skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Let's assume that as a society we're not going to let people starve to death or die of exposure. So that means we're going to have to use tax money to provide everyone with at least some minimal level of income whether we call it welfare, dole, or basic income. So let's turn the government into an employer of last resort. Even if people have no skills they can pick up litter or do basic landscaping in public areas for 30 hours per week. Since we're going to be paying them anyway I for one would at least like to get some value for my tax money.

The point isn't whether robots could someday do those tasks more efficiently. Robots will always cost >0. Whereas the people will essentially be "free" since we we'll have to pay them anyway.
A History of the Most Impractical Weapons Ever Used in War
We'd love for you to get involved and help improve the map :)
Part of the problem here is that cocktail meant a fairly specific band of mixed drinks in pre-prohibition days, but it grew into a generic catch all. Drinks which would have had a specific term back them (e.g. Flip) would show up on a cocktail list today
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9059156
Perhaps all these wealth creators you speak of will abscond from the fundamentally broken world the rest of us live in and be together in peace and harmony with John Galt.
Content-based session recommender: Strata+Hadoop World
New iOS security threats revealed
The work and challenges for OpenWorm may not reflect the work and challenges for the Human Brain Project. Among other things, unlike most other neurons, C. elegans neurons don't spike. Action potentials make simulation more tractable since you only have to worry about propagating spikes, and not all internal state, between connected neurons. (At least ignoring things like ephaptic coupling, which is probably not that important in mammalian neocortex.) Also worth noting that the Blue Brain project supposedly succeeded in simulating 100 neocortical columns, which is 1 million neurons, vs. 302 neurons in C. elegans.
They are being so. It's an ongoing process.
GameMaker developer YoYo Games sold to gambling firm for $16.4m
> IMHO, Marco's should never have to worry about traffic.

You'd have thought the same about, say Metafilter, as well. But apparently not.
Small books would also make updates easier (if some APIs referenced in a book change, for example). Seems like a good way to go.
> I am advocating what we did to the Nazis and Japanese.

That was a world war if I recall, and the US didn't even care about the Nazis, or Japan until they were forced to. "we" didn't stop the Nazis, the world stopped the Nazis, with our help.

Don't be so quick to call for World War III, because i'm not at all certain we would have more allies than enemies if we unilaterally decided to declare open war against the rest of the world, which is what it would amount to. Because the truth is, most of the world 'harbors' and 'funds' terrorism to some degree, including the US. And we've already proven to the rest of the world that we're willing to drag it into a war on false pretenses, so I doubt they would be eager to throw themselves into another one on our behalf. That political capital has already been spent.

Which is, of course, why we don't do what you suggest.
Inside the Anglo-Saxon Classroom
Waits and Measures (1999)
Well, to be fair, I thought it might have a little thought provoking content. But no.... just sludge.
There are so many things wrong with this essay -- it combines a Marxist-inspired call for redistribution of wealth in the name of egalitarianism (are there specific individuals who will control how much we are allowed to own?), fear of change in what people do for a living (are people too exploited and too stupid to adapt?), and fear of technological progress in private hands (does the State, or some other supra-collective, have a magic wand and omniscient mantle of benevolence?).

The worst parts are the claim that (forced) redistribution is inevitable and that regulation will somehow prevent "bad privately-done things" from happening -- as if regulation is a perfect solution to any problem one confesses to fear or claims to dislike.

In principle, government intervention hinders technological progress, derails economic progress, and ultimately destroys the economy. Maybe people who have made a lot of money with one wave of progress should leave future generations alone and let them free to do the same -- instead of strangulating them by intervention and regulation that the now-wealthy did not have to suffer.
I still don't see what that has to do with what I see as your thesis: Your "sophisticated drinks" are an ad-man's creation.

I pointed out US whiskey because the circumstances of its existence were not manipulated by marketers, but was the "natural" consequence of the limitations of the time. Further, that fits in with whiskey throughout the Western world, so the US is not unusual.
Quite.

I was first introduced to the concept of alcohol branding by way of the wine industry (at one point Pepsi, by way of Diageo, owned a number of Napa Valley properties). The "fake rustic / family / small one-off" vibe of a great many wineries, breweries, distilleries, bars, etc., is little but a show.

Though yes, there are also genuine family-owned outfits. They just don't have hundred-million-dollar advertising budgets. Well, except for the Gallos.

On Diageo's holdings: "Diageo's brands include Smirnoff (the world's best-selling vodka),[7] Johnnie Walker (the world's best-selling blended Scotch whisky),[8] Baileys (the world's best-selling liqueur),[9] and Guinness (the world's best-selling stout).[10][11] It also owns 34% of Moët Hennessy, which owns brands including Moët & Chandon, Veuve Clicquot and Hennessy.[12][13] It sells its products in over 180 countries and has offices in around 80 countries."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diageo
Great to see public rights of way being included in the walking directions.
I've had a couple of meals with Jon & Swift (founders of MLH) and can speak to their dedication to the hackathon community. They're really trying to encourage experiences like these for students around the country.

Hackathons are the reason I got involved in the larger tech/startup community, an indirect (but crucial) reason I have a job right now, and have really come to be a very important culture for me. The work of MLH and Jon have made a large part of that possible.

For those curious about the history of hackathons, Jon has a really great talk that he gave at HackCon last year about the history of hackathons: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zr6VPAe9CKU&index=1&list=PLP...
What does the blog title mean?
...so it's totally fine to not have gender parity in software engineering because the culture that creates that norm also screws up in creating a 'men can't be child care workers' norm as well? Really?
>The countries that have nuclear weapons, who do they ask to be allowed to keep them?

Well, the 5 official Nuclear Weapon States (with capital NWS) asked nicely with the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which is signed by just about anyone. Not that there ever was a chance of them just giving up their nuclear weapons, but they did ask and the world said yes.
Except that the trend away from quality cocktail making long predated the pricey mixed drink trend. I don't disagree with your premise but I still don't think it has anything to do with the situation described in the article
They can do that without a warrant, or at least they've been acting like it. The FISA court issues warrants to spy on US individuals if the NSA shows "probable cause" that they are "agents of a foreign power".
It's a continuation of the long-term and broad trend of silo-ization and movement to closed platforms.
Having worked in many restaurants in college I noticed how much louder some were than others simply by using carpet. I pay attention just for fun and having carpet and breaks between areas (either high backed booths, plants or complete walls) makes a huge difference. Also the height of the ceiling and whether it's dampened or not.

We used to do the whisper trick at a mexican restaurant I worked in. You could eavesdrop on conversations if you mapped it out properly. Sadly a customer could also hear you talking inappropriately as well.
WRT Norvig if you learn clojure to learn functional and parallelism, you'll win, but if you learn clojure so you can write visual basic in clojure you'll lose. He's giving a necessary but not sufficient option for each broad field you need to understand.

WRT Hickey if you "gain advanced skills" by using the best language for the job, then the language mattered with respect to the learning process. But once you understand the "fun" of concurrency, the language you used is no longer relevant. You can talk ACID compliant transaction using clojure STM as a vehicle or your favorite SQL, the language just doesn't matter any more.

The point of a reading primer "see spot" "see spot run" isn't to learn about dogs, and once you can read, you don't need the primer anymore. There are learning techniques and textbooks that are better at learning than others... the the mastery, if it ever comes, came from sweat, not the book itself.
> intelligence agencies need actionable intelligence

For the most part that hasn't really been how it's worked so far. Generally intelligence agencies have used the information they've gathered so far to try to manipulate people.
As I've said, the taxes from other countries somehow don't have to be paid (1), but the user data from these is claimed a "must." Strange.

1) http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-2868322/Disney-Micro... "Disney and Microsoft dragged into Luxembourg tax avoidance scandal engulfing EU chief Jean-Claude Juncker"
> It kind of demonstrates how far behind they are with things like navigation, search etc

To quote from the link "Well, the first thing to note is that the philosophy of OpenStreetMap is not to offer a one-stop-shop on our main website, but to create truly open data to empower others to do great things with it."

The search has always been... odd, though.
if sergey and larry didn't code much, why do they care about making engineering-centric culture, instead of focusing on the business around engineering?
A whole branch of the project is dedicated specifically to ethical issues https://www.humanbrainproject.eu/discover/the-programme/ethi...
+1. If you have a story to share, email us at hi@mlh.io. We'd love to share it with our community!
Given Snowden's stated values, it's highly unlikely that he would report such a breakthrough.
Yes — that’s exactly the problem. Handling ten thousand concurrent users with CGI is easy, even on 2000-era hardware. Ten thousand concurrent users might be four requests per second. But ten thousand concurrent users using websocketd means you have ten thousand processes. And if you’re doing some kind of pub/sub thing, every once in a while, all of those processes will go into the run queue at once, because there’s a message for all of them. Have you ever administered a server with a load average over 1000?

Still, the O(N) scheduler work in current Linux might make that kind of thing survivable.
The absurdity of life is the absurdity of existence: that there is anything at all is completely absurd and it's doubtful that this will ever be explained satisfactorily.
You're putting far too much faith into the contents and completeness of Google's searchable archives. Newspapers and a selection of contemporary books may be a reasonable guide for broad trends and significant events, but in no way can they be relied upon to contain every little detail of the world around them.
Wow, so naive. The Third Reich was established in 1933, WW2 started in 1939. It didn't have time to invent much or to build industry anew. 90% of the technology came from US - directly from US government or through companies like Standard Oil and Ford. Thousands of factories got sold on the cheap in the US after the Great Recession started and all the equipment moved to Germany. A process quite similar to the outsourcing of the last 25 years or so.
> (Half-life, Counter Strike, TF2, Left 4 Dead, Portal, DoTA2... it's actually hard to name them all).

Actually, it's not that difficult. Of what you listed, only HL was original IP.

Valve put a lot of work into digital distribution, and have pretty much owned the PC digital distribution market.

With console and mobile gaming dwarfing the PC market, and big publishers like Ubisoft and EA getting into their own digital distribution, I'm curious to see how Valve continues to grow.

That said, I admire them as a company.
Javert has always played very true to the like-named Les Mis character here on HN.
I don't understand what do you mean by "bit rot". Bits don't rot like vegetables. They could last just fine for centuries, specially in protected, privilege parts of memory were firmware stays.

NVDIA driver is the same for all cards.

Tablets and smartphones are very homogeneous and the most widely used, Apple's totally closed source, including the hardware.

Most people use Intel processors.

Any of those vectors are very easy to target if you have the hardware and software source code.
Given that a lone dude was able to modify the firmware on a HDD controller CPU (http://spritesmods.com/?art=hddhack&page=3) it doesnt surprise me that full-blown malware of this sort is in the 3-letter-agency toolbox.

Didn't someone else also manage to run Linux on a HDD?!

edit: it was the same guy, it's just hidden on the last page of the series and it's just linux, no userspace
> What the article doesn't reveal is the attack vector, how did the firmware in these drives come to be infected?

If criminals can target a bank to steal $300M from clients, the NSA can target a HD company to steal the source code.

It's really not that difficult.

Remember, the best attack isn't a direct assault. It's a sneak assault.

The story is that during WWII, Ian Fleming was part of a group of spies in training, who were asked to get into a secure nuclear research facility. Everyone else got caught. Sneaking in under the wire, etc.

Ian called a professor friend to vouch for him. Then, call the facility, and asked for a tour, as a visiting "researcher". After the tour was over, he called his boss, and told them his briefcase was hidden next to a critical part of the facility.

Bugging HD firmware is a brilliant ploy. Who looks there?
Too bad the article doesn't mention that Kaspersky actually is very closely tied with the FSB (ie KGB) - most likely he works for them. That doesn't mean the original article is untrue - just that the 'research' really comes from Russian spies.

Profile here: http://www.wired.com/2012/07/ff_kaspersky/all/

"Kaspersky’s rise is particularly notable—and to some, downright troubling—given his KGB-sponsored training, his tenure as a Soviet intelligence officer, his alliance with Vladimir Putin’s regime, and his deep and ongoing relationship with Russia’s Federal Security Service, or FSB."
Read every 6 months:

- How to win friends and Influencing people - Dale Carnegie

- How to stop worring and start living - Dale Carnegie
> I have no doubt that we aren't even capable of understanding half the shit that goes on to turn food into energy.

Why? What physical property of the universe precludes us from understanding metabolism?
I'm really not sure you read my post very thoroughly. I'm fairly intimately acquainted with the internals of database systems, and you don't seem to be replying to what I actually wrote - I wasn't attacking your point of view (I generally agree that a decently designed DB is unlikely to trash an SSD all that quickly), I was just hoping to shed light on the other poster's wording.

If you have an 8kb block and you change 128 bytes of it, the 'actual update' is much smaller than 8kb. Sure, you're reading/writing 8kb to disk, but everything outside of that 128 bytes is basically fat for the purposes of that change. As I said in my previous post, that can absolutely be mitigated by writes being combined through the checkpointing process, and one would hope that a decent SSD could cope easily with combining writes to an appending log.

A database can still be writing data all over the place. A heavily indexed table can cause quite varied write patterns, which can result in a lot of different pages getting touched. Fortunately, the reality is that well-designed DBs and SSDs are fairly capable of dealing with this.
DropTrip: Shipping Reimagined. A startup to watch!
She doesn't seem to discuss the cause I see, which is that life emerges from the random set of deterministic rules that define the universe. There's no crucial reason life as we know it looks one way over any other - if some portion of the universe had developed different emergent patterns then life could easily be defined according to those patterns instead of the ones we use in our portion, and it would still be absurd. Humans didn't have to evolve from apes; they may have been in the right position to develop more advanced intellects but had giraffes been in the right position then giraffe-ancestors would be arguing about life's absurdity right now instead. Each moment's state depends entirely on the previous moment, and states are not globally optimized at each moment, so they build up into complicated weird-looking systems over time. There's not much we can do about that.
I hate to say it but I think the average person just doesn't care, even a lot of HNers don't really think it's a big deal. I personally think it's time for a revolution or at least mass social upheaval.

Politicians pretty much treat us like we're all mentally challenged, which, compared to Ivy league educated officials, I guess most of us are. But it really makes you wonder why such smart people just don't give a fuck.
How headlines affect your blog’s dwell time and why you should care
I'd support Basic Income in theory, but I don't know if it's politically feasible in the US. People are still talking about dismantling Medicare and Medicaid, and of course, everything related to Obamacare, even the parts that work quite well.

It's entirely possible the answer to increased joblessness here will be to tell the unemployed to go back to school, then raise the cost of student loans by some ridiculous factor, then not actually attempt to create jobs for them when they get out.

Then again, there are states where gay marriage and marijuana are legal now, so maybe i'm too cynical.
There is a tiny segment of the population who will read the New Yorker, where pieces of this length are the norm. This segment represents the last of the literate.
Washington State House OKs bill banning ticket bots
Agreed. The text of the article simply should have been one word, 'Because'. Trying to make reason of the nature of absurdity seems fairly absurd itself.
NSA has hidden software in hard drives around the world
Marc Andreessen's plan for fostering more “Unicorn” startups
Whiteout Mail – Your new secure mailbox
The great irony is that it's exactly that arrogant ignorance and inability to understand what happens when large numbers of wildly different human beings try work together why middle management continues to be necessary.

It's like saying we don't need janitors because we can self-organize and all clean the company toilets ourselves.

It's a claim that is as true as it is ignorant and naive.
While reading the article, I had to wonder how it must feel to be management at a HDD manufacturer today, and look out over the desks or think back over the contractors, and wonder which one is the spy.
I second this. Well, the part about the soft skills. Of course you need to be a good web developer, but typically you won't get judged by your uber development skills. (Depends on your client though.)

Clients usually come to you (or you go to them, but preferably the first) because they are not knowledgable in the part where you specialize in. But in order to prove (show value) that you are a good web developer, you actually have to be a good salesman.

You can start dropping HTML, CSS, Frameworks, Libraries, Angular, React, Ruby, Python, Symfony, Django, Hibernate or Spring on them, it does not tell them a thing.

And once you got the gig, depending on the client, you will have to reassure them on a daily/weekly/monthly basis everything is on track so they keep believing in you.

Furthermore, in order to get some quality leads, you will have to get your name out there. I started at an early age as well, doing websites for family members and small companies in my community for a bargain. Doing so I got some exposure, got more requests and slowly raised my prices.
Docx to Text convertor
Google could spoil AT&T's party here.

So it's $348 a year cheaper to have the privacy-impaired AT&T offering. Google just needs to offer VPN service to these people for $40 a year. Privacy intact, you save a bit over $300 a year, and AT&T gets to look at nothing but encrypted bits.
The thing that people often over extrapolate based on Special Relativity (SR) and other things like Quantum Mechanics (QM) is they think that "relative" (or for QM, "probabilistic") means arbitrary. No, in fact while time is not "absolute", certain things about time for all observers are constrained. For example, the time between events depends on the observer, but use that time separation multiplied by the speed of light--the distance a light ray travels in that time--and take the square of that distance and subtract the square of the distance between said events' locations, this quantity is the same for all observers. This IS a constraint on the "distance" between events in SR.

This really isn't the relativity that the author alludes to, but I have something to say about this too. As physicists, we term this "relativity" the author deals with as "dealing with units." Having a concept of time is meaningless without a given scale. For example, for the ultraintense-plasma interactions that I am discussing in the paper I'm writing today, a picosecond is a long time given that the electro-magnetic dynamics I care about happen on the femtosecond scale. For the hydrodynamic simulations my groupmate will work on, picoseconds are the timescales of significance. Of course, when heating the coffee in the cup next to me, the barista measures timescales much larger than this, of the order of seconds, exponentially longer than both of the former scales.

Life is a complicated phenomenon which captures dynamics at many scales. Thinking about life can be just as complicated, if you let it. An issue I often see is equating parts of life with other parts and thus, using the same scales for both. This often leads us into trouble. Why does it take my friend an hour to shower while it only takes me ten minutes? If I can write a python script in one day, why the hell does it take this junior dev two weeks to make his? Of course, the same issue here is a novice physicist comparing the fs physics I deal with to the ps my friend does, the comparison isn't valid just because they are both "times."

This is why even though life seems short for some people it can seem long for others. Just because 80 years is a year and people are people, any given individual has their own experiences and opinions that shapes their vantage point, and it can be hard to really compare the two. Of course, just like the "real" relativity SR, there are certain constraints we can make on time in this context, many people might prefer longer lives even if we lived 1000 years if millennial* olds are as selfish as us 80-year-ers are. But the diversity in context must be taken into account as it should be for me when I model ultra-intense laser plasma interactions. Context always matters.

Thinking about the context for each person's scales makes our look on life a little less absurd. I think that more often than not, people's motivations (for desiring longevity, for instance) have good reasoning in them, especially when you consider their context.

[*] It's funny that millennial here means people who are 1000 years old as opposed to people in their late teens to early twenties.
Agreed, great guys leading the charge for the community.