skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"Technologic/scientific achievements don't hold any intrinsic meaning. It's like saying you make art for art's sake instead of for an audience. That's the same as saying there's no point to your work."

I'm not sure I follow your logic from sentence A to sentence C here. I think I get what you're saying, but you kind of lose me on the point about "That's the same as saying there's no point to your work." Are you suggesting I've made a statement whose logical outcome is "There's no point to your work?"

"You're saying humans are going to stop being competitive."

That's not really what I said. I said humans in Huxley's world are going to stop trying. Trying, full stop. We can fill in the blank however we wish: trying to explore; trying to create; trying to question; trying to answer; trying to figure out; trying to obtain; trying to..., etc. Sure, I guess you could fit "compete" in there, but competition was not the crux of my point.

"And if we're relieved of the nagging sense that we have to achieve something, you could consider that a cure."

It's not about a "nagging sense that we have to achieve something." It's about a nagging sense that we can improve our lot beyond its current state, whatever that state happens to be. Maybe we can and maybe we can't. But we try, and over time, we usually do. It's not that the trying holds any intrinsic meaning -- and you'll notice that I've been very careful to avoid words like "meaning," which I find squishy and soft for arguments like these. Rather, it's that trying has a chance at improving our circumstances in some measurable way.

Even if you remove "meaning" from the act of trying, you can still place a value on trying. That value, very simply put, is the expected value of whatever you're trying to do/build/make/learn/achieve, plus any ancillary achievements/learnings/accomplishments/etc. along the way. (Recognizing, of course, that progress is not teleological or deterministic!)

Let's take this a step further, though. Let's play with the assumption that a life of care-free leisure is perfectly fine, if not exemplary. Ok. Then isn't a life of superior leisure and more entertainment even better? The citizens of Huxley's world -- at least the privileged Alphas -- have it pretty good, from a purely hedonic standpoint. But certainly they could have it even better. They never will, because they've lost their ability to wonder what "better" might be. That wonderment, even absent any intrinsic value, is still a very valuable thing to have lost.

Even if we evaluate Brave New World's society from a purely utilitarian standpoint, we conclude that society can do better. For example: a society based on pure leisure and entertainment, just as in BNW, but in which there are no subordinate/slave classes. That would be an improvement, I'd think.
Patient in New York City Tests Positive for Ebola
I left Italy because I was looking at a future in which I would have been one of those 5 young devs that got hired instead of someone like your dad.

I am still young and am always relocating to find better projects and conditions, and its been working for me in this past 5 years. But now I know that there is also a lot of companies out there that are willing to hire people from across the globe and let them work remotely.

Those jobs are not easy to find, and are a small minority in the job market, but they are a beacon of hope for really good devs for which relocating is not an option. You (royal you ... which means potentially your dad) will generally get good money but might have to set up your own taxes, insurances and benefits, so it's not as hassle free as just being a normal employee.

Relocation, IMO, is always an option. Just speaking English is enough ... and English is not hard.
What's something really cool you could do with this?
I not able to come up with politer wording yet I'm downvoted. Total discrimination.
European Parliament report was issued in 2001. The difference back then was that everyone in the general population considered you a nutcase if you described it to them. These days, only perhaps 60% of people consider you a nutcase.
> ... make reference to having to comply with First Amendment rights, civil liberties oversight, court orders, etc.

I just wish they did more actual complying, and less lip service to compliance. I especially wish they'd think a bit about the spirit, not just the letter.
I wonder how hard it would be implement automatic face masking for these videos, to increase the viewer's emotional distance from what they're exposed to.
Microsoft launches lock screen app for Android
I came to a very different conclusion from the data than the authors. The difference in the numbers was not substantively different (an absolute difference of about 1%) and much, much lower than I would have expected. The difference could easily be explained by other differences between the two founders other than sex and perhaps this could be pointed as evidence that once we removed those factors this small difference would evaporate entirely.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8501530
Maybe he should make it look a bit more professional and advertise his actual skills. It looks a bit too psychadelic as it is now.
What interests me about these discussions is that the common perception seems to be that women face a level of harassment hugely disproportionate to that experienced by men, however studies don't show such a large gap.

There was a recent study by Pew[1] that shows the differing levels of harassment faced by men and women in various communities. Unsurprisingly, online gaming was skewed massively towards being more welcoming to men.

Unfortunately since the actual survey questions don't seem to be available, there's not too much in the way of insight you can make from the Pew poll.

There's also this decidedly non-scientific study of Twitter[2] which shows male celebrities receive more "abuse" on Twitter than female celebrities, where "abuse" means "something tweeted @ them with a swear word in it."

All of this, non-scientific as it is, makes me wonder if the common perception about women having it so much worse online is actually true. I will note, however, that anecdotally women clearly have it worse in terms of targeted sexual harassment.

-

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/2014/10/22/online-harassment/

[2] http://www.demos.co.uk/press_releases/demosmalecelebritiesre...
There are watermarks on the images.
That's an interesting point. He's been working for some months on his own project, that is an app for managing SMEs' salesforce. He has some experience on the enterprise so he really understands the problem.

The thing is that he is actually 3 steps from being on the curb (I live alone and am economically independent)
"I just love to work" - Betty White.

Love this article. Be realistic. Recognize patterns. Love what do you do. Inspiring.
The original story tries to implicate Google in opening their servers for "full take" data feed.

XKeyscore was a program to analyse data siphoned from wiretaps. This is what caused that infamous ppt slide "SSL Removed Here ;-)" which, among other reasons, caused Google to start encrypting all of the inter-data center links.
Microsoft EU warns: If you have ties to the US, Feds can get your data
I thought Robert Caro would belong on this list. He amazes me, having written over the course of five decades two seminal books, both of which earned Pulitzer prizes. But he's "only" 79.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Robert_Caro
Hence why I think Snowden is somewhat stand-offish around him. Assange seeks acceptance and validation in a lot of the duo-presentations I've seen (especially in the Mega sponsored New Zealand one, where Snowden outright disagreed with him on a few points), but Snowden knows that he appears as a crackpot. A crackpot with SOME good ideals and points, but are ultimately poisoned by his high-level of lunacy appearance.

EDIT: It seems some people don't agree with me.

EDIT2: And the responder below has also been downvoted. Not liking this attitude, if you disagree with something it doesn't mean you should downvote. :\
Or maybe just charge more for the 2nd and later license seats. That may make it even easier to get business to go all-in.

There really should be a one-man shop deep price break. I've used the iOS Pro edition for years since I got grandfathered in for my small iOS app but I don't come anywhere near to breaking even with that so I can't consider adding on Android at full price. I've love to but since I have Pro iOS I can't even add on non-Pro Android licenses either. My little app is a labor of love type of thing with a small, niche user base, not something that will ever cover my costs yet I don't want to give up VS and all that muscle memory and familiarity, etc... I can take a little loss each year for side projects but I can't lose $1800/yr.
> What are they [Google] suppose to do?

Not have a business model predicated on datamining users' information, and build their systems in such a way that they are unable to collect troves of unnecessary information.

But the only way we'll ever see any change is through users/developers: Detach yourself from such businesses. Don't build your dream on top of their corrupted platform. And if you must use some of their services for pragmatic reasons, consider them hostile governmental entities and thoroughly understand what you are giving away to be stored indefinitely.

Even if we demolished the NSA and put the traitors' heads on pikes, it would only be a matter of time until insurance companies robustly created similar chilling effects: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7928484
the attempts by Assange, and people like Yasha Levine, to tie Google into the military industrial complex are weak sauce

The historical, current and future involvement of senior Google executives in US foreign policy, their self-description and in some cases their personal identification as middle-east focused was, I felt, well illustrated in the article. The DARPA point is tangential.
But what to say when they ask your current salary?
There was a post responding to yours which claimed it was 'incontrovertible truth' that Zoe Quinn got favourable coverage from a Kotaku writer she was in a personal relationship with. This is false.

It's now deleted, but I wanted to set the record straight anyways. These kinds of baseless rumours are really annoying because the misinformation is repeated over and over and over again.

"On March 31, Nathan published the only Kotaku article he's written involving Zoe Quinn. It was about Game Jam, a failed reality show that Zoe and other developers were upset about being on. At the time, Nathan and Zoe were professional acquaintances. He quoted blog posts written by Zoe and others involved in the show. Shortly after that, in early April, Nathan and Zoe began a romantic relationship. He has not written about her since. Nathan never reviewed Zoe Quinn's game Depression Quest, let alone gave it a favorable review."

http://kotaku.com/in-recent-days-ive-been-asked-several-time...
Is this a lot? I've probably hat to press my "delete" and "report spam" buttons 10-20x this week due solely to "I need a Scala ubermenschen".

So while there seems to be a statistically significant gap between men and women, the problem in this case hardly seems clinically significant. 36 over 5 years is barely a little over 1 per 2 months.
All of those things are logical and make sense, but are unproven. Politicians are notoriously risk adverse when it comes to those kinds of risks.
Yeah, these kind of jobs are hard to find.
Well, he is actually willing to relocate and he speaks English, so let's hope that works out
I didn't say it was typical, what does that have to do with anything. It seems like you are trying very hard to avoid reading my words and instead read what you wish I said.

Yes, it is a problem with the web. The culture of web design is part of the web. This is why we need a replacement for the use case that the web was originally designed for but no longer fills.
I think it was more the fact that he got married and had two child than the pay
Yup, 100%. I just found out my current boss is 47, I would have said he was late 30s.
He sounds a little like the former president of the company I work for (President is higher than CEO over here).

He was extremely hardworking, wise and smart, he knew the business in and out, but he was pretty much set in his ways and did not delegate, and was hampering the company's growth (many of this kind of people try to keep their company manageable by themselves).

He ended up being overthrown by a brilliantly executed palace coup (by a sociopath, but I digress), but he would have stayed until his death if left to his own decision.

Actually, for some of the most driven workaholics, being retired is kind of a death sentence, it really does shorten their lives (most, being old, don't adapt to change well).

My father is still young, but I'm betting he's going to do the same (he is the head of a law firm), and I'm glad not to have followed his career, he's going to cast a shadow over his potential successors for decades.
Doctor Recently Back from Africa Tests Positive for Ebola
When your entire job is managing other people's information, the terms on which you let potentially hostile third parties access that data is a huge deal.

So what exactly is your problem with the DARPA point? It is perfectly legitimate to complain that the same political institutions advocating the dismantlement of civic privacy are funding consumer-focused tech in California. Or that Schmidt might harbor political/social aspirations that are leading him at best into a sort of passive acquiescence in activities Assange sees as socially destructive.

All you seem to be saying is that you consider these sorts of connections "normal" and thus not subject to reasonable critique.
Seems kind of unrealistic, at least given the cost of living in the Bay Area. Even if you're able to put away, say $1000 a month for 10 years, for a family of four, that's about two years of very frugal living expenses. Oh, and you have to fund the business too. Congratulations to you that you managed to do it though!
sure, there's 2 sides, the maths and the programming/systems

________

the math is mostly the same math that physics and EE majors do for first 2 years, plus probability/stats:

https://www.seas.harvard.edu/courses/cs281/#schedule

http://www.zipfianacademy.com/blog/post/46864003608/a-practi...

http://fastml.com/math-for-machine-learning/

________

the general purpose programming languages mostly used are python, C++, java, and the statistical languages include R, matlab.

there's lots of good threads at /r/machineLearning, including

http://www.reddit.com/r/MachineLearning/comments/2i68f0/tack...

http://www.reddit.com/r/compsci/comments/2jw14w/which_fields...

also some books for people who haven't the rigorous math background yet are Intro Statistical Learning (James et al), the ones by Peter Flach, Steven Marsland, and Witten/Franke:

http://www.amazon.com/Data-Mining-Practical-Techniques-Manag...

http://www.amazon.com/Machine-Learning-Algorithmic-Perspecti...
Introducing Skybox for Good
That... makes me very sad. I remember the old ESR. Knew that I hadn't heard of him in a long time, did not know he went a bit nutty...
I have seen some very shallow attempts to paint this as truth on Youtube. Not sure who the sponsoring organization was for that one, but you can probably safely assume it's an western-based acronym. Anyway, if you watch the full event it's clear that the entire thing was out of context. The fact is, both characters were somewhat standoffish around Mr. Dotcom and with good reason. I am not sure how, when discussing such important matters as the political direction society is taking with regards to its economic, technological development and the preservation of fundamental human rights within that context, how anyone's appearance is remotely relevant.
I don't want to retire. After you retire, there's only one big event left. - Steve Spurrier (I think, it's from memory)
Seconding that this is a great publication.

A typical quarterly issue can contain excerpts from the Office Space screenplay to Schopenhauer.
> But those others haven't managed to convince too many that hey are "not Evil" or some like that bullshit.

The "American Hospital Association" probably has very few people who think it is evil.
Been in the same position where I've read something, interpreted it to gain a particular impression, and then not had the same impression after re-reading. It happens!
I just sent him the link to sign up :)
The Golden Arches Theory (even before it was disproven by the Russia-Georgia war of 2008) -- and similar theories like the "democracies don't fight wars against each other" theory -- have always been silly things that take rely on people not understanding math. You've got a feature that (at the time the theory is articulated) is historically fairly recent and that, when you take the number of pairs of countries that have been in wars that have occurred in any given time frame and the total number of pairs of country that have existed in the same time frame, and the total number of pairs of country that share the feature in question, where the expected value of number of wars between countries sharing the trait that is supposed to protect against war would be closer to zero than one if wars were randomly distributed and the feature had no effect, and then the theory uses the (utterly unsurprising) fact that the actual number of wars between countries sharing the trait is zero as the whole basis for an argument that sharing the trait prevents war.
Show HN: Storing my variables online (variabl.co)
Hi where is Monthly HN thread of freelancers?
Can you please share?
Thankfully Dotcom has realised his poisonous "brand", and has stepped back from the limelight (that is, until extradition is pushed again).
I think girls in Tech ARE funny
Thanks and thanks. More validation that Bing's CPC is going up while Google's is going down. It will be interesting to see where they meet.
The Future of Everything
Yeap, he runs a free software association but he doesn't usual code on GitHub
No, I think you're misunderstanding my intent. I'm just saying basic html and hyperlinking still works perfectly fine, and most people read the web as hypertext in almost exactly the same way they always have. The original use case still exists and it still works.
That comic is based on Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves To Death. It originally appeared at...

http://www.recombinantrecords.net/docs/2009-05-Amusing-Ourse...

...but was apparently taken down due at the copyright holders' request. More on the book:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusing_Ourselves_to_Death
The german states have their own different data privacy laws, e.g. see http://byds.juris.de/byds/009_1.1_DSG_BY_1993_rahmen.html for Bavaria.

Those regulate how personal data has to be handled within the state and communal administrations. Those regulations concern private businesses in so far as administrative tasks are delegated to the corporate sector.
Thank you for posting this, so the lawsuit-happy folks of HN will realize they, once again, have no legal leg to stand on.
If the main purpose of this system is to allow small business owners to register their businesses, I just can't imagine that it would be worth anyone's time to either make an app for it or make a mobile web UI. It's something that some people use once and most people use never.
Amazon loses $170M on flopping phone, undermining results
Sam Schillace, creator of GDocs and SVP of Eng at Box, is doing an AMA
From a business perspective, you want to look at these as rates against revenue, not just bulk sums for reasons you pointed out.

Normalized for dollar spend per $1000 in revenue (2012), the % spend on lobbying is:

HP 232%

Facebook 75.6%

Northrop G 69.4%

Yahoo 55.1%

Google 36.3%

Lockheed Martin 32.4%

Boeing 19.1%

Oracle 18.1%

Microsoft 10.9%

IBM 4.6%

Ideally you would want to normalize by revenue from government contracts (like in HP's case), but there isn't really a story to follow here because different companies spend different percentages of their revenue on lobbying.
> In fact the worst thing you can say about those DARPA grants is that they are haphazardly doled out for some real stupid projects.

There have been protests and boycotts against DARPA funding even back when it was ARPA. See http://web.eecs.umich.edu/~kuipers/opinions/no-military-fund... . This was especially an issue because "[t]he Mansfield Amendment of 1973 expressly limited appropriations for defense research through ARPA, which is largely independent of the Military Services, to projects with direct military application." You can see some of the effects at http://books.google.com/books?id=nUJdAAAAQBAJ&pg=PT264&lpg=P... , where project had to have a military justification.

Perhaps you can tell me this - why is there so much funding through DARPA and not NSF, NIH, and other non-military sources? Steve Blank's "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" discusses some of the long ties between Silicon Valley and the military. Do you call that a 'grand conspiracy'? Whatever it is, Assange's statement seem to be in line with at least part of DARPA documented history.
It is unfortunate that so much effort in this thread is being put into suggesting that anyone who disagrees with Assange must be a tool of the government or Google. We must not allow ourselves to fall prey to the military intelligence complex and actually think critically.

But I suppose when you agree with the premise then it's not actually propaganda...
He should start a business, it's easier than ever:

www.ProjectAmericanDream.com

Seriously, it could change his life in a major way.
That last claim is a bit rich: as center of hierarchical monotheism during an expansionist era they sure did a good job of sponsoring the destruction of the Meso-American cultures - the fact they're now accepting donations to share digital copies of some of the stuff they secreted does not really let them pass the buck.
Actually, all of the questions are available in the complete report, starting on page 53. [1]

[1] http://www.pewinternet.org/files/2014/10/PI_OnlineHarassment...
It's stupid that you are being down-voted but I agree profusely.

Google might stand for a better way of doing things (from what we had before) but at the end of the day it is a global and impersonal corporation with thousands of employees.

What our governments must due is keep a close eye on them. What we must do is compete with them and do everything in our power to beat them to market or circumvent their walled garden. If they go down in the process then too bad, we will take all their engineers - the real value of Google.

I would expect any startup and government to approach a huge conglomerate like Google, Apple, or Microsoft without fear and with much integrity.
This back and forth reiterates why I like BNW so much more. For some people it is just simply not a dystopia, yet for others it seems so much worse than Airstrip One because at least in 1984 there is still ambition and motivation, albeit aggressively quashed, but with a fundamental inability of the party to just violently stop everyone from trying.
The doctor should have known better than to go to a bowling alley soon after he returned. Whether or not he was contagious now they have to perform contact tracing and disinfect the place.
Every f*ing video on Youtube by a woman has that one jackass who posts "make me a sandwich" complemented with 10-100 upvotes.
HN too. :)

Go stand up and walk around. Stretch. It's good for you.
Investments by Amazon Piling Up, as Losses
What…?

Blowing the whistle on illegal behaviour is generally not considered unethical. The relationship to the other person or organisation doesn’t really matter.
Is it just me or does this seem really good? Im not a econ buff but those percentages are higher than I would have expected.
I think he means median salary for everyone in the area, not developers.
Correct, attr() for use with anything than the content property is unsupported by most browsers.

(https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/CSS/attr)