skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
A big part of the problem is the limited choice of issues that come up and how they are framed.

For instance, "pro-family" organizations oppose abortion, but don't oppose any of the many social changes that destroy families, such as divorce.

Organized feminism, such as NOW, sticks to "pro-choice" as the only "pro-women" policy that their members can agree upon.

So long as an irreconcilable issue like this exists, politicians don't need to talk about anything else.

Republicans back the Keystone XL pipeline because it proves they are "good for business" and the democrats are not.

Democrats oppose the Keystone XL pipeline because it prove they are "good for the environment" and the republicans are not.

In reality, either having or not having the Keystone XL pipeline is the end of the world. But while politicians are pretending it is, they can appear "legitimate" without having to deliver anything at all in terms of promoting business or protecting the environment.
Since you have already experience with software development, I suggest you start with the tutorials and documentation on developer.android.com.

Apart from that, keep an eye open for a new revision of Reto Maier's "Professional Android 4 Development". Reto is head of Google's Android Developer relations team, and the book is a very detailed explanation of architecture, patterns, APIs and best practices on the platform.

The current edition is somewhat old, however. I expect a new version after L is released later this year.
I think it's fair to consider them as different distros, at least in practice, given how much the choice of a desktop environment can affect the user experience. A lot of the software available by default will differ, obviously. Instructions about how to use the system differ, as well. The default capabilities and functionality will differ. The bugs affecting them will differ. All of those differences add up.
It’s getting harder to tell what’s a real startup and what’s a parody
How does the "Fourth Dimension" work with arrays?
so facebook was like being friends with the entire cheerleading team and then being the only guy at their giant drunkin' true or dare party.
I think the issue with this PAC (and others with similar slate of goals) is the naiveté that if we are able to reform election policy and cutoff unlimited funding from lobbyists and other 3rd parties that the interests behind that money just disappear.

These groups still have money and still have an agenda, and they will work to the very limit of the law (and possibly more) to exercise that agenda. I can see this pac achieving their goals only to find out the top spenders dramatically increase their employee bonuses with a wink and a nod as to how it should be spent. I'm sure they can be more creative than that.

I wish that this reform would work but it won't. I'd rather go after term limits or combine the two. Its much harder to influence a politician who won't be around next term.
Right, it was at least more insightful than "This!".
Do I get quality inquiries from my site: Yes.

Would I pay for SEO: No.

SEO is not the only way to get traffic to your site. Most of my traffic coming to my site comes from my blog, where I write 1-2 articles per month. I try to make the posts interesting and insightful to the type of crowd that would include my potential clients (startups).

An added benefit of blogging is that your name will start to get recognized as an expert in your field (assuming your articles are good), which will play in your favor when you're talking with prospects.
I'm pretty sure the intersection of people worried enough to remove the batteries from their cellphones and willing to buy internet-connected lightbulbs is indistinguishable from the null set.

As for their purpose, well, to the company it's too make money, to the buyers, that's explained by this classic¹ strip of C&H: http://assets.amuniversal.com/6e921050df960131725e005056a954...

¹ yes, it's redundant, I know
Paywalled links should not be allowed on Hacker News
I guess the first issue of LJ I have on the bookshelf just doubled in value..
Except EA is really notorious for desecrating whatever franchises they have.
They fund a game/chore like Command & Conquer: Tiberium Alliances, yet Warhammer: Age of Heroes shuts down in a very short time.
Not true. An employee can adhere to a company policy without understanding the reason a given policy exists. It's certainly possible to carry out orders, and adhere to a script, with unquestioning obedience.
"the agency is targeting anyone who is interested in online privacy" - not so surprising, is it. I wonder what other similar criteria there are for being considered an "extremist"? No Facebook or other social networking accounts? Uses Linux? Makes certain types of comments online that support privacy (like this one)? ... It's really unsettling.

On the other hand, now that this is out, I think the NSA will suddenly have a ton more "extremists" to look at.
You didn't read the article.

It says they shocked the participants before the study started so the curiosity factor was not present.
Most people would be very happy if their worst problem in life was thinking it could have been more mentally stimulating. People have regret on their deathbed because people don't want to die and wish they could have their cake and eat it too, not because they suddenly found wisdom.
The Audible version of the book is brilliant, the narration takes it to a whole new level. It felt like I was listening to a British comedy with a John Cleese character. One of my favorite Audible books.

There's a great story in there about how they survived a cashflow crisis. Very dodgy, but fantastic to read about, and it's good to see some honesty about those tactics.

I've personally made lots of notes through Chapter 5, and Chapter 9 where he talks about the darker moments when he nearly threw it all in.
Looks like time alone with thoughts is ready to be disrupted.
Success is predicated on serendipity. Chance favors the prepared mind. Be prepared. Make your own luck.

We can't control what happens to us, but we can try to make the best of what comes instead of falling to the worst.
Otherwordly
I don't think you can conclude too much from it being a 9V battery. It depends how it is connected up. The shock from an implantable cardio defibrillator which comes from a small lithium battery hurts more than 240V through your fingers.
The article says they exposed people to the shocks and other stimuli to get a response to the 5$ question. It doesn't say they took the people and gave them 15 minutes to play around with the thing. Curiosity is still very much in the game, especially when there's nothing else to do.

A much more meaningful way to do this experiment would've been to have people sit and receive regular shocks (not under their own control), and to sit with nothing else to do, provide an incentive for staying 15 minutes and see how quickly they give up.

And while i'm writing: The article also mentions they couldn't find people who enjoy the time alone, but didn't mention whether they asked people who habitually medidate.
LXDE has been doing some fantastic efforts in polishing with LXQt. They recently finished porting everything to Qt 5. You might want to check them out - though most distros don't have packages from git.
It would take some pretty interesting circumstances for me to argue that using raw CSS is a good idea. As I've said before, the language has plenty of flaws, and using plain CSS without a preprocessor would be, in the majority of cases, irresponsible. Sorry for any confusion.
His reminds me of the horse in _Animal Farm_. His mantra was "I will work harder" , and he worked himself to death in support of the crafty manipulative pigs.
Yeah, pretty much

You can have them try prototyping stuff on Go on the second week, trying some libraries, examining some existing Go code and that's it

There are good "XX" programmers, but I'd say that they're mostly good programmers and not tied to a specific language. Yeah, there are some niches where someone who's great at that niche may not be so good at other places (front-end, or maybe performance critical programming, or even things like COBOL or Java)
I've just put Linux Lite (XFCE) on an old netbook, and it works great, better than Windows 7 did, with 1/3 RAM usage. Make sure you upgrade after you install or Chrome won't work. I think the upgrade even installs Chrome itself.

https://www.linuxliteos.com/

I also liked Zorin Lite, which is LXDE based, but 7.1 was very buggy for me. Maybe 8.0 will be better, and should come out this fall. But I'm happy with Linux Lite for now.

I've never liked the default Lubuntu UI and set-up. It looks too much like it was designed in the early 2000.
"Different defaults" is not really something that differenciates distros. Lubuntu, Xubuntu, Kubuntu etc have a name: They're remixes of an existing distro.
You suspect? You see it all the time?

http://www.zpub.com/notes/idle.html
Are teenagers such terrible people?

After the 350 diaper, the deep emotional rewards start to have diminishing marginal utility. Work/Life balance is possible.
You should pick up a book on medidating, or maybe find some kind of mental hobby. For example designing programs in my head when i'm not at a computer, or reciting kanji shapes i'm learning along with their meanings and readings in my head, are productive uses of time that would otherwise be boring.
> It makes sense if your app flat out requires a lot of
> javascript on the client side.

Well, you can take a different look: spend some time thinking why does your app requires a lot of JavaScript, and is it really necessary. Even if the answer is still "yes" that may be a good exercise.
>The government borrows from the fund, and leaves treasury bonds in it. If you personally save your money in treasuries, it's still considered savings. This is not different.

We're using a different definition of savings. I mean savings as in not-consuming. By this sense, investing in treasuries is only 'saving' in the grander scale if the government doesn't spend the money, or if it invests it. If the government uses it for consumption or in transfer payments to people who then use it for consumption, it's ultimately not 'saved', it's consumed. This means that when the original saver gets the money back, they're not getting the money they saved, they're actually receiving a transfer payment, as the money (value) they saved no longer exists.

This is why American social security could potentially "run dry"[1], which wouldn't happen in a system where people only got back exactly what they put in (plus interest) and the money wasn't used for anything else.

>Why would preserving wealth differences be important to a forced savings scheme?

If you're not 'preserving wealth differences', you're transferring money to people who didn't originally earn it. This makes it a transfer scheme, not necessarily a savings scheme. The parent seemed to be looking for alternatives to transfer schemes.

1. http://www.marketwatch.com/story/social-security-trust-fund-...
I tend to agree there's not a lot to see here. But the headline reminded me of this:

http://partiallyclips.com/2005/09/08/hell/

Time alone with your thoughts doesn't have to be a good thing.
Mind Candy gets social with Instagram-inspired PopJam app for kids
<rant>

I'm willing to pay for a good games that don't annoy me asking for more money, but see almost nothing to pay for. (I'm only talking about mobile here, desktop games market is totally different.)

That is, when I got bored I had browsed Play Market for a while and I'd say - subjectively - options where you buy a game and that's it - you enjoy the whole thing, as advertised, right to a solid logical ending, without anyone persistently asking you to take your wallet out again (to remove ads, to buy some in-game advantage or to access further gameplay) are astonishingly rare.

Crap, even Baldur's Gate is now with in-app purchases and DLCs. (But, again, not on desktop!) Guess, that must be something related to stereotypes and cliches, not real business models.

</rant>
You are right, but the parent is spot on

This was a risky situation but much different than someone willingly coming at you with a knife, the fact that he could dodge him easily is proof of that.
Why are we interviewing Developers by asking Architect questions?
At some point, you hit a region where access to capital and powerful friends is the difference, not talent. For example, Larry Page and Zuck had wealthy investors and access to enployees who were more talented than themselves but accepted a lower share in the conpanies they built.
The NSA's problem is that new threats are a form of innovation, but that it's hard to predict innovation, and harder to target surveillance towards people planning a dangerous activity if nobody has seen that activity before. New ideas are a threat.

So perhaps their method is to define Normal, and then monitor everybody Abnormal, on the basis that dangerous innovation is more likely to come from the Abnormal.

Enthusiasm for Linux isn't as abnormal as it used to be, but it definitely puts you in the "dangerous 1%".
Trans-Cranial Direct Current Stimulation
Since the Ubuntu transition to Mir is imminent, will they wait until Ubuntu comes out with Mir? (probably next version). I think the performance would be even better with Mir on older hardware.
My "favorite" was deisolating a live phone wire with my teeth when I was a kid, and managing to complete the circuit via my tongue just as someone rang. It didn't actually hurt very much. But everything went white for a moment.
Notepads are pretty much only yellow in the US. I see that mostly as an internationalisation issue, to be honest. (That said, “folders” also don’t necessarily look that way on many places on Earth besides the US.)
> Knife-on-unarmed is even worse odds

This can't be stressed enough. Please, don't ever try to fight against a knife. You've got much better chance of surviving an unarmed fight against a gun.

It may be a good illustration though - getting out alive from such a situation is probably even less likely than building a successful startup on your first try.
The depressing part for me is that I've started to consider what I search for on a daily basis and how that might look...essentially they are starting to make me paranoid.

Over the last few months I've googled

Numerous Weapon Systems (I have a fascination with WW1, WWII and Cold War history - stuff like Black Arrow etc).

Insurgencies during the British Empire

Electronics (want to get back into and saw a fun project to make on reddit the other day) - http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=movVFYWheGM

Linux stuff (settings, security, the usual stuff a developer/system administrator would look at).

Programming stuff (relating to security, encryption etc)

NSA related material (following the story closely).

Setting up a VPN (so I can access Netflix US because Netflix UK is basically crap).

The US constitution and some case law.

NSA Report: "User noir_lord has an interest in privacy, weapons, insurgencies and excellent technical skills, user noir_lord should be monitored"

Where in reality I'm a 34 year old web developer from the North of England who enjoys history, techy stuff and playing with my cats.
I love the iOS7 symbols and I really don’t understand why others don’t. No one could ever explain that to me, except to say they dislike them. I love the colors, I love the shapes†. Be that as it may, it just seems that tastes diverge and that this is a subjective, not an objective question. I love ’em very much and I think they are much better than the old ones.

I’m ok with the more complex OS X symbols, they seem to fit the platform better. I think that’s also thematically a nice contrast between the platforms: OS X is more complex but also more powerful, iOS is a lot simpler – however, both are still consistent with each other where it makes sense. I think that’s also a very nice message to send through graphic design (and one reinforced through Apple’s other announcements about the future of their platforms).

—

† Of course there are exceptions. Game Center was a train wreck before and still is one – but at least it isn’t offensive to people who play games anymore. (Gaming is not gambling! Oh shit, I just though of IAPs … maybe Apple is more perceptive than I give them credit for …) Does no one at Apple play games or understand people who do? I really dislike the camera symbol. It’s horrific. I liked the lens much more before and I think a stylized lens would be much cooler.
Personally, I think Xubuntu desktop is better that Gnome2-based Ubuntu ever was.

It's just that the default settings – only one panel (at the top), ugly blue theme & background image – are not very appealing and feel dated.

But after adding a second panel, reorganizing panel contents, changing icons & windows themes and background image, Xubuntu desktop is very nice.
You Really Want To Boost Your Blog Credibility | Blogging Engage
Wow, and pron is spreading FUD again.

Getting a bit desperate that absolutely no one cares about Kotlin?
Well you're in the same club as most of us.

Reminds me of: http://youtu.be/-PSeAfSKQe4
One participant shocked themselves 190 times. I'd say I'd concede curiosity is the main factor the first one or two times.
What if there was no novelty factor? Electric shocks aren't so common; I'd play with a machine that let's me have a new sensation. I might prefer it to time alone with thoughts because I believe I'll have the latter available any time I want.
Agreed that you shouldn't mix concurrency models excessively, but many problems do call for a mix. I don't think Rich was referring to what I am. He was talking about the trouble composing Java concurrency using locks and such, which is just hard.

On the other hand with clojure, a standard mix is to use non blocking IO to multiplex a large number of connections, then delegate work to a threadpool (using clojure refs/atoms etc.). Such a system has a much smaller chance of deadlocks and other issues.

A great example of polyglot concurrency is the clojure reducers framework that lets you delegate work to a fork/join pool. Most people don't need it, but it's nice to have a safe, seamless interface to such an advanced concurrency tool.
When you are looking for bugs, you still have to read all the code. Whether it was auto-generated or folded by the IDE doesn't give any benefit here.
Well, a good side of it - the more false positives they have, the worse for them.
For even more convenience I don't test for IE compliance. I test for ECMA and W3C standards compliance and don't write any vendor specific code.
Of course the journal article isn't open access. But hey, Google.

"To see whether the difficulty with “just thinking” is distinctive to college students, in study 9 we recruited community participants at a farmer’s market and a local church. The par- ticipants ranged in age from 18 to 77 (median age = 48.0 years). As in study 7, they completed the study online in their own homes, after receiving instructions to do so when they were alone and free of any external distractions. The results were similar to those found with college students. There was no evidence that enjoyment of the thinking period was related to participants’ age, education, income, or the frequency with which they used smart phones or social media (table S2)."

So apparently it's not related to the prevalence of distracting technology - according to them. I would question the second (S8) 'at home' studies which only used 15 people per experiment. This was to test whether allowing participants to distract themselves had any effect.

It's a very short paper, only a couple of pages, so I think needs a bit more digging to actually find out whether it's true or not. The whole thing seems very speculative.
People who meditate can certainly reject it. I don't think it's categorically unpleasant. Confinement is unpleasant because of the high opportunity cost.
You made sense until the "...definitely puts you in..." part
Unfortunately, they haven't changed the design much.
Thanks for the clarification. Perhaps the operative distinction here is between parasitic and symbiotic corporations. Ideally they are symbiotic with other players in the eocsystem, rather than parasitic, but I think all corporations have a temptation and a tendency to end up as parasitic monopolies.

Re Google, I wasn't saying they don't create value, far from it, I was saying they don't create value for readers with advertising. I concede this is a debatable point though for the reasons you mentioned, and it is really a subjective. Personally I don't find their advertising useful, and if anything think it targets me mostly with sites I've already engaged with and wastes the money of advertisers. There is a tension in their services because they depend on advertising, and the temptation (which thy have increasingly given in to on their search service recently) is to favour advertisers (the real customers) over end users - a classic problem in a two-sided market.

To be clear though, I was not saying google are evil, but that just shifting the value around is what businesses do and what Google does - creating value is a very slippery and subjective concept and I'd argue their services which create value (mail etc) are funded by those that don't (advertising). So I would not use that particular behaviour as a criticism of the companies mentioned in the article - they might be objectionable, immoral or even illegal (I'd say probably all three) but they are not easy to distinguish from normal businesses in terms of how they shift value around.
Oh, I just assumed that it was multiple submits concatenated to make the log readable for a news article.
That video is amazing, I've always liked Pink Floyd's "The Wall" so I'm a bit ashamed I've never seen the full video version.

The imagery is chill inducingly powerful.
That's not very good reasoning. You're basically saying that Fedora and Ubuntu are the same distro, because differences in the default package manager and other core software are irrelevant. Clearly that's not the case.

It is the defaults that matter. They're what give a particular distribution its unique characteristics.

Sure, you can go out of your way to install the software necessary to make one distribution comparable to some other distribution, but that doesn't mean they're really the same to begin with, even if their names may be similar.
Not in the Android performance picture so far: language runtimes (e.g., jruby and groovy) that dynamically generate bytecode. A JIT can optimize it (and for jruby and grovvy on the jvm, it typically does).

That hasn't been an issue on Android so far because those language runtimes would have had to be retooled to generate Dalvik bytecode, and none of them were. (Ruboto, jruby on Android, runs in pure interpreted mode, with a significant performance hit.) But I believe that with Dalvik, it was technically possible. Does ART just close this possibility off?
A practical workflow for resizing images with ImageMagick
Microsoft and Intel's FPGA announcements and the future of computing
If you assume their goal is to do what they claim it is.

If not then false positives are largely irrelevant.
This driver was out of the Tesla during the crash.
> also a more reasonable IR for a JIT or AOT backend.

It might have turned out that way but I see no evidence that DEX was designed that way from the start. The claims about DEX performance when Android first came out were that it was twice as fast as interpreted Java bytecode and half the size.

The Dalvik JIT compiler is a nifty design, but there is no evidence DEX was designed to make it easier or better. The JIT compiler was added years after Android shipped.

One can make the general claim that there is no big impediment to producing optimal compiled code from any reasonable bytecode. But I have yet to see anything indicating DEX was designed for compilation or confers any advantages on any compiler design.