skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think also they should be raising awareness of both the cost and the ineffectivness of mass surveillance. It has failed specatularly to stop some of the worse attacks, because all the resources where tied up playing video games on thier databases, instead of old fashioned boots on the ground monitoring of suspects that on the large where already known to them. The sheer cost of building the interception infrastructure is on a nightmare scale, maybe people would care more if they knew how much it costs them personaly.
one of the most important things that i've learned in the process of building this particular indie app is the fact that GAINING TRACTION should be as important as building the product.

that nearly killed me when i first realized that. this book really changed my perspective: http://blog.desk.pm/gaining-traction/

it's hard to do both... i mean, impossible... but i've focused more on doing a good job of building community, creating content, and gaining traction through experimentation (e.g. marketing on Gruber's blog) than I ever have...

and... it's kinda worked.!
It's a valid point. So, so put your mind at ease: the exchange (as well as all backend services we've built recently) is built with Postgres.
Besides the title being pedantic, I feel this article is alienated from the average person I know who is always modeling and dealing with symbols and representations in the world, but less often takes a step back to realize the practice of their modeling and to judge its efficacy.

To me, modeling seems equivalent to consciousness. To me cave paintings of animals seem significant because they illustrate 41k yo humans creating representations of their world (for mental practice, entertainment, ceremony, who knows...), whether they realized their practice is another question.

But today, there are many people who model and recognize it, think of manipulative salespeople/lawyers/cads, great fiction writers, constipated philosophers and art/film/lit critics, scientists, artists/architects/designers...

You don't __need__ any technology built after 1980 (or whatever) to explore the world... Even thought experiments can shake an academic field (Maxwell's demon, Schrodinger's cat, EPR paradox...)

I agree that there may be better tools to convince people to contemplate environments and unpack/model/break down confusing things into collections of simple theories than to send them to a liberal arts college (where this and goofing off is really all there is to do in my experience)...

But programming is still the new literacy IMO. I feel like all the white collar underpaid people I know could work 2-4 hours a day of their 10 hour/day jobs if they wrote the most limited, banal, imperative script that abstracts no concepts and in completely un-generalized (and therefore fails at modelling). And I feel just this fact, that there would be a great liberation of 1st world mankind's time if every non-programmer who uses a computer for their job up and wrote a severely shitty program that automated some aspect of their responsibilities, is enough to say that a coding is the new literacy.

Think of what kind of intellectual shift a machine-literate public that just cut their work week in half would result in...
Not that they have to go fully off the grid all the time, just when they want to use solar.
homebrew is at least curated and every time you update you see several packages removed
I think you're missing my point; if everyone went net zero, and the minimum charge rate increased to compensate, the current payback calculations of solar will go out the window.

If everyone were to buy solar (ignoring production issues) at today's price and technology, the seven year payback rate of the OP would not hold. That's why it is unsustainable.

I think it's unlikely that net metering will be maintained with an increase in fixed rates; eventually the price of power at peak solar will be negative, and it makes no sense to credit households for feeding even more in.

Residents building useless solar panels, overproducing at peak so they can charge their Teslas for free at night, and power companies building massive resistors to burn that power of during the day and coal plants for the night is Kafkaesque.

The right thing to do (long term) is to treat those feeding power back into the grid as commercial customers/producers, where they're compensated and charged based on current market rates. Anything else distorts the incentives significantly.

Edit: And this isn't some pie in the sky theoretical situation I'm talking about - South Australia has already experienced negative power prices at times due to solar, see

http://cleantechnica.com/2014/10/23/negative-electricity-pri...
UK perspective again, though may be useful for a possible glimpse into the future:

In London, cash is no longer accepted on the bus. Same deal for subways. The smart card (Oyster) is purchasable without ID but not disposable without showing ID and a deposit is charged. Paper travelcards are available at much higher cost per journey.

Smaller towns have cash bus tickets :)

Taxi may be viable but it's a matter of chaffing; are you hailing, or calling a private hire company/using Uber? The former is far more expensive here and also not really viable in many cities.

The train is also drastically more expensive unless you buy advance tickets online (on the day tickets can be obscene, hundreds of pounds for a 200 mile journey).

Bicycle is viable, for now.

Basically, most methods are trackable, there just might be levels of indirection. Buying a ticket online or using a bank card is just an algorithm away from entering the 'log where you are' zone.

But then, we're all carrying cellphones right? :D
My understanding is that it is not practical to turn nuclear on and off to meet demand. Am I just wrong on that? Do you know of a good resource to learn more about this?
Speed traps I'll grant you, but how are red light cameras not a safety measure?
Here's a potential argument.

Global climate change impacts the poor the harshest. They're the least able to cope with it, and can least afford the long-term impact economically and to their food supply.

The subsidies to solar assist in building out the long-term technology/energy innovation and infrastructure necessary to combat climate change. Those investments must be made, because we're not going to just magically wake up one day with extremely effective solar, we have to build our way there gradually through university science, commercial R&D and product deployment.

I'd argue that the wealthier people buying these panels are paying their fair share of the overall cost when it comes making the energy shift possible, and were even more so in decades past when it was far more expensive and far less efficient. The top 20% pay something around 70% of all income taxes; the bottom ~15% have a negative tax basis; so the wealthy are largely funding the tax credits that they're claiming anyway.

The contribution the poor are making in very slightly higher electricity rates, is their fair share of contribution to the solution of climate change. No different than any other product build out in history, in which the rich subsidize most of the expense of new technology, but poorer consumers also have a role to play as prices come down.

It's also worth noting that in the US at least, the poor often have subsidized utilities. It's the middle class that is actually taking the bulk of the cost hit you're referring to, not the poor.
Yup. people are returning the product and there are a lot of people that hate the product... that's fine. i'm not trying to create a perfect product for 100% of the population... just certain people who will find it useful.

but, one of the biggest motivations for building this was knowing how hard it is to write, full stop. even after writing and blogging for 14 years... it's still as hard as ever.

any tool that can help me write and grab my strange amorphous thoughts and put them down into something understandable makes that ROI-value hit positive real quick.

so, for those people who are able to write more and publish more via the app... i think it's really worth it to them.

why? because writing is really fucking hard.
Sure, but in the long run it is far better to take the new panels and tweak your system.
Externalities don't invalidate the entire theory, they just mean that adjustments have to be made in the cases where there are externalities. Hence my emphasis on the fact that a person losing their job is not an externality.

I think you read my sentence as "(following the principal of maximizing profits is what is most socially beneficial) in the absence of externalities" where what I meant was "following the principal of (maximizing profits (in the absence of externalities)) is what is most socially beneficial".

Classical economics with optimal "Pigovian" taxes can be thought of as a first order approximation to reality.

Also, you can produce any Pareto efficient outcome from free markets + redistribution. In practice things aren't quite so simple since redistribution has some deadweight loss (e.g. some estimate that it costs $1.30 to the economy to raise $1.00 in taxes).

EDIT: rewrote after a better understanding of the parent.
EDIT 2: added more explanation.
TPMS sensors or RFID tags?
You should check out California. It's one of the world's largest solar markets, and it has really taken off there.
I assumed these were like standard Pantone names or something but what do I know. I'm pretty sure they didn't create the names, regardless.

edit: Oh, it's explained when you click on the question mark on the right side of the page. It's from an xkcd color survey: http://blog.xkcd.com/2010/05/03/color-survey-results/
"I'm guessing most Engineers by that level are so well-taken care of or dedicated to their employers that they are unwilling to leave."

Senior engineers leave their jobs all the time, but to get them to do so you have to offer them at least one of: more interesting work, more money (adjusted for local cost of living), or better working conditions (e.g., private offices for people who prefer them).

And I'd agree with the commenters who said that people who are good developers are not necessarily interested in being managers, and especially not VPs, who are managers of managers of managers, and thus pretty far away from the programming action. After being a director for many years, I decided to go back to being a developer because it made me much happier to write code, not sit in meetings and deal with management issues (hiring, layoffs, performance reviews, fighting for staff raises, employees not getting along with each other, etc.).

Also, there's no guarantee that a good developer would even make a good manager - it requires a whole different set of skills that include empathy, politics and diplomacy. Finding someone who has both programming and management skills would be exceedingly difficult. Better to hire the developer you need now, and if they show aptitude and interest in management, promote them. If not, hire a competent manager to oversee the growing department.
Just wondering if this provides any advantages over https://github.com/pmylund/go-cache? That's what I use for all of my projects, and have never had issues with it before.
I was also unaware of this. That said, RFID chips are used for inventory systems. The inclusion in a tire is most likely innocuous and doesn't seem that unusual to me.
here here!

one of the biggest compliments and encouragements that i've received is that other indie developers have told me that i've done it "right" by pricing the app the way I've done it.

in fact, many of them have shared with me that they've done this wrong in the past and that they wanted to encourage me that i've gotten at least this part right!

the challenge is that those "atta boys!" are all private via DMs or individual emails... not public so they aren't available for all to see.

but to be sure, i've got a bunch and it feels great.
Stitchless patterns mixer
There is another part of the theory which says that you get back the full set of Pareto optimal outcomes, by redistributing wealth (e.g. through taxes and welfare). Although see my comment above on the limits of wealth redistribution.
Is there a draft UI spec of "This is what a GPG front-end needs to look like" out there?
And if you enjoyed that, you will enjoy this

https://what-if.xkcd.com/1/
Cuentos cortos infantiles gratis
Custom plates: 8BB8 8BB8.
i second this... insofar as sharing that for years (a decade+) i've used basic markdown editors and even code editors for a lot of my writing.

many of them are not very good... but some of them are amazing. it's all about what works best for the individual.

:)
Once a few years I get bored and rewrite this project using new technology. Hope you'll spend next ~10 minutes crawling screen with mouse and having some fun).
Until we stop subsidizing coal, oil, and gas through direct subsidy, tax breaks, extremely expensive wars and ignoring the effects of pollutants, subsidizing renewables is the only way to make it fair.

I am absolutely for removing all subsidies for all forms because I am confident that solar presents a much better value. But ask a politician to suddenly start charging fossil fuel users for our wars and pollution and they'll instantly pull out the line that "raising prices hurts the poor".

So subsidizing solar is just more politically feasible. It is certainly not the best solution but reversing a 100 year old industry is basically not going to happen. So if we don't want solar to be at a disadvantage (which would strike me as immoral given the value it offers) we basically have to subsidize it.

But soon, unsubsidized solar will be cheaper than our indirectly subsidized fossil fuels. The raw panels already only cost $4000 or so for a 5kw home system, and great effort is underway to reduce the cost of installation and inverters.

It is unfair to ask non-fossil fuel users to live in a world polluted by fossil fuels, but nobody ever asked us about that one.
If you planned on making a competitor of Word, would you copy all its features and throw 5,000 people at it? Of course not.

No, I don't think Word is 25 people. But a relationship of mine made an Excel in js with 3 people and sold enough copies.

Before you say I'm wrong again, no this Excel-in-js isn't isofunctional. It's just what the customer needs.

Point being: You can make great software with few people, and IBM could do it easily.
Probably could use the same technologies used to defeat lidar speed enforcement. Active jamming with high powered IR emitting LEDs or covering the plate with an IR absorbing lacquer or film.
Safety measure or not, red light cameras are a joke. Chicago's red light cam program is a failure.

Edit: I have to agree with the other commenter though - red light cams were meant to bring in revenue to the city of Chicago. They bought into the program by outsourcing to a third party company (big shock, most of chicago looks like the poster child for a corporation owned city). They're not making the money they expected on the deal though.
A beautiful video was made from this speech by The Glossary, it's available here: https://vimeo.com/68855377

The story behind it is here: http://www.adweek.com/adfreak/story-behind-water-inspiring-v...
Delayed delivery of metrics and metadata as of 7pm – Google Cloud Monitoring
Snapchat “Discover” Content Feature Launches Tuesday
I actually freaked out recently when my wrist went really sore to the point of almost getting blocked.

Since i got an ergonomic keyboard, slowed down my typing pace (whilst aiming to do less typos) and generally try not to use my mouse at all everything's fine again but it scared me a bit.

I'm trying to have small incremental changes but it is pretty difficult sometimes as I have to deal with user support / management tasks and sysadmin tasks on top of my dev duties. Small institutions, yaaaay!
>I don't understand that question. I know the language of economics very well, but you're not using the terms in way that has an obvious meaning.

I'm not sure if economics uses the term.

Monotonic growth would mean that the dependent value (in this case utility), never decreases as a function of the independent value (time, in this case). In other words, does this framework guarantee that total utility will never decrease, even in the face of events such as 110,000 IBM employees being fired?

>Time is not really an issue in general equilibrium theory.

Then what use does it have in a universe where time appears to be fundamental?

>E.g. the assumptions can be interpreted as saying that all companies make the decision that, at that time, given all information available, maximizes the expected value of the companies future time discounted dividends.

Is there any reason to believe that these assumptions are well founded? Companies are likely aware of a tiny fraction of the total available information and they likely can only understand an even smaller fraction of that information. How does the framework respond to grossly misunderstood and sparse information?

>E.g. it can be restated to say that if you were to make a plan (where plan can include contingencies, e.g. if X happens, do Y) to maximize the (time discounted) total social welfare over all future time periods,

Is it possible to make such a plan? My guess is that any practical attempt would fail for many reasons, including being unable to define what 'social welfare' means as well as not being able to acquire enough computational power to compute across 'all future time periods'.

>There are indeed adjustment costs, but you can't speak about these costs in the same terms as the actual value of having a job. It's like comparing the cost of moving from one home to another, to losing one's home entirely.

I'm not sure exactly where you're talking about here. What is the actual value of having a job?
Let me complement your helpful answer with some details about the stuff I'm eating..

Fexofenadine (Allegra, Telfast..):

"Unlike older antihistamines, fexofenadine does not have anticholinergic activity."
http://www.medscape.com/viewarticle/406437_3

Bilastine (Bilaxten):

"No anticholinergic adverse events were observed in the clinical trials.."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bilastine

"bilastine's safety profile is satisfactory, since it lacks anticholinergic effects"
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22149338
Researcher links 20 percent of Ulbricht’s Bitcoins to Silk Road accounts
My understanding was that the majority of the access was by tapping the private network connections between google, yahoo etc's colocs, at points outside the coloc. This has prompted these companies to start encrypting data accross links they would previously consider secure. Another task should be listing all companies known to be activly working against thier own paying customers, like att and cable and wireless/mercury. Which could form the basis for a consumer boycot. Hit thier partners, so that cost of doing that business becomes too great.
Doesn't that average consumer change their tires more frequently than their license plate over the lifespan of their car?

I ask as your question seemed a bit strange to me.

I am not sure if you are alluding to the fact that individuals trying to evade the law wouldn't know to change their tires, or if car licensing & insurance is much different than I imagined in the US (and individuals get a new license plate each year or something crazy).

Edit: also thanks for the link! I really had no idea RFID was hidden in tires! Makes me wonder what else they are hidden in...
So the question is, how do we make a computer selfish.
Wii-like Bowling Game for iPhone and Apple TV
What about motorcycles?
Classic HW problem nicely done. Today they use Viola-Jones.

For those wondering why PCA works (self-plug): http://ilyakava.tumblr.com/post/95691347612/demystifying-pca
Repo-groups use this already. Police cars have them too.

http://www.popsci.com/article/technology/scan-artist
I can't agree more. IBM is so old it says something. But .. what's there for them in the future ? I don't know how much money they get from consultancy, or their mainframe/big-customers. Maybe the trends don't really matter in IBM's case. But when I see proliferation of tiny yet capable computing devices, self-driving cars, wearables etc etc I hope that IBM didn't leak all their hardware R&D talents out by aiming at services (subjective anecdatum: I wouldn't regret their software design / appserver for a second)
Yeah. And it seems like a natural fit for DropBox. I'd love this service on my dropbox. And I had never heard of it before.

Dropbox is looking for ways to stay competitive with the likes of Google, etc, and I'm amazed at how well they are doing.
Here's a hack for turning a Selectric into a printer! Have not investigated beyond glancing the page. http://hackaday.com/2012/06/13/turning-an-ibm-selectric-into...
I'm pretty sure Dropbox has been buying a company every few weeks for the last few years. You just haven't heard about most of them.
I remember turbo pascal circa 1988 and I liked it way better than C. I rewrote a chunk of the standard library so it would take advantage of 16 bit instructions on my 286.
Show HN: Sentity – sentiment analysis and text analytics API
Theory: This is actual news, people are shocked. So we haven't got apologists because they'll just look ridiculous. The follow up stories will be full of apologists once that shock wears off. It's just sad to watch the utterly relentless trashing of the constitution and the rule of law. Get out and vote! (for either another Clinton v another Bush?)
The revenue stream tempts governments to reduce the yellow interval, which then decreases safety:
http://www.copradar.com/redlight/
It's used for monitoring pressure so the driver can be alerted if the tire starts to go flat.
An epee is close to a dueling sword, but still pretty far from a rapier. I imagine you know this, but a rapier is not the ultra fast moving sword most people think it is due to movies and the like. They are actually pretty heavy (1.7-2.2 lbs).
Psychiatric drugs: side effect = effect
Who Needs a Junior iOS Dev? (Remote)
I'm looking for an entry-level job on iOS Development.
I recently graduated on Systems Engineering and would like to work remotely on an exciting startup.

Please contact me at sbastidasr@gmail.com
There is no way to reverse this. Trying to cage this with paperwork will just lead to more of the same creative interpretations à la NSA. So the rulers don't feel the rules apply to them, big surprise. With that in mind, the futility of fighting the tide, what is the next step? As the ideal solution of reversal is unavailable, we need to go with harm reduction - but what is the harm that we would reduce? Most would say the harm is the loss of privacy, but I disagree. I believe the harm is further consolidation of power by those with the means to abuse it. So I would advocate for a democratization of all these spy programs. If the DEA can spy on us, we should be able to spy on the DEA. Any funding request for government programs should include a documented method of direct public access (not FOIA, operator level).

It is no mystery why the Constitution included the provision allowing citizens to arm themselves with the same class of weapons that the government possessed. The memory of tyrannical governance was fresh. Information is no different, if the government posses this information - so should the citizens.
It's close, and it's the first thing I found that made me think it would be possible someday. My first attempt would probably be to take one of those kits and a RbPi and figure out how to have it constantly record keystrokes. Or use a keylogger.

The use case for me is being able to carry a typewriter around and write on it without thinking about plugging it in to something, then taking a USB key off it later. Whereas that kit is more oriented to using with another computer.

It's also a project that I've accepted I'll tackle some year in the future as my list of fun projects is long and limited by a full time job and a side business. Thank you for the links!