skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Stack Exchange has a ton of totally pointless, 100% opinion based exchanges, but they close something that would actually be helpful?
Sometimes it seems like the entire Snowden debate is ultimately reducible to one's belief about this. In a phrase, one's belief that given N people with power P, q will eventually abuse it.

I think that as N grows, the probability that q >= 1 approaches 1. It strikes me as a self-evident feature of human nature.
Griffin is, perhaps without intending to, doing exactly what you hope she isn't: she's making a list of goalies in the US who have cancer. Who else is going to contact her to get their name on the list?

The act of collecting a list is an error since the data collected is entirely meaningless. Here's how she should be doing it: randomly select a few cities in the US, then check the cancer rate among soccer players in those cities.
A problem I've observed with these kind of blackbox systems is that the process from input to output really is a mystery.

When the results are right, they're just "right" so you should accept them, when they're wrong they're actually also right by whatever magical hamster wheel is operating inside of the thing and you just don't "get it".

The problem is that humans like to have some clue as to how the results were derived, something easy to explain that gets the gist across. Something like "Watson counted all the words you use and compared them to different reference lexicons to arrive at the score". This provides a little bit of context so we understand the semantics of the result and how to consider them and reason with them.

But for all we know the results we're seeing are from some arbitrary stochastic method:

openness=rand(90,99)
harmony=rand(90,100)

etc.

For things like this to be accepted by the users (humans) there needs to be a quick explanation for how this works otherwise we get head scratchers.
And they were right.

Magic Johnson was diagnosed with HIV in 1991, during the relative early days. 23 years later, he's apparently very healthy. The first AIDS cases in the US were in the mid 1970s give or take, with the first recognized at the time to be in 1980. So 11 years after recognizing that first case, they were able to take someone like Johnson and keep him alive indefinitely with a virus that was thought to be a death sentence in 1991.

And that's all prior to having cracked the human genome, prior to understanding stem cells, and so on. So progress was naturally slower in the 1980s or 1991 than it is now. The biotech industry was nowhere near as large in 1980 or 1990 as it is now (Genentech having been founded just in 1976).

Ebola doesn't stand a chance, even though the short term will be scary.
> password recovery measures are regularly abused as well

> how to reduce the risk of 3rd parties [...] gaining access.

Don't you see the contradiction there? Our systems are already full of holes, so let's create some more...?

You also assume I'm a US citizen, which I am not. The minute the US mandate backdoors to manufacturers, all governments will want in, including some very nasty customers. So what do you do next, have separate keys for each government and country-based firmware, i.e. even more holes? It's a slippery slope.

"The thing to look at" is how to remove the capability for third parties to access your data, regardless of who they are. Say that tomorrow I'll wake up in Nazi Sweden (not terribly unlikely, seeing current Euro trends), I'd rather not have brownshirts with keys to all my data - would you?
"The standalone decompiler runs fine under Wine."
The manhattan project wasn't incremental. Nor was the apollo program nor the hoover dam. It does seem like we (America) have moved into a mode of thinking where instead of asking, "what do we want to build?" we ask, "based on the advances at the edge of iterative academic or technical progress, what is now possible to build?"

In short, Thiel's argument that America has mostly transitioned from optimistic determinists to optimistic indeterminists seems like more than a matter of perspective bias.
#1 and #3 are not even refutations and #2 you didn't even understand. You're absolutely wrong that this isn't a security issue. The simple proof is that no secure network would ever allow a device to call home like this.

Maybe you think that because it's common it's not a problem. That's not how security works.
One day, we could have XBox games where kids could activate Kage Bunshin no Jutsu by doing the hand signs.
Was the link in the OP article a joke article? It doesn't seem to have a punch line....

Blood Industry Shrinks as Transfusions Decline -
http://www.nytimes.com/2014/08/23/business/blood-industry-hu...
Agreed. I think the analysis here plays a little fast and loose with the conclusions it draws from the data.
Breaking things is time expensive too, plus it erodes trust.

Not breaking things can be time expensive if you do it late, but it doesn't have to if you do it early. If making sure you don't break something is time expensive then you're probably not building on a solid foundation and solid processes.

Be foundation first. Incurring the time expensive to build a foundation (process, infrastructure, software) that will allow you to move fast with stability IS controversial; because it's not the "hack" approach.
Tourists generally don't go to Venezuela because the country is extremely unsafe. The capital, Caracas, is ranked as the second city with the highest murder rate in the world [1]. There is an extremely low regard for life - petty criminals will kill you for your phone.

However, we do have some of the most unreal places on the planet! [2]

[1] http://www.theguardian.com/world/2014/jan/12/violent-crime-m...

[2] http://1.bp.blogspot.com/-4ghbtqN0bRY/TyV8kLJVivI/AAAAAAAABX...
Very minimal (in the sense of content, bad)... I don't know how this even has four points.
>This article is exactly WHY I am not legitimately concerned about a wide-spread infection in the Western world.

Leaving aside the moral argument of preventing huge numbers of innocent people from dying Ebola if we can, there are two reason we in the west should be concerned:

1. There is a serious risk that Ebola will mutate to become more infectious. It is very unlikely to become airborne (this is about as likely as pigs becoming airborne), but it could relatively easily mutate to slow down its kill speed. At the moment Ebola kills so quickly that there is little time for a patient to spread it to other people. Ebola is under huge selection pressure to slow down the disease progression in humans. We could see a strain arise that takes a month to kill you where you are asymptotically infectious for a couple of weeks. Model this sort of virus and things look far less rosy for us in the west. The more people we let Ebola infect the more likely that such a strain will arise.

2. Once the number of cases get very large (25,000 a day by Jan 2015 according to the CDC) this is going to start disrupting international trade as countries close their borders. We already saw the sort of recession that can result from disruptions to trade when this happened in the GFC and the Asian crisis in the 90s. With interest rates at or near zero in most countries there is not much that can be done to buffer us economically.
I'd like to initiate an animation based on a button event (clicking another object). Am I missing that feature?
It sounds interesting, but there's not enough detail here.

Before they submit where?
Small spider.. Big thinking
"If an area get's 10% more cancer than expected but twice the breast cancer then there is probably a local cause." That is incorrect: deviation percentage is meaningless without a sample size. In a group of 100 people, twice the rate of cancer means nothing. In a group of 1 Billion people, 10% is significant.

You're right that blood cancer is the most important part of the article... those are the cancers which are most common in children and therefore the cancers most likely to be found in an coincidental cluster in children.
> and King County Metro is just a shit show in general.

Ah, yes, I was wondering if I was going to read this here. In the same sentence that you give BART a pass for stopping at midnight and not going "everywhere," Metro gets written off completely. Even thought it has a 5am to 1am span of service, 14 night owl routes, daily express service from as far out as North (freakin') Bend, and is the most-used mode of transportation to jobs in Seattle, it's a "shit show."
NYC isn't there yet, but there are so many intrinsic advantages it's just a matter of time. The biggest impediment is cultural. Most of the tech talent is very cautious and by the book. However this is changing. NYC Papers We Love is a great example of what the future holds... As is clojure.
>> Like it or not, law enforcement officers with a valid warrant to search your device are authorized users. It's in the constitution.

It's not, of course, literally in the Constitution that you cannot encrypt things and then refuse to decrypt them for law enforcement. Nor is it in the Constitution that people selling encryption devices must include backdoors.

What words in the Constitution do you see as pertaining here?
The original submission got 4 points in 4 minutes, which is blatant vote rigging. (The only time that happens is if someone dies.)
All this crap is easier said than done.
>There's a good chance that the active strains are more transmissible than we assume, and might become worse through natural selection

We actually have a very poor idea of what is going on the ground in most of the affected countries as the hospital system has effectively stopped admitting new patients. The CDC is using a correction factor of 2.5 (i.e. there are 2.5 case outside of the hospitals for every case in inside), but once you stop admitting new patients then you really have no idea how many infected people there are.
I would argue a 404 is not proper in this case and a 200 is more correct and valid.

The URI exists, the requested record/document does not, hence the successful response with no return.
Your comment is already obsolete. I wouldn't be so quick to judge, with both of your points...

In regards to phone models: "What phone models does Amp support?
Amp is designed for the iPhone 5, 5s, 6 and 6 plus."

As for your second comment, what about people who want to play music from their phone while by the pool or in their backyard or at a small gathering? I personally listen to a meditation each morning and have to use an external bluetooth speaker so this looks pretty useful to me.
Please, please allow passwords longer than 10 characters
AMD Appoints Dr. Lisa Su as President and CEO
> The section of DeLong's essay that Krugman quotes in his article though is the claim that Bitcoin was designed as a weapon against government central banks and their ability to tax

No, the section of DeLong's writing that Krugman quoted didn't deal with that, it dealt with the ceiling/floor issue I described; this was in the section of Krugman's piece discussing the postivist evaluation of bitcoin's ability to function as a stable store of value.

What you seem to be describing is the excerpt of Charlie Stross's work that Krugman quotes in the shorter bit at the end where Krugman is discussing normative evaluation of bitcoin's purposes.

Charlie Stross and Brad DeLong are two different people, and Krugman cites them for very different purposes. (One about bitcoin's purpose and one about bitcoin's functional properties.)
"The courts" are basically a sieve (every newspaper hack learns this on his first day on the job), so you can count that one out very quickly. Manufacturers are only slightly better, and we've seen it with DigiNotar et al. That leaves the FBI/government, not exactly the strongest fort when it comes to public leaks. In that sense, Apple's marketing is right: the only person you should trust with the safety of your data is yourself.

Also, if you allow firmware to reflash its keys, then you have a mechanism that again can be subverted (as well as what you point out). I think we've seen it with games that that sort of DRM doesn't work in the long run -- it's routinely cracked, but manufacturers don't care too much as long as it allows them time-windows long enough to make bank. Making it the basis of all data-handling in the land doesn't seem particularly smart.
He's really embracing the 'selling pickaxes' model of cashing in on a boom. Even if all the companies they've promoted fail, they've still been paid.
Here is the diff:

http://cvsweb.openbsd.org/cgi-bin/cvsweb/src/usr.bin/head/he...
Erm, there is also Sound Transit, which completes the system a bit.

I wish it wasn't all bus based; Portland does much better than Seattle in this regards.
I haven't. I tried core.typed a year ago and it was still not very mature, but I'm glad it exists and I'm sure that it has advanced a long way. It's an ambitious project and I'm really glad it funded (I donated).
This might be true under the US legal system, where as I understand it each party usually pays their own costs. In a loser-pays system, particularly one with an efficient small claims procedure, the conclusion might be different.

In any case, if you're wilfully and knowingly taking on debts you can't repay and using a card like this to CYA, your bigger risk in some places might be getting arrested for criminal fraud. Good luck ever getting credit again whatever the CRAs say about you if you've also got a criminal record for a fraud-related offence.
No, the point is that we focus too much on the downside.

We should be happy that there's lower demand for blood transfusions due to improved medical techniques, but we're just lamenting the lost jobs in the industry.

Just like we should be happy that self-driving cars are going to mean more leisure time, safer streets, and lower transportation costs, but we spent a lot of time worrying about people who currently drive cars for a living. Obviously, we should care about those people, but we shouldn't let a minor loss overshadow a major gain.
. would be a weird here as well (and we had a share of issues with early online banking systems: Think "I want to pay 10 $currency, let's put 10.00 - and the bank uses the . as a delimiter for thousands, i.e. 1.000,00 / you meant 10,00).

That said, my favorite localization issues stem from CH/Switzerland. Numbers are formatted as 1'000.00 there (someone correct me), which is especially odd:

1) That's a weird decimal separator. DE uses a , and as far as I know FR uses a , as well. I _assume_ IT uses a , - so why is this a . in CH?

2) The ' really kills a lot of naive parsers and causes quite a bit of frustration in other fields (think OCR - some overly fat 1'000 might turn into a 11000 with bad luck/crappy image quality or (marginally better) lead to 1000 where means 'I think here's a character, but no clue what that might be')
You're referring to things that happened 60 or 70 years ago as a reference basis for trust, for a government who has as its President a man born 53 years ago.

There's a long list of warranted criticism to throw at the US Government, but I don't see how your examples are valid criticism of today's government. The US Government of 1950 no longer exists. Yet you're referring to it as though it does.

I guess Angela Merkel is not to be trusted because of what happened 70 years ago? Or Shinzo Abe?
Absolutely true.

I think that if you know how to use it, Haskell's type system can reduce your bug count substantially. It makes a difference, spending 30% of your time debugging as opposed to 70%. (These numbers are approximate and vary depending on the problem you're working on.) You still need to test, though. That is true. QuickCheck does a lot for that.
The Magazine Is Shutting Down
The extremely odd for-loop structure feels to me like someone was trying very hard to avoid a goto, and in the process obfuscated the flow quite a bit more. The special case of head'ing stdin is similar to the classic "loop and a half problem" (which is really only a problem if you religiously abstain from goto use.) I'd consider this a more straightforward way to do it:

FILE *f;
int i = 1;
...
if(argc < 2) {
f = stdin;
goto do_head;
}
...
while(i<argc) {
f = fopen(argv[i], "r");
/* check for failure to open */
...
do_head:
/* head'ing code goes here */
...
fclose(f);
i++;
}

That being said, OpenBSD code is still far more concise and readable than GNU; compare coreutils' head.c here:

http://code.metager.de/source/xref/gnu/coreutils/src/head.c

GNU head has a bit more functionality, but I don't think the increase in complexity - nearly 10x more lines - is proportional to that.
Some academics do work on specific problems with a known commercial application, and sometimes this research is funded by commercial entities. The primary goal of most academics isn't to produce commercial products, but in the course of research useful things can pop up. Giving patent rights to grant awardees gives them the ability and incentive to commercialize offshoots of their research. Here's an example (I'm not a biomedical guy, so please excuse the errors):

Dr. Brown researches some disease. He's not particularly trying to come up with a treatment for it, just trying to understand it better. He's in academia, so he needs to publish papers to get tenure and receive grant funding. The NIH funds his research because it's somewhat promising and because he will do a good job educating students. Suppose his group happens to discover a chemical compound that seems to be effective in treating this disease. What happens next depends on whether the university can patent this discovery.

Before the treatment can be prescribed by doctors it needs to receive FDA approval, which requires expensive clinical trials. Without patent protection, no one (neither the university or outside companies) is willing to fund the trials because they won't have exclusive rights to sell the treatment once it's approved. Dr. Brown could work on the trials himself, but that would mean neglecting his other responsibilities. No one has a sufficient financial incentive to make the next step, so the treatment never makes it to the market.
NYC will get there when they move the city to the west coast. There is something different about the west: wide open spaces, mountains, good weather, that you can't really replicate in the east.
In-page help system to better automate support
Well, Rutherford split the atom in 1917, so technically the development of the bomb could be considered incremental.
It's a shame. I visited Caracas and Isla de Margarita for about a week 10 years ago. It's a very beautiful place and the people I met were very friendly. I hope the situation improves. Would love to visit again!
Indonesian cave art: oldest hand 'stencil' yet discovered
I'm not disagreeing with you, just pointing out that if crypto is ammunition, then the actual weapon is the computer. So this could be read as the amendment forbidding the government from taking away your computers.

It would be a fabulous interpretation, although I'm somehow skeptical that we'll ever find a court endorsing it.
I fundamentally disagree -- there is a difference between incremental and revolutionary advances. They are qualitatively different types of steps.

http://adamierymenko.com/c/

Nevertheless this Bloomberg article makes a good concrete counterpoint to Thiel and Stephenson. Part of the problem is that these things are horribly difficult to quantify. How do you measure "fundamental advance?" I'm not aware of any good metric for that.

I wonder though if the real problem isn't the decline in wage parity since ~1970. It's not that innovation's stopped, but the rate at which people can afford new innovation has slowed since more and more people can't afford anything but basic necessities.
File hasher webapp with shareable validation links
Damn, that's a nice waterfall. Not "worth dying over" nice, but close to it.
AFAIK GPUs are floating-point centric, meaning you'd have to reimplement some functionality on top of FP. Plus it seems that each 'cell' can be it's own state machine, I also believe that GPUs are less fine-grained than that (you allocate clusters of units to compute a programmable shader).
I remember reading the book You Will Go to the Moon in childhood, just as Virginia Postrel, the author of the essay here, did. She is right that most people in our era were not as excited about the space program as she and I were: "The reason mid-20th-century Americans were optimistic about the future wasn’t that science-fiction writers told cool stories about space travel. Science-fiction glamour in fact worked on only a small slice of the public. (Nobody else in my kindergarten was grabbing for You Will Go to the Moon.) People believed the future would be better than the present because they believed the present was better than the past. They constantly heard stories -- not speculative, futuristic stories but news stories, fashion stories, real-estate stories, medical stories -- that reinforced this belief. They remembered epidemics and rejoiced in vaccines and wonder drugs. They looked back on crowded urban walk-ups and appreciated neat suburban homes. They recalled ironing on sweaty summer days and celebrated air conditioning and wash-and-wear fabrics. They marveled at tiny transistor radios and dreamed of going on airplane trips."

The older I get, the more I like incremental progress that leads to inventions (like this Internet doohickey that lets you and me have an interesting conversation across barriers of time and place) that hardly anyone thought of in the 1960s, and which have developed from a mixture of government research projects and private investment. I don't really care if not a lot of big-deal things happen in the next thirty years, as long as plenty of little-deal things happen like a continuation of the ongoing increases in healthy life expectancy at all ages.[1]

"Optimistic science fiction does not create a belief in technological progress. It reflects it. Stephenson and Thiel are making a big mistake when they propose a vision of the good future that dismisses the everyday pleasures of ordinary people -- that, in short, leaves out consumers. This perspective is particularly odd coming from a fiction writer and a businessman whose professional work demonstrates a keen sense of what people will buy. People are justifiably wary of grandiose plans that impose major costs on those who won’t directly reap their benefits."

Hear. Hear. Let's keep working away at making our own lives better, and our children's lives better, and as everyone does that, the whole world's lives will be better.

[1] http://www.nature.com/scientificamerican/journal/v307/n3/box...
The End of Stars
Related: Does anyone know of a good-quality place to go for discussion that doesn't center around news and links? Something akin to MetaFilter or HN in terms of standards, but not focused on aggregation. Are mailing lists/Usenet groups good for this?
You don't prevent it. That's the thing about security - there is never a such thing as 100% secure. The key is coming up with reasonable expectations and implementing policies to mitigate the risk down to an acceptable level, [EDIT]then putting measures in place to limit damage if those measures do fail[/EDIT]. If I were a third party with access to your device, I could brute force the encryption. There is nothing you can do about it - I will eventually get your password; the trick is whether it will take me a few minutes or a few decades. What's an acceptable time frame to protect the data on your personal cell phone? Do you care if I get the personal data on it 20 years from now or have to spend $2 million in computing power to get it?

Unlike me stealing your data, there are very legitimate reasons for law enforcement to have access to devices to carry out investigations. The warrant requirement is a check on abuse. If there's an issue regarding abuse of power (e.g.: bribing employees, intimidating judges, overly broad laws), it would be better for everyone to work to address the real problems than taking away means for law enforcement to investigate actual criminals.