skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Being poor renders it very difficult to think long term as the survival instinct kicks in. If you have to constantly worry about whether you can put food on the table and pay the electric bill tomorrow, you simply stop thinking about what happens next month.

This instinct kicks in on such a low cognitive level that it's almost impossible to suppress.

This makes it very easy to leech profits from the underclasses through payday loans. The profit is made at the point that the survival instinct programs them to ignore.

This is why outright prohibition of payday loans usually has a positive impact on the financial wellbeing of the underclasses.

Unfortunately, even the middle and upper classes who struggle with giving up smoking still look down on the set of people who take payday loans, thinking that their superior intelligence and good sense is what leads them to not be suckered.

Empirical study on the effect of poverty on short term thinking:

http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/2013/11/your-bra...

Study on the effect of banning payday loans on the financial health of the underclasses:

http://www.federalreserve.gov/pubs/feds/2013/201381/201381pa...
There's a large group of people between the bottom half and the top 85 people that hold quite a bit of wealth.
The bottom half of the World's population not only don't have a representative half of the World's wealth, they basically own diddly squat compared to their numbers.
So where would you suggest going to learn all of this seemingly endless amount of information?
I'd say that if it was in its interest to communicate something, an intelligent being would be better equipped to do so than an unintelligent being.
I think the FactoryFactoryFactory-(anti)-pattern and bloated xml-configs are an enterprise thing, that by accident became a java thing (as java was adopted by people that were used to fighting with multi-kloc-c++ code-bases).

Another (related) java culture mis-feature is the tendency of "horizontal abstraction". Rather than building useful abstractions, there seems to be a tendency to move parameters from (initialization) code to xml to ini-files that generate xml to... All the while not really building up vertical abstractions where there sits something simple on top -- but rather just shifting the complexity "sideways" -- moving it around rather than collecting and simplifying.

I think part of this started before generics were introduced, as an artefact of java being a "compiled" language without any dynamic code-generation. So everyone ended up writing their own, strange, meta-programming language based on XML. Which can be fun as an exercise[1], but pretty poor in terms of tooling/ecosystem.

What java probably needed from the start was something like groovy -- and yes, my impression is that the ecosystem is becoming more sane.

BTW, java doesn't have multiple inheritance (well, it might have now that you can add some (static)code to interfaces[2]) -- it has (weak) contract based programming (via interfaces).

[1] http://www.amazon.com/Program-Generators-Java-Craig-Cleavela...

[2] http://docs.oracle.com/javase/tutorial/java/IandI/defaultmet...
That is absolutely not the same. One is referring to half the wealth in the world, one is referring to the wealth owned by the poorest half of the world (which is strictly less than half by definition, and in this case far less than half).

Doesn't make the fact not-disgusting, just slightly less so.

EDIT: Wow, 5 corrections in two minutes.
Tim Draper on The Colbert Report
I hope you do use vim splits, since you have the same (copy/paste) buffers then.
As a mechanical engineer, I've always clung to the notion that I need to be multi-disciplinary. The days of being able to get by in Mech without knowing how to write code or work with some basic circuitry ended in the 90s, if not earlier.
I think we should all look at the example of Mohammad Ali's appeals to the Supreme Court regarding charges of dodging the draft. In a documentary about Ali, I recall the one of the supreme court justice's clerks going back through the record, and it turned out the Ali's beliefs (being a member of the Nation of Islam) did qualify him as a conscious objector much like the Seventh Day Adventists. Before this point the courts has ruled the N.o.I. didn't deserve the same treatment for its members. Ruling for Ali posed a large problem for the Supreme Court, if they ruled in a way that set a large precedent that many people could claim they were objectors the country would have huge problems feeding the established "war machine" (the draft). So the justices went back through the record and found a technicality, as such they found a way Ali wouldn't be found guilty of dodging the draft due to a procedural error. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clay_v._United_States for all the details.

I expect if the court comes to review the facts in this matter they will either be impeded in succeeding due to national security concerns or find a way to decide for the plaintiffs in the smallest possible way to not upset the established order. Very rarely are judicial decisions groundbreaking in precedent. They are more like the tree trimmers of legislation and executive privilege, they typically only trim branches not cut down entire trunks as this ruling would possibly do for Internet surveillance.

So this the world we live in, encrypt your life.
Do you have a link? I can't find a previous discussion.
Congrats on the release. Will check the game out.

Curious, what type of numbers you were seeing (downloads and play counts) before getting a bump from Apple?
Have to disagree actually. We make seed investments in health it startups and when I came across this, I thought to myself it's a great idea, much needed. But I also wondered who their competitors might be, if any. Posts like this are helpful in that way. Perhaps it could have been written with a little more humility.
> In less than three days “No Russian” received over 100,000 views.

Well it's perfect, isn't it? A Russian-American SC venture capitalist who flat-out says that "Russia was and is a failed state". That Russians are coddled and intimidated by a domineering nanny/bully-state, that many/most Russians are unproductively employed in some placeholder position by the government (sound familiar?). That there is a suppressed creative class, while the population at large is "statistically speaking not very bright". They need to break free and find their Silicon Vallye. That SC should embrace these refugee smart people (but stay clear of the posers who aren't "creative"! They are not important). That there are a lot of possibilities for outsourcing work to Ukraine (and you'll be helping Ukraine itself, to boot!).

This has a great patriotism appeal - even the more dililussioned-by-America types can relate to the good old USA vs Russia (USSR) rivalry on some level. It has a great appeal to SC culture, seeing some smart Russian make it while, had he not been given the opportunity to move to that glorious place, then he would have surely became a drunk or just suffered in silence, a member of the creative underclass with no outlet for his ideas or aspirations. And of course the plea to aim the inevitable eventual brain-drain in America's direction.

No, I'm not saying that anything that he said is wrong. Just that the reasons that this got popular seems pretty obvious.
I'd argue that this behavior is in violation of international law as well as the constitution.

http://gigaom.com/2014/07/16/un-human-rights-report-blows-ap...
Where do you get a factor of 10 from?
I'm not sure why you need child processes or SSH (I mean you can use vim over SSH). But have you tried syntastic for the syntax checking? And I'm not sure what kind of visual interface you want for git, bit the combination of fugitive and gitgutter (super simple but awesome) works quite well for me.
Of course the NSA needs this ability -- as an agency whose recognized goal is having information, they of course will always need all information.

The question is whether we need the NSA, and whether we're willing to forfeit our rights and principles to provide them with all information.
http://www.forbes.com/sites/peterhimler/2014/05/06/russias-m...
what in the world are you talking about? "most" humans exist in 3 dimensions (x,y,z), all the time, with or without tools.
Not everyone can be a Manhattan attorney:

http://www.infirmation.com/shared/search/payscale-compare.tc...
Not that I disagree with your point, but I don't think spoken/written language is our best tool for sharing feelings. I'd say body-language is better for that. Or certain forms of art (such as visual art or music). All forms of communication, obviously.

Language probably is our best way of communicating abstract concepts, however (now, are feelings abstract or concrete? ;-).
It reminds me of an article on the latest issue of phrack, (Similarities for Fun & Profit,
http://phrack.org/issues/68/15.html#article )

Research in this area could trace back to the early days of information retrieval (such as tf-idf, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tf%E2%80%93idf). I am not quite familiar with the recent progress in this area, perhaps anyone could provide some pointers?
I don't have any problem with women or men having sex. I don't think the term slut is ever appropriate.

Bullying is always bad.

Hope I didn't piss you off too much. I just wrote that example quickly, without much thought.
it's not nearly certain that your bitcoins will be stolen, particularly if you don't consider what happens to them after your death.
Could you point out for me where Sam talks about diversity of perspectives? All I see him talking about is what the OP mentions - gonads and skin color.
Home Care Established as a Hot New Franchise Option
> I would assume foliage is correlated to wealth

Likely. Lawns have pretty much always been conspicuous consumption: Versailles is sometimes considered the source of the first modern lawn, as opposed to a pasture.
Things have changed dramatically since the constitution was conceived. Nobody predicted the internet, WMDs (which could easily be smuggled into the country, they're not just movie fiction), and other nations having spying capabilities.

My main thought is that the US must stay ahead of other nations intelligence agencies. Other than protecting myself, my family, and the country I don't really have a good reason for this though.
Success Rates Home Care Franchises vs. Startup Companies
Show HN: Courier Primal – Courier Prime with a slashed zero
the article was mostly shared by Russian's themselves. I think they wanted for somebody to get this message out for them in light of recent events.
In discussions like this the numbers matter. To quote Heinlein, “What are the facts, and to how many decimal places? You pilot always into an unknown future; facts are your single clue. Get the facts!"(1) Piketty's book suffers from poor numbers and bad maths, making his conclusions useless. If he is right, he needs to support it with sound numbers.

Chris Giles in The Financial Times found his numbers wanting. (2) In Piketty's response(3), he downplays the importance of the questions, focusing on the European numbers. FOr5 the US numbers, he recommends substituting the numbers of Emmanuel Saez (Berkeley) and Gabriel Zucman.(4) But those numbers are based on reported capital gains taxes without adjusting for major changes in the law and changes in the definition of capital gains.

I don't know if Piketty is right or wrong, but I know his Excel spreadsheets are not adequate evidence. I'd like him to be right; I think wealth disparity in the USA since 1980 is more due to legal maneuvering than merit. I also know my thinking it isn't evidence.

1) http://www.timeenoughforlove.org/Heinlein.htm

2) http://piketty.pse.ens.fr/files/capital21c/en/media/FT230520...

3) http://www.voxeu.org/article/factual-response-ft-s-fact-chec...

4) http://gabriel-zucman.eu/files/SaezZucman2014Slides.pdf
its showing its age
I fell in love with Courier Prime as a great throwback to when I first started coding.

However, I was bothered by the lack of distinction between a zero and an O. Thus, I put slash in it.

I'm curious to know how others like this font(or not) for programming purposes.

Thanks,
L
I'm curious as to what the EFF would propose as an alternative that both allows the NSA to conduct legitimate intelligence operations on the internet and provide acceptable privacy protections. I look at that diagram attached to the article with the two giant filters, the first of which says "filtering aimed at eliminating fully domestic transactions", but they consider it unconstitutional right from the beginning before it even hits the first filter. It strikes me as akin to giving someone a task like "implement grep, but don't read any lines from stdin which don't contain your search term."
> "The fact is that the US is one of the prime targets for terrorism, both independent and foreign nation sponsored."

Might be worth working at not doing things that make one a prime target instead. This would be a better investment from what I can see. Just look at the growth of ISIS in Iraq. Our governments seem to create more enemies with every attempt to quash them.
I understand, and I don't mean to be argumentative or even trite but my intention was to express disinterest in what words we use to describe elite schools that close-enough-to-no-one can go to.
Note that the male version of 'girl'is not 'guy', it's boy. Do you use 'boy' regularly to refer to adult men? If not, perhaps not using 'girl' either is appropriate.
Please tell me: What do you mean with this line:

'The more your intentions fall in line with the intentions of the universe, the more satisfying life is.'

I am curious.
I was expecting a traffic fatality map, something like this:
http://riskyroads.org/
Our "rights" were put in place before mass communications were available, long before the internet was conceived.

Presidents being shot. Planes flying into buildings. A nuclear weapon or any bomb being detonated inside of the country are all things that I do not want to happen. I don't know how to prevent these without SIGINT dominance.

If these events can be prevented without the chance of any human using the collected data for any other purpose and the data only being stored for a very short period of time, then I'd have to say I'm on the side of the NSA.

I think that corporations and law-enforcement agencies using intelligence and mass collection techniques are much more of a threat.

Yes, the sharing and data-retention of the NSA should be greatly limited and controlled and monitored in my opinion, but eliminating their ability to protect the country (their ultimate goal) might not be worth it.
Not everyone who commented on the OneBody thread is Christian, or religious in any way.

Past polls and discussions suggest that HN is somewhere around 3/4 non-religious (with various flavors of atheism and agnosticism most prevalent) and 1/4 religious (with various flavors of Christianity most prevalent). This thread is no different.

But HN also has a high regard for technical prowess and interesting projects, combined with a low tolerance for douchebaggery. Which means that interesting projects that happen to be targeted toward Christians (particularly one that could be easily forked for other religious or non-religious groups) can generate a lot of positive discussion... and the sort of people making snarky remarks about "imaginary friends" will tend to get downvoted/flagged into oblivion.
In which upper-class HN tells someone who grew up poor how poor people think. And then downvotes the heretic, despite relevant, first-hand experience contribution to discussion. Nice.
Yes. Frustrating bug. I ended up compiling my own, but I think the newer pretests have the fix. If you want to build your own pretest with the "Yamamoto Mitsuharu" version of Emacs (railwaycat), I posted the commands I ran: http://amitp.blogspot.com/2014/04/building-mac-os-x-emacs.ht...
They just sent me code.

It is up to them to make sure that they are following NDAs. Also, sometimes code isn't open source, and it isn't NDA; like 4th year assignments or small contracts.
Almost all of the time the project we are doing for the client is so valuable that they eventually become quite pleased when we deliver what they wanted. But the mere imposition of a hard deadline on a feature that the deal-maker imagined because the client requested it is something we should change. I just think better/more flexible deadlines would be a good idea, in general, and overpromising to a client prevents that.

My experience in my office has been good otherwise, so perhaps I was being too negative above.
You are conflating cause and effect. Being poor does not make it very difficult to think long term but the lack of discipline required to make good short term choices has the effect of keeping you in poverty over the long term. A pattern of good short term choices tends to lead to getting out of poverty whether one is thinking long term or not.

I lived a significant portion of my life in pretty severe poverty; I was raised in it. It requires a decent amount of discipline to not waste money even when you are hungry and can't pay the bills, and many poor people do not have that discipline and therefore stay poor. Many non-poor people have the same lack of discipline but can simply afford to be more wasteful. Given two choices that solve an immediate problem (e.g. hunger) people will often choose the one that is most wasteful of their money even though they know they are poor.

I was never the world's most disciplined person but I did manage to bootstrap myself out of poverty in fairly boring fashion working low-paying jobs. As long as I had an income (never guaranteed) I always managed to spend less money than I earned. It is pretty shocking the percentage of people in poverty that are obviously wasteful with their limited resources but it also explains their long term outcome.

I earn a fine income today but my spending stopped rising with my income a long time ago. Old habits of not spending frivolously on low-value things die hard I guess.
Ask HN: In regards to the link, why not the WiFi Pineapple?
This may be a plebeian query, but i feel like taking the 'teeth' out of a bunch of Pineapple knock offs and placing them all over the place would be a good start at making an open public interweb for all people.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2014/07/building-open-wireless-router
I doubt this was on the frontpage, but here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8053155
How come no Pastafarianism option?
I was largely referring to the process of converting fuel into motion. Basically the engine and the drive train- which are some of our most precisely manufactured systems
completely agree. I myself am specializing in Computational Fluid Dynamics now and love coding
This approach can be very good for finding things like duplicate articles. It might not perform as well with blogspam, though. Rolling hash approaches can be very sensitive to "high-frequency" variation, so all a spammer would need to do to evade it is insert a reasonably high rate of spelling errors or word substitutions. That would have the effect of keeping the segment hashes themselves well-randomized (since even a single character difference should result in a completely different cryptographic hash), or prevent the rolling hash from selecting segment boundaries in a consistent manner.

One of the nice things about locality-sensitive hashing algorithms for less-than-pristine data is that you can instead tune it to construct the fingerprint from a larger number of smaller samples, which makes it more likely that you'll get at least some samples which represent all signal and no noise.
This article was posted eleven days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8033051

And again three days ago:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8071148
User Onboarding Checklist
I do agree that targeted killings are doing more harm than good.

There are interviews with special operations soldiers saying that they would receive a kill list, they would work their way down the list, then the next month the new kill list would be much longer.

If you raid a house, kill the father/brother/uncle and maybe have some collateral damage, it doesn't matter whether or not that person was against America, you've converted several people in that family and community against America because we just became the terrorists.

America not being a popular target for terrorism is a much more difficult problem to solve. People are crazy, ignorance combined with religion leads to misguided people, even jealousy is a factor. Foreign nations will do almost anything to increase the wealth of their country, that would be very difficult to prevent.
I don't think any scientist working today works under the delusion that our theories are anything but models.

This. I think this is a key point that the general population doesn't understand. And it leads to debates like this. The debate itself is moot because the debate would be a non-issue if all sides understood this point.
> "A lot of it is pretty dang hit-you-over-the-head-with-a-stick obviously metaphorical"

Origen: "[if scripture was purely literal] we would not certainly believe, when thus possessing the meaning of Scripture in a continuous series, that anything else was contained in it save what was indicated on the surface; so for that reason divine wisdom took care that certain stumbling-blocks, or interruptions, to the historical meaning should take place, by the intro­duction into the midst (of the narrative) of certain impossibilities and incongruities; that in this way the very interruption of the narrative might, as by the interposition of a bolt, present an obstacle to the reader, whereby he might refuse to acknowledge the way which conducts to the ordinary meaning; and being thus excluded and debarred from it, we might be recalled to the beginning of another way, in order that, by entering upon a narrow path, and passing to a loftier and more sublime road, he might lay open the immense breadth of divine wisdom. This, however, must not be unnoted by us, that as the chief object of the Holy Spirit is to preserve the coherence of the spiritual meaning, either in those things which ought to be done or which have been already performed, if He anywhere finds that those events which, according to the history, took place, can be adapted to a spiritual meaning, He composed a texture of both kinds in one style of narration, always concealing the hidden meaning more deeply; but where the historical narrative could not be made appropriate to the spiritual coherence of the occur­rences, He inserted sometimes certain things which either did not take place or could not take place; sometimes also what might happen, but what did not: and He does this at one time in a few words, which, taken in their “bodily” meaning, seem inca­pable of containing truth, and at another by the in­sertion of many." - http://www.ccel.org/ccel/schaff/anf04.vi.v.v.i.html section 15

Origen was one of the foremost Christian scholars of the 2nd-3rd century. This was the predominant approach Christians took to scripture until 19th century America, when literalism took over -- for a short time.

Of particular note, the earliest parts of Genesis would have been obviously metaphorical to any of the early readers... because they blatantly undermine the Egyptian creation stories. They take the most significant Egyptian gods and describe them as mere objects (even the sun and moon aren't named -- they're just "lights".) They take the most significant elements of the Egyptian stories and turn them around, twist them up on themselves, and use them to express how Yahweh is different from Horus, Isis, and the rest. It's like the way Shrek takes common tropes from Cinderella-type movies and turns them on their head, only serious instead of comedic.
Agree re. Stripe. YMMV but in Australia when people give to their Church via CC it is tax deductible.
The young YC companies don't hire anyone not like them so they don't need HR.