skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
when I startup company I was at years ago started failing and laying people off, someone proposed unionizing to prevent it. In the serious discussions that followed, many reasons came out. I don't agree with them all, but these were floated by people at that time:

1. Unions are about more than simply the jobs 'n' wages. There's lots of favoritism, a whole new layer of politics beyond the question of "who works enough to earn their paycheck".

2. There was insufficient inertia. A chicken and egg problem. No one was used to unions and no one knew exactly what to do or how to determine if it was being done properly.

3. Some people were uncomfortable having a more exact spotlight shone on their work. In more physical, less individualized jobs like plumbing, pipe-fitting, etc., people are more interchangeable and less mysterious. Programmers at this company preferred to endure the risk of layoff rather than have their art/handiwork/craftwork get recast as something that another individual could do just as well.

4. At least in the startup we were in, failure was more of an anticipated outcome than other professions. Unlike a tradesman, most of us didn't invest our whole lives in a set of skills with a known or "background" level of demand. iow, many of us just said "fuck it" and went to a new startup or a new white collar job.

5. Elitism: At least some people viewed unions as something "lower-class" people have to do to earn their wages. Some people at this company felt they were of high class and didn't need "lower" themselves by unionized. (yes the cognitive dissonance here is strong).

Personally, I still don't know the answer, but it can only help us to give these objections some thought from time to time in considering the next several decades of our trade.
re this : "if you write about a topic in some fairly durable and public form, you'll find you worry much more about getting things right than most people would in a casual conversation."

i wonder what the bar here is - certainly more than blog posts / self published websites as those are fairly close to casual conversation imho.

glad to see pg picking up the pace on the writing!
There have been a ton of advancements in FPGA's and MIPS cores since 2002, and there are quite a few R3000 (MIPS I) cores available:

http://opencores.org/project,ion

http://opencores.org/project,plasma

And there's more info on the Red Star R3000 CPU (the linked PDF) here:

http://brej.org/red_star/
Contrary to popular belief, while it is difficult, it is possible in certain situations to have student loans forgiven, canceled, or discharged.

https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellati...

Edit:https://studentaid.ed.gov/repay-loans/forgiveness-cancellati...
> He's lucky

I'm not sure about that. I don't know the details; but I strongly suspect that while Shrem very likely knew he was laundering 'illegal' money (at least, I think he would have done it whether he knew or not), he was not ripping people off on purpose.

Personally, I find it hard to feel too bad for Shrem; since he was sloppy and loud.. and kind of just had it coming. That being said, I don't think he did anything morally wrong w/r/t what is he is being convicted of.

This is more a case of a bad law and a stupid person than a bad person. In a more reasonable world where people are legally allowed to enter into mutual, private contracts without a nanny state policing people's morals.. what Shrem did could not even be considered a crime.

His fault? sure. Stupid of him? Sure.. but laundering money for drug dealers is not morally reprehensible in its own right (unless they are violent drug dealers); it's just dumb to do in an obvious way with thousands of people watching you (and not even charging a ridiculous mark up!)
Zmq.rs: A native implementation of ØMQ in Rust
I am noticing a trend in Paul's essays. The last two were about changing paradigms. The first was about how a second read of a book leads to a different understanding, and this essay is about not letting your previous beliefs close your mind about things that can change.

I like though how he circles back to two fundamentals. One, human nature doesn't really change, and Two, betting on people is a better indicator of the future than betting on ideas.

Probably the biggest mistake people make is looking for confirming evidence instead of using evidence to determine the relative likelihood of competing hypotheses.

Even a large body of confirming evidence doesn't prove anything because that same evidence could be consistent with other hypotheses you never considered. You need to evaluate the diagnosticity of that evidence. (i.e. a patients high fever has almost no diagnostic value in determining what is wrong, because so many illnesses are consistent with that evidence.

Whereas, one shred of evidence can disprove a hypothesis completely. Which is why good doctors rule out things to identify the most likely problem.

These ideas PG is talking about are, IMO, some of the most important things for founders to understand.

Don't look to confirm your theories, look to disprove them. Don't accept lore, challenge everything. Most importantly though, always evaluate competing hypothesis to prevent you from just trying to confirm what you are looking for.
As an 80's anime kid, I remember when I first saw Castles in the Sky and My Neighbor Toro Toro. It left lasting impressions on my world views of flying robots and bus-shaped giant cats.

But Princess Mononoke straight out floored me. The surprising heaviness and violence felt like they backdoored a complex film for adults. In Japan it was the highest grossing film of ALL TIME until Titanic came along.

My growing years have been enriched beyond measure by the Ghibli/Miyazaki films. May my curiosity and joy of trekking hidden paths be the legacy of Studio Ghibli.
“I work at Sony Pictures. This is what it was like after we got hacked.”
Or for Standard Chartered, ING, Credit Suisse, RBS, Llyods Banking Group and Barclays?
This whole "north korean hackers" story is a less credible scenario than the one in Wag the Dog but they make up in perseverance what they lack in intellect .
>By your same reasoning, the advent of air travel made laundering cash easier.

That's true, though. Law enforcement agencies around the world had to account for plane flights as a potential way to trade illicit substances and gains from those substances. They had to hire experts in satellites and radar systems to track air vehicles carrying contraband when necessary.

And the same is true of cryptocurrencies. Law enforcement has to quickly adapt to the new medium and overcome extra hurdles.

I'm not discounting cryptocurrencies or air travel at all, I'm just saying that technological inventions often create many new intended and unintended externalities for all sorts of entities.
Updating one's beliefs to get more accurate priors is something we should all strive to do. There is no such thing as having two beliefs of equal weight that contradict each other - that's an illusion created by either applying a different definitions to each belief, or a refusal to admit that you believe one more than the other.

...

> "The winds of change originate in the unconscious minds of domain experts."

I would also add that domain expertise is when one's internal model / map matches the territory. When this happens, one's intuition is accurate and one can notice patterns that other people can't, or one can make predictions that turn out to be right.
By the time you've completed a PhD you aren't 16-24. Roughly speaking, Bachelor degree will take 3 years, PhD will take at least 4, so you'll be at least 25.

That's also 90% from a relatively reputable university - http://www.birmingham.ac.uk/International/impact/global-rank... claims top 100 in the world.

The University of Nevada in comparison is apparently the 113th best college in the US for English: http://colleges.usnews.rankingsandreviews.com/best-colleges/... - so much further down the rankings.
What is the best comment in a source code that you have ever encountered?
You don't know that for sure. India's Mar's mission only cost a fraction of what it would cost NASA. In fact, it cost about as much as a Hollywood movie.

http://money.cnn.com/2014/09/25/news/india-mars-cost/

India definitely wants to grow its economy. Selling expensive drugs to the US and Europe couldn't hurt. Look at China, for example. They built 10,000 miles of high-speed rail for about 3x what the few hundred miles of HSR will cost in California. They built a maglev train for $1.2 billion. This couldn't be done for nearly the same price as the US.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shanghai_Maglev_Train

India is where most generic drugs are made. India is the biggest supplier of generic drugs to the US.

http://blogs.wsj.com/corporate-intelligence/2014/05/14/why-m...

Why not move into a more profitable business?
It is ingrained in my head that the patient's privacy is of utmost importance (second only to the actual care I'm providing).

Having a camera in the room just runs counter to that idea, and makes me uncomfortable.
"isn't standards compliant" how?
For something more like encrypted anonymous email (that keeps sender and receiver location hidden), there's: http://voluntary.net/bitpost/
This assumes you can only hold beliefs that are adjacent to your current beliefs (i.e. the graph of your beliefs over time must be continuous). I disagree with that assumption.

You can explore ideas that you don't hold, and these can be quite varied from your current beliefs. Once you find an idea that you put more confidence into that your current beliefs, then that idea becomes your belief.

The local optimum from high-climbing doesn't constrain you in a world where your beliefs can teleport from one hill to another.
Strangely reminds me of machine learning:

1. We have some initial beliefs
2. We use it to make decisions
3. We receive some new data
4. Given the new data, we confirm/change the beliefs
5. We can make different decisions
6. Go to 3.

The initial beliefs may or not be true, the key to get as much accurate data as fast as possible.

A better algorithm would be to ask other systems beliefs and compare it to ours too (eg: neuronal network).
What if they anesthetics simply paralysed you, rendering you unable to respond to pain, while temporarily interfering with your ability to form new memories?

The drug Versed is supposed to do this. For example patient complaints see http://versedbusters.blogspot.com/ and the comments on that page.
Partender Startup Vignette – 500 Startups Liquor Inventory Company
Ask HN: Starting out as a programmer in the UK
Hello all,

Long time lurker here - HN is a fantastic community. Thank you all!

Background: I have a bachelor's degree in Physics from a prestigious university in the UK. My work history (internships and current position) has primarily been geared towards finding employment in the more traditional careers - finance and so forth. It seems to me that the UK is a difficult place to come of age in nowadays - housing costs in particular are astronomical - at times I have felt that my hand is forced if I wish to ever provide myself and my family with a decent standard of living.

I would like to change direction and pursue a programming career. As many here can hopefully relate with I've spent my youth tinkering with computers and producing the odd tool here and there to deal with personal needs. I am increasingly starting to realise that in order to succeed one must find a job that they are truly passionate about - and also to be surrounded by colleagues who are similarly minded.

My question to you all is how I could go about achieving such a transition. US centric advice can only go so far, unfortunately.

My focus at present is on finding employment that will allow me enough flexibility / free time to contribute to open source projects in my downtime.

The question then - how does a beginner pursue a career in programming? Are there companies still willing to train new starters, or is the best approach to produce a solid portfolio of OSS projects/contributions?

Many thanks for any advice.
An unhedged call option is something the actor knows is risky. Bad code may seem perfectly safe at the time.
If you worked with the smack dealers, set up a space explicitly designed for drug transactions, and then took a cut of the profits then that would be a better analogy, and you'd definitely be guilty of criminal conspiracy.
There are concerns with using time() as a seed other than security. Besides, consider what you are typically trying to express: initialize my PRNG with a random seed. Almost never are you trying to express: initialize my PRNG so that all runs in the same second will behave identically.
>We just got lucky; we're passionate about something that the owning class happens to currently consider fashionable. Enjoy it while it lasts

I imagine programming and related fields (networking, system administration and integration, other IT operations) will still be very lucrative in 100 and 200 years from now. It might be slightly less lucrative (or it could be more lucrative, who knows), but programmers will likely be very important to organizations for at least a few centuries, if not millennia.
So... let's say I know an ambulance responded to your house two weeks ago, in the middle of the night, and I want to know why (for... reasons...). I can't go as the EMS agency, or the hospital, as HIPAA prevents them from releasing any information. However... If I know a cop was there, then I can leverage the fact that the video his chest recorded is a matter of public record and find out for myself.

Wouldn't you want that video redacted in that case? There are plenty of other scenarios I can think of where redaction is very appropriate.
I'm not sure where I read it, may have been an article posted on HN a while ago, but just the opposite actually happens. I think it was where a countdown timer is present for the pedestrians, but since drivers can see them they tend to speed up if the light is about to change. Which causes more accidents, esp with pedestrians.
Did an Astronaut enter space? Find out by iOS Notification
Something I've seen a lot in Europe is speed cameras in places that have a specific good reason for people to slow down. Several seconds before encountering the camera is a sign with the speed limit and a camera icon or the word "radar". The purpose isn't to issue tickets, but to get people to slow down for the dangerous section of road.
Great read. I would go a bit further and say that the goal is not to be an expert and is not related to start-ups. The goal of being open minded and sceptical as described in this essay, is to make sure one do not embrace sheepishly some ideas that will be considered obviously stupid twenty years in the future. For example in the 50s in Europe most intellectuals were communist or pro communist. Only a very few were neither reactionary nor communist. The goal, for me, is to be of these few. In the US history, it would mean to have been e.g.among the earliest abolitionists.
I think the majority of HN commentators would agree that buying drugs is not a crime in the philosophical sense. This is about crime in the legal sense though. And facilitating drug sellers and buyers (with furniture, or with websites and escrow systems) is definitely criminal conspiracy in the legal sense.

To move back to the philosophical sense, it seems apparent that Ulbricht ordered the murders of at least 2 people, so I don't have a ton of sympathy for him. If it weren't for that I would probably be rooting for him (though I'd still agree he has little legal ground to stand on).
> The OpenBSD 5.6 release notes http://www.openbsd.org/plus56.html show changes

I don't see anything about openntpd on that page. Are you makign stuff up?
I don't follow how you interpreted what I said as wanting to "protect the cops from looking bad on camera".

I am a paramedic. I take care of people in very compromising positions (most people don't worry about getting dressed if they're having a heart attack at 2am). I worry that _their_ privacy needs to be protected.

This also isn't simply about 'modesty'. There are many ways medical information could be used against someone (denied a job, denied housing, denied various forms of insurance, etc...). There are many reasons personal medical information needs to be protected.
It's just factual. You're both denigrating the value of the linked article based on not knowing about Paul Graham's NYT quote.

Even if there were no such specific, personally identifiable quote -- should we deny that there are v.high-level players in SV who indulge in and (apparently) support ageism?
I am actually in need of an underemployed physicist. I'm writing a book about quantum mechanics and I need a consultant to make sure I get the math right. I was going to put an ad on Craigslist, but maybe someone here has a lead?
Only crazy people put sugar in cornbread:

10" round (iron) skillet

2 eggs

1 cup milk

1/4 cup cooking oil

3/4 teaspoon salt

4 teaspoons baking powder (not baking soda)

1 cup yellow cornmeal

1 cup unbleached white flour (or 1/2 whole wheat + 1/2 white)

Preheat oven to 400 degrees:
In a large bowl, beat together the eggs,
milk, oil and salt until well blended. Sift
in the baking powder and whisk until foamy.
Quickly mix in the cornmeal and flour.
Beat until the batter is smooth. Pour into
an oiled 10" round cast iron skillet. Bake for
20-25 minutes, or until a knife inserted in
the center comes out clean.
(Okay to freeze the leftovers.)

Once cooled, crumble into bowl, add milk for a breakfast-type cereal.
For fun and profit: Data entrepreneurs size up Recreation.gov
I wonder if a lack of domain "expertise", but a general understanding of the domain instead, can sometimes be an advantage in generating domain-changing ideas.
Nice Minnesota Whitetail
I believe gonzo meant "isn't portable", as OpenNTPD uses OpenBSD-only APIs. See this cousin thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8778577 .
A Whitewashed Earthsea
No idea about NK. But re: #2 - I believe that sort of trade is regularly transacted with Iran through resellers in UAE/Dubai. US companies with overseas subsidiaries. They are legally separate companies. The goods are manufactured in Asia and never touch US soil. The employees are citizens of a country without restricted trade. The end result is the same - what are essentially US-backed goods make their way to a country with enforced economic sanctions, but without violating US law or OFAC regulations.
Couldn't it be because her skills are obviously being underutilized? Society could benefit from her a lot more, and she could get more resources at the same time, but for what ever reason that's not happening. And that is rationally upsetting.
You can also use timedated, an optional daemon packaged with systemd. Works really well for me, I just turned it on and it hasn't complained since.

The command you'll want to run is:
# timedatectl set-ntp true

And it'll have you within a deep fraction of a second from a decent timeserver in about ten seconds, and keep you there indefinitely.

NOTE: For the person who downvoted this because they don't like systemd, seriously, you need to find a better hobby.
True, this is similar to the classic question as to why does a top-of-their-game baseball players make millions of dollars while top-of-their-field-<doctors/engineers/etc> don't make a similar amount.

The reason is because their skill set reaches hundreds of thousands of people while a doctor/engineer can only reach maybe a thousand. The rationalization is they can reach a massive amount of people and their effect on the world is much broader (regardless of having a higher impact).

I honest have never seen a Dr Oz show but I know he has a broad audience therefore he should have a much much higher level of scrutiny than any other doctor.

Regardless the OP's question is still valid, if only the goal is to improve upon the output of the science.
The commonality of a short-term rental isn't the issue. What matters is that the liability changes massively as soon as you charge someone money to come into your home, rather than inviting them as your guest.
Theo de Raadt is proof that it doesn't matter what community you come from, you can still be a huge douche as long as you write code well.
That's possible, but the general consensus is this (FTA):

"The country is said to have a fairly large internal domestic internet disconnected from the rest of the world. Most citizens with access to computers are only allowed to access this network, not the global computer network the rest of us connect to."

That is, absolutely, the official IP space is assigned to government and government-affiliated institutions. The rest of the local internet isn't in the Chinese address space, though; it's instead on a disconnected network with its own address space allocations, which may overlap with addresses in the rest of the world's IPv4 instance.
A good friend of mine works in pharmaceutical pricing and this is exactly how works. You price to what the market will bear. The "market" includes physicians, insurance companies, the gov't and patients.
A collection of disassembled and commented source of parts of MS-DOS 1.0
It would follow neatly that the one linker offered His Unassailable Eminence was the one that would spit out strings in an accommodating way and dereference some political parties in the Americas, Pacific, EMEA and PRC. Also, just because it's a locale name doesn't mean it's not Korea (or a cipher for the GOP's inimitable MO for gov infosys.)
I just stumbled on this tonight as well, I'm happy it's still active.
I just don't get all the complaints.

Since when did we become entitled to a well-paid job?

If, let's say, tomorrow they invent an AI that can write great code, putting me out of business - I will say, well, time to switch to something that pays. And there are still TONs of jobs that pay - electricians, plumbers, carpenters, construction equipment operators, elevator repairmen, illustrators, real estate brokers - they all make good money. For now at least.

Why would I even waste my time as a waiter? That time can be spent learning a skill that's in demand, not something literally anybody can do.
The reason for this is that you can't have two different prices for two different diseases when it's the same drug. The company decided to stop selling it for cancer (they now give it away for free) to optimize for the MS market.
Scientists accidentally stop skin aging in mice
UBC's introductory CS course (CPSC 110) uses HtDP/2e as its "textbook". Given the progress that the majority of students make throughout the term, I think it's quite successful in terms of teaching the fundamentals, despite not being based on a more "conventional" language like Python or Java.
The problem is that there are lots of other choices to make an intersection safer than cameras.

Generally, the psychology of the timing matters. Most of the intersections that I see people crash aggressively are busy intersections and have lights that take forever to cycle. So, there is a huge time penalty for missing the light (something like 4-5 minutes).

If you cycle the light faster, it may let fewer cars through, but it tamps down the aggressiveness with which people are willing to crash the light.
Ask HN: How can I emigrate away from russia?
Hi! I live in moscow. In the light of the recent events(such as russian government blocking github), I realize that it's time to move away from here, as quickly as possible.

I have no experience related to emigration, so I want to ask for your advice - which countries are my best options, and how should go about moving there?

I'm happy to move into pretty much any country with a sane political situation. Of course ideally - with warm weather and english-speaking people =)

My situation: I'm young, single, I work as a freelance Django web developer, but unfortunately - not very experienced, not very rich, and without a degree in CS(I do have a diploma in unrelated field), which, I realize, will make things harder for me.
Shopkins So Cool Fridge (These new toys are selling like hot cakes)
Similarly, never date a girl older than 21.