is more appropriate than OR here.
The plot in the article is an example of a "reliability diagram" frequently used in weather forecast verification. See, e.g., http://www.bom.gov.au/wmo/lrfvs/reliability.shtml.
Reliability is considered separate from accuracy in meteorology -- the former evaluates success conditioned on what was forecasted, while the latter is an unconditional evaluation of success or failure.

Other facets of forecast "goodness" exist and are often considered in meteorology. A seminal paper on the subject was penned by Allan Murphy, who identified three types of "goodness" (consistency, quality, and value) and ten subsets of quality (including reliability and accuracy). See http://www.glerl.noaa.gov/seagrant/ClimateChangeWhiteboard/R.... [PDF warning]

A popular companion to the reliability diagram is the Relative Operating Characteristics (ROC) curve. Here different forecast probability thresholds are tested to calculate likelihood of success if the event occurred, and likelihood of error if the event did not occur. This evaluates what Murphy calls discrimination (forecast quality conditioned what was observed) which complements reliability. See, e.g., http://www.bom.gov.au/wmo/lrfvs/roc.shtml.

Curiously, accuracy tends to take a back seat in forecast verification to other aspects of quality, particularly in rare event situations. This trend first began in the mid 1880's with the "Finley Affair", a series of published articles debating how to evaluate tornado forecasts issued by the US Army Signal Corps. Murphy published a fascinating literature review on the subject and showed that many of the skill scores and debates born during the Finley Affair are still active today. See http://www.nssl.noaa.gov/users/brooks/public_html/feda/paper.... [PDF warning]
Drone pilots obviously don't experience acceleration, so some of these shouldn't apply, but there are many well-understood sensory illusions that pilots are vulnerable to. Many of these will cause flight characteristics that will sound ridiculous to the layperson, like the graveyard spiral, where a pilot incorrectly perceives the craft to be flying level and thus reacts incorrectly to the altimeter's indication of a descent.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sensory_Illusions_in_Aviation

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graveyard_spiral
Developer spent 13 years making his childhood game
Busy ≠ successful.

Busy ≠ important.

Busy ≥ stressed.
Yes.

Like an Eagle Scout Badge or a Medal of Honour.

Doesn't matter how many people get it, my point is that it's a reward for either doing something positive or achieving something remarkable.
He's probably not referring so much to the specific limits on mailbox size as he is to the policy of forcing responsibility for maintaining permanent archives on the users of the system rather than the administrators of it.
Jure, your projects never cease to impress me. Really looking forward to talking in depth at OKfest. This idea is so close to what we've been doing that it's a real shame we didn't talk earlier, but the parts of what you're doing that are unique are also truly awesome.

At ContentMine we're doing something totally complementary to this. Some of the tools will overlap and we should be sharing what we're doing. For example, I've been working on a standardised declarative JSON-XPath scraper definition format and a subset of it for academic journal scraping. I've been building a library of ScraperJSON definitions for academic publisher sites, and I've converged on some formats that work for a majority of publishers with no modification (because they silently follow undocumented standards like the HighWire metadata). We've got a growing community of volunteers who will keep the definitions up to date for hundreds or thousands of journals. If you also use our scraper definitions for your metadata you'll get all the publishers for free.

Our goal initially is to scrape the entire literature (we have TOCs for 23,000 journals) as it is published every day. We then use natural language and image processing tools to extract uncopyrightable facts from the full texts, and republish those facts in open streams. For example we can capture all phylogenetic trees, reverse engineer the newick format from images, and submit them to the Tree Of Life. Or we can find all new mentions of endangered species and submit updates to the IUCN Red List. There's a ton of other interesting stuff downstream (e.g. automatic fraud detection, data streams for any conceivable subject of interest in the scientific literature).

I have a question. Why are you saying you'll never do full texts? You could index all CC-BY and better full texts completely legally, and this would greatly expand the literature search power.