skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> It's an unpopular opinion, but I don't think that everyone should have a roughly equal say in how things go. The average person isn't as well equipped to deal with large problems as the elite are.

To really get to the truths behind this opinion, it is important to distinguish one's political goals from the politically implemented policies in pursuit of those goals.

I fully agree with you that the average person is not well equipped to decide on policies. However, the vast majority of people in the elite aren't equipped for that either! Look at somebody like Bill Gross, for example, who was removed from PIMCO after continuously making bad investments based on his misunderstanding of basic economic facts. I wouldn't want somebody like that calling the shots in government.

Honestly, I would expect the connection between wealth and quality of policy analysis to be relatively weak. Education is certainly a confounding variable, but not all education is equal. (A good computer scientist doesn't necessarily make a good economist.) In fact, in certain policy areas such as economics, being part of the elite - which usually means being a high-level executive - is probably a negative for the quality of your policy analysis, because executives see the world from a micro-economic perspective rather than from the macro perspective that is needed in politics.

In any case - I agree that a certain level of "elitism" is probably justified when it comes to the question of policy analysis, though you really have to be very careful who you think the "elite" is in that context.

However, if you leave politics up to an elite, then the goals of politics will also shift to match the goals of that elite, which is probably not a good representation of the goals of the overall population. And therein lies the real crux, because when it comes to deciding what the political goals should be, everybody really does have the same qualification. And this is ultimately the reason why democracy is the right way to go.

The tough problem is to establish institutions that translate democratically established goals into good policy.
But there comes a class of problems which I guess need no fictional example, because we're dug up to the neck in them - coordination problems. For instance, it would be better for people to agree and stop polluting the environment, or making crappy food (I don't mean fast-food, I mean borderline-unsafe food made as cheaply as possible), or switching away from fossil fuels. But we can't do that, because anyone who tries will get quickly outcompeted in the market by anyone who defects and keep doing the wrong thing. Therefore, we're stuck in local optima instead of moving to better global ones.

There is an excellent piece by Yvain that goes into deep details of those problems[0], so I won't be repeating him here much, but the world is full of such problems, and apparent stupidity of institutions and markets are usually result of inability to coordinate.

I'm not saying to give up democracy. But we have to appreciate that it has very troubling failure modes and that they're not theoretical.

Real-life democracy tends to be extremely impotent. It has tremendous operating costs (think of all the resources wasted in a zero-sum game of political campaigning), and in the end people still can't agree on things like building infrastructure (NIMBYsm) or creating laws that benefit the population. Again, I'm not saying "ditch democracy". But there is a huge trade-off between security of decentralization and effectiveness of centralization.

There's also the case that central planning doesn't suck that much - it sucks when done for humans by humans, because central planners operate at human speed. But consider that instead of Paco setting up routes, there is a computer named PCO, tasked with collecting real-time data from all drivers and optimizing routes. PCO may alter some of instructions it sends to drivers to explore the solution space, and it will quickly figure out that doing only rights leads to less fuel used. And then it may stumble upon other optimizations, like shifting delivery times in different parts of the city depending on traffic patterns - things that are impossible to figure out by Pablo, because they require global view.

I think that central planning got a bad name because of Soviet implementation, but with modern computing, maybe we should re-evaluate its costs and benefits.

[0] - http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/07/30/meditations-on-moloch/
Hey! Which units would you prefer?

For height/weight, I'd assume meters and kg?

When you get your cholesterol measurements, do use mg/dL, mmol/L, or something else? What about blood pressure?
Tiny Catastrophes
I've been using AIDE since the early versions and it just keeps getting better and better. It's actually very usable given it's form factor. They've taken a lot of the environment's constraint into account. I wouldn't do all my android development solely from the phone, but I wouldn't mind it too much if I had to. It's a pretty solid IDE with a lot of great features. Using hacker's keyboard helps a lot because of all the special characters but most of the time I get by with the character bar they have above the keyboard. Just depends on what's being coded. I also have a dock for my Note 2 so i can use a regular keyboard, but I rarely bother. I use dropbox to sync the code and usually I'll do the heavy lifting on the computer in eclipse and then make small changes while I'm away from the computer in AIDE. Also being able to compile and run right from the phone is huge for me. It's not for everyone I'm sure but it's a great tool to have in your toolbox.
The Rise of All-Purpose Antidepressants
Uses HTTP adaptive streaming that's built into Quicktime and iOS natively. It's the same technology that MLB/NFL/NHL use to do live-streaming of games to their apps on iOS.

There is a way to get VLC to open the stream, but I haven't had to do it personally.
iOS 8.1 doulci icloud bypass Activation LockBypass iCloud Activation
Learning from the League of Legends Referral Program
Problems with the current refer-a-friend program

Reward Tier Structure

“..the average player faces a dilemma where attractive rewards like Grey Warwick and Medieval Twitch are prohibitively difficult to obtain..”

“We understand that the current refer-a-friend reward structure isn’t ideal for the average player.”

“We found that the majority of League players refer between one and five friends, and we’ve designed the refer-a-friend update to reward you for bringing those friends into the game.”

Fraudulent Behavior

“…70% of accounts with 10 or more referrals are abusing the Refer-a-Friend program.”

“…99% of accounts with 100 or more referrals are abusing the Refer-a-Friend program”

You can read more here: http://www.referralsaasquatch.com/learn-from-the-league-of-l...
Bypassing HTTP Strict Transport Security [pdf]
Thanks for the report! I'll work on Firefox speed--it's sort of an all-around problem with the Firefox experience.
SolarCity website offers commission free bonds direct to investor
I wrote a tool I called the "data file disassembler" somewhere around 15 years ago that is basically this, along w/ a user interface that allowed you to drag a selection area and define a "section" and its type.

I used this primarily for reverse-engineering proprietary formats both for personal entertainment, but also while doing work to determine when/if patents were being violated while working for a legal firm.

I had a variety of supported formats, including several microcontroller instruction sets, as I spent a lot of time disassembling ROMs. These had full support for labels etc.

This seems very similar.
Apple Announces Apple Watch SDK, Launches in November
Hello,

Ideally, there should be an ability to switch. Regarding height and weigh - its metric meters and kilograms. Not sure about others.

Thanks.
> They're worried about maintaining a democratic society, where everyone gets roughly an equal say in how things go. Highly concentrated wealth is a threat to that.

I agree inasmuch as it applies to government and media, but when it comes to entrepreneurship I could not disagree more.

Making progress means taking some big risks. It is the nature of big risks that it's difficult to tell at the outset which ones will succeed and which will fail. But the people who are probably best qualified to predict this are the people who have succeeded before.

If people can't take the spoils of previous success to invest in their next idea, we don't get SpaceX, Tesla, or Y Combinator. Would Y Combinator be better run as a government program, run democratically and accountable to the general population? I don't think it would.
You can't avoid the estate tax by gifts given before you die [1]. They are added into the estate.

[1] http://www.irs.gov/Businesses/Small-Businesses-&-Self-Employ...
cm and kg
But once they get a takedown notice they have actual knowledge that the material is infringing. If there is a fork that they know about, they do have actual knowledge. They have been doing it in the past, and if they now try to make sure they don't know about forks, that is willful blindness and they will still be found to be infringing.

512(c)(1)(a)(ii) has the so called "red flag" requirement. "n the absence of such actual knowledge, is not aware of facts or circumstances from which infringing activity is apparent"

Essentially, if they know about a fork and a reasonable person would know it is infringing, they lose their safe harbor.

Does GitHub have in house counsel? This policy is risky and doing it response to an outcry about actual pirate programs this will look horrendous if they end up in court.
Any way to export these colorful maps to a png? I desire them as a desktop wallpaper, they are wonderful.
The Mini iOS 8 Course with Swift at Bitfountain
What about kindle version ?
Medium’s CSS is actually pretty f***ing good
Airbnb in the City: From the New York State Attorney General [pdf]
Link to the repo for the lazy: https://github.com/binspector/binspector

Interesting project. Is there support for importing/exporting from a C header? Or generating file import code given a bfft file?
It is about economics. The just-good-enough wins against excellence, because it is cheaper. When excellence finally pays of the good-enough competition already was profitable for years and solved five more problems.

What was good enough in the 80s is not good enough in 2014. Our views about good enough changed. For example, security requirements are much higher today.

The question is not if Better or Worse is better. The question is what is good enough?
SeLect OPeration
MAke IMage
I see your point, totally. The title is of course designed to get views, right? Marketing does have its role in any business, so we try to bring people with the interest into the fold. Pretty hard to educate them about the commitment without them even trying to code something though, so give them the mission and the avenue, right?

Ok but yes, it is a serious problem, so much sell for something that might only produce, as you said, a 5% talent outcome. The thing is, and I'm willing to take criticism on this, we have to start somewhere! The skills gap is literally growing faster than we're producing even junior level devs in the world. In Europe (where CareerFoundry is based) the problem is literally a good few steps farther than the US even. So isn't one path to solution to try and onboard as many interested potential developers as possible?

Problems with this? Depending on the bootcamp of course, the person walking out with 5% actually knows and understands they have only 5% or they don't. If the don't they become a "problem" for the industry, they become noise. But if they know it, and are taught to perpetuate their own learning, to take steps towards the great goal of actually becoming a fully fledged and accomplished developer... and they actually understand what that means... well then the bootcamp has done a good job.

How many bootcamps are doing that? No idea. We're working on it, we're not there yet but trying. And of course we always have to get as much shallow interest in the front door to then weed through potential students and try and get the geniuses to work with us. :-)

Would love your thoughts!
Congrats as well, it's been a long road to this point. I am curious to see where this product goes, in particular who outside of startups ends up using this tech.
Dice.com Tech Salary Survey [pdf]
I'm not sure I completely understand your question, but my guess is they are blocking access to the file from github.com which is all they need to do to comply with the DMCA request. They can't do anything about people's local copies.
First Drafts of History: Earliest Extant Versions of Wikipedia Articles
What about the common libertarian viewpoint that we should limit the scope of government so that the rich guys don't have any significant political power to hijack? This comes without the slowing of economic growth that would be caused by higher taxes on capital.
Where I work we say "y'all". It's a useful word and I like it.
diode for android does everyhing AB does. hyperbole.
I came here to say exactly the same. Maybe you could add a radio button, or better, try to get geographical information from the IP and display the units accordingly (but don't forget about the other two countries that still use the imperial system, the USA aren't yet alone ;) ).

In any case I'm glad that I'm at relatively low risk despite being overweight (but a little less each day). I guess that low blood pressure and zero smoking are that good.

My caffeine intake is also zero (Ok, I think that cocoa powder has some, so not literal zero). I wonder if that has any effect on my risk, maybe something indirect through blood pressure.
Put a Propeller on It: The Golden Age of Tinkering
The developer said that there is aspects of RES that the admins don't want to endorse
Unfortunately, until we figure out an easy way to convert between unit systems, our only recourse is to complain on hacker news.
> The problem with differentiating between the "good investor" and the "lavish lifestyle guy" is that the good investor is actually the one that you (rather, Piketty) need to be most worried about.

Disagree. The good investor not only puts capital to work and creates wealth for others, he is also taking money out of the system. Since he is not consuming, the net effect of his increased capital hoard is to decrease prices across the board for everyone else. This can change once he decides to spend, but then he will pay consumption taxes like the others.
>I'm glad Microsoft is doing what law enforcement seems incapable of doing.

Yeah! why make our seized domains go to waste redirecting to a landing page like the FBI when we could make them work for us while ruining some company's user experience like Microsoft did!! Yeah!

law enforcement & microsoft are equally capable of feeding judges bullshit in order to put their hands where they don't belong and destroy fragile systems.
If you're like most, it usually comes down to recommendations from friends or colleagues, but would you use a service to find the right design firm?

Design Square matches your projects with the best suited design firms and advertising agencies for the job.
Is there anything like this that uses ABSI or some other BMI alternative?
Apple Releases OS X Yosemite for Free
It's pretty amusing that you're complaining about the units (and wanting non-American units is fair) but don't actually know what units you want.
Paper: High-speed quantum networking by ship
Given that europeans consist of up to 5% or more Neanderthal genetic stock, it's increasingly untenable to look at the Neanderthal as some sort of "other".

They is us.
Do you see this system of the elite ruling as an ideal that will never be reached (a la Plato's Republic) or as a practical system? Because in the latter case, you've got an intractable problem on your hands.

The problem is a basic political systems one: at some point, you need the consent of the governed. There are no stable systems on the record where a majority of those governed dislike the leadership. Either the oppressed are a minority (colonial Europe, slavery in the US) or the gov'ts are short-lived and unstable (on an order of 50-100 years, in the short term these can work). The most stable regimes that don't have majority support are ones that suppress free speech, which is hard to argue is operating "in everybody's best interest".

So, if you want a stable oligarchy that preserves some free speech, you need a group of "elites" that the whole society agrees is fit to lead them. I don't think the average voter believes themselves to be in the best position to run the country -- that's exactly why they vote for somebody else to do it.

But if you take voting out of the equation, you're trying to build a system where you have an elite that has support of the majority, without consulting the majority. At best, you have a system of guesswork that results in something similar to democracy (because the oligarchy are people the majority supports anyway). At worst, you have an unstable government.
Exactly. It doesn't make sense to fight politicians, because they pretty much have no agency. They are public faces to the decisions made inside the system that is both influenced from outside (lobbying, et al.) as well as having its own power dynamic. If you're a honest, well-meaning, incorruptible politician, you'll get filtered out from the system at early stages. No one is going to let you take an important seat if you're uncontrollable.
These numbers seem slightly off, or the way they are presented is a bit confusing:

"Your lifetime risk of heart disease is 56% as of today. You can reduce that to 38% if you ... That would make your risk about 34% lower. Not too shabby!"
Seems like an interesting product that we might start using for our incubated portfolio companies. Anyone have experience with it?
Its magical.
Yes, precisely. And I don't think this can happen without decriminalization or legalization of drug use.
All I can say is big thank you :-)
Tax evasion is a crime that's much more throughly punished than lying to sense agents or misreporting wealth. That's for obvious reasons, because tax evasion actually takes money from the hands of the government, while the later actions (that are not even consistently considered crimes) just hurt some abstract concept of data gathering, that could lead to better policies in the future, or not - nobody can be sure - for reasons that very few people can understand.

Add to that that the few people in power that do understand how data can improve policies normally have an idea what kind of improvement they'll get, and don't like it (they are in power, if they liked it, they'd already do it). While tax evasion is understood by everybody and weaken they power right now, in visible ways.
> Or do you think the state is a more efficient investor of capital?

Absolutely! The number of inventions that was created by government investments absolutely dwarfs the number of privately funded inventions. Internet, GPS, cancer research, nuclear power.. I've never heard a logical explanation to why companies should be more efficient than states. Everyone just seem to take it as a given because "everyone knows" that governments are buerucratic and inefficient.
Based on your own comments here, it sounds like the reporting is entirely accurate. You're attempting to justify why you're tracking your users, but you're still tracking them.

You've highlighted many of the hard problems in this space: how do you achieve anonymity and unlinkability while doing things like IP hiding, spam filtering, and relevance matching? The issue is that you haven't solved the problems, and are instead suggesting you should get a pass because the problems are hard. It seems simple to me: if you haven't designed something that gives you truly unlinkable anonymity, don't claim to provide it. If you have to track your users to make your app work, don't claim not to track your users.

There are projects like Tor that are approaching these types of problems seriously, but apps like Whisper or Secret end up poisoning the well and confusing users. There's a huge difference between "can't" track and "won't" track. Right now you're claiming "can't," but it sounds like you're squarely in the "won't" category of having your servers "avert their eyes." I think this understandably makes people uneasy, particularly given the data mining direction it sounds like the company is headed.
> Most importantly, the only way that a wealth tax is going to do what Piketty wants is if the rate is higher than the typical rate of return on capital.

Note that one important reason why Piketty wants a wealth tax is that this would lead to much higher quality data on the wealth distribution (I haven't read the book, but he says so very clearly in his TED talk).

> But if it's higher then the economic incentives it creates are catastrophic.

Frankly, this sounds much too alarmist. First of all, the talk is always about a progressive wealth tax in the first place. That is, few people would be affected by the highest tier.

Second, if you think about the steady state, it's clear that wealth up to the level of the highest tier of taxation wouldn't be accumulated in the first place. [0] Yes, people would try to evade taxes, but they are already doing this today. [1] More likely, this would create incentives for donations.

As a final thought, the idea of using a VAT to finance a basic income is nice, but it doesn't help against wealth inequality, because poor people generally spend a much higher fraction of their disposable income on stuff on which VAT is paid.

[0] My intuition for this comes from income taxes: During the time when highest marginal rates were much higher than today, executives didn't bother bargaining for the ridiculously high salaries that they get today, and so few people really paid those highest rates.

[1] And if you're worried about people renouncing citizenship: I think we should grow a pair and get serious about exit taxes.
So just out of curiosity, do you see yourself in the "have a say" group or the "do not have a say" group?
"A third person is mostly consuming, spending a lot of money on things like a yacht and plane. While it’s true that the wealth of all three people is contributing to inequality, I would argue that the first two are delivering more value to society than the third."

Really? I always considered this kind of spending a good thing for society.
Other businesses and people get that money, they create technology, materials and processes that would likely not exist otherwise, there's still tax being paid along the way and we get a bit of cultural heritage as a bonus (castles, boats, planes, cars, the Sistine Chapel, a lot of paintings - all of which exists only because some rich man decided he wanted it).

Taxing luxury is a mistake and a potential slippery slope IMO. IIRC, the US tried it in the past with disappointing results.
Does this look like a "bag of crap"?

http://www.google.com/nexus/new/images/nexus9/N9-keyboardlow...
So if I read this correctly, you track every users IP address and geolocate it?
from what i understood they have knowledge of the fork, but they don't have knowledge if the fork also contains copyrighted material -- so, if i fork x and i remove all the supposedly copyright stuff, my fork should be ok.
Machine Data Intelligence – an update on our journey
There isn't any support for importing from a C header. In order to get it right you would need a decent C parser as well as details about the compile-time environment (e.g, char being (un)signed.) At this point it's probably faster to code up the format grammar manually.

Generating import code given a bfft is a thought I had considered. One of the features I would like to implement is to separate the parse tree generator from the analyzer and expose an analyzer API. Applications would be able to use the Binspector core as a library, then, and read file contents directly by providing their own bffts and hooking the API to populate their own internals.

edit: spelling.