skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
So, we're talking about the rich people.

Okay, let's get some ballpark arithmetic:
Suppose the 1000 richest people in the US
are worth on average $1 billion, that the
US has 330 million people, and that we
redistribute the worth of those 1000 people
to the 300 million. Then each of the 300
million will have money enough for a nice new
car, four years in college or graduate school, to
pay off their student loans, make a down payment
on a single family, three bedroom, two bath
house on a nice street, and won't have to struggle
with a miserable job? Will they? Maybe?
Let's see:

1000 * 109 / ( 330 * 106 ) = 3,030.30

dollars per person.
Oh, well.

But, maybe in the US the top 100,000
people have average worth of $1 billion?
Then, sure, we'd get

100,000 * 109 / (330 * 106) = 303,030.30

dollars per person.

Ah, that's more like it! We just need
a lot more billionaires!

I would suggest that maybe by far the biggest
pot of wealth is in pension funds
for middle class workers.
This reads like a strong case of: http://xkcd.com/538/

> Now, each of those parties is a fully independent company, with its own CEO, own board, own employees and own counter-espionage division. [...]

Do you remember that US judges didn't even give a fuck about other _countries_ having different privacy laws? I can't imagine that they will respect that "this company which actually isn't one, but five"-move.
Do you have links to support this?
Yes, it's great that it's possible to use OSM for many different purposes.

However, all these compromises on the front page are too complicated for end users and scare them off.

End users expect services that seamlessly work together. If centralization is needed to achieve that, then yes, OSMF needs centralization.
you could just rewrite your article to call these "obvious blunders" - i.e. which you define as ones that crafty identifies in 2 seconds or less. redefine what you're doing so your methodology is correct :) Plus it's still interesting. Probably more interesting than blunders that take longer to identify!

Once you have found the blunders, you can verify them by analyzing the found positions more deeply. (Of course you should also report the number of false positives - ones that appear blunders after 2 seconds but turn out not to be on slightly longer analysis.)
Armies of Expensive Lawyers, Replaced by Cheaper Software (2011)
They can use "rubber hose" crypto to interfere with your bitcoin usage. The point is that the lack of anonymity is a bad thing when you are facing against a powerful adversary.
My suggestion is to go somewhere that isn't in the Bay Area. Tons of other places - like D.C. and Austin - are seriously hurting for good startup focused lawyers that aren't huge (Cooley) or just word of mouth.

My suggestions are to start small with a web portal that has all the docs you need to get started or to quickly catch up if you are about to close financing. From there you can add your personal services.

For example, there is a lot written about term sheets but significantly less written about Note Purchase Agreements and Promissory notes. Even less is written about when you need to file a Part D and your Blue Sky provisions etc...

If you could build a dead simple interface that walks you through the documents you need sequentially and piecemeal like:

1. Incorporation template and best practices
2. Corporate bylaw template and best practices
3. Board appointment template
4. Term sheet template
etc...

With on call (paid) help, you guys would do more than anyone has so far and clean up.
Tailor Brands Raises $1.1M in Funding to Build Out Its Automated Design Process
The author talks about languages and technologies (JS, Mongo), but he's really getting at something deeper. The real danger of the "ship it" culture is that things that can't be "shipped" right away — things that require solving really hard problems — tend to fall off our collective radar because there is just SO MUCH cool and (relatively) easy stuff to do right now. PG has a great term for this: "schlep blindness": http://paulgraham.com/schlep.html
> we need to start pushing back against the trend, modernizing blogs, and building what we want to come next

this
Protecting Client Interests: Anonymity in US Equities
>The question is: is Kaspersky going to abuse all that trust and good will they are gathering?

There are a dozen or so American companies that most would have hoped would stand up to domestic intelligence companies, rather than take the safe route of cooperating.

Was the power abused or was it co-opted? Will a Russian company fare any better against their own government?
Man, how did you figure that out so fast!

And here I just figured folks would think it was a throwaway account that somebody used to avoid having paranoid internet trolls dig into their online presence. Seemed like such a good cover, too.

Brb gotta dictate a memo to psyops.
Regarding flowcharting, I find it's all but impossible for me to understand the nature of any complex decision-making process without drawing some kind of diagram. It's actually more difficult to diagram a process than it is to sit down and implement it in program code, but also the very act of diagramming the process exposes flaws in my understanding which would be much more expensive to fix were I to expose them during the debugging process.

Regarding gotos, I think a more general statement would be "excessive reliance on one type of control structure is to be considered harmful." Avoid dogmatic preoccupation with general statements about avoiding language features.
That's a good idea, I really like it. One thing to think about though (which I'm sure you're already very aware of) is that lack of money a startup might have, and the prohibitively expensive process of filing for a patent.

This is a question a lot of startups have to make. Should I protect my product for what could cost over $10k, or should I use that $10k to put into marketing, or focus being the first to market with my product, or any other of the 100 things a startup company may want to do.

Obviously you wouldn't _just_ do patents. It's just something I've seen people think about and just say "nah, not worth it for the money", especially when you couple that with the risk of finding your idea is totally no novel or inventive after spending $2k just on your first search.
> b) We don't need political capital to do it.

The US's unilateral declarations of war have caused a huge amount of tension, globally. To do what you propose would be a log breaking the back of many a diplomatic camel.

Contrary to your opinion, the US is not superman, it's just another country that is currently on top of things. Take a look at what has happened to empires who over-stretched historically. Hint, it's not pretty and they're not around anymore.
It's fun to see this being built, and definitely hope it gets released!

I chuckled at this bit:
"As you know one of our key concerns is privacy, so to give users a safe browsing experience while on the web we included password protected history into the browser."
Hold down CTRL and ALT; press DEL 7 times. Much easier that way.
Yep, it was specifically when I wanted an application that would run a game loop involving round trips to the backend for every step that I ran into a lot of difficulty. Ports were not very clearly documented and I didn't find any examples, so I wound up writing Javascript instead.
Well you can get a cup size immersion heater:

http://www.amazon.com/Instant-Immersion-Heater-Portable-Beve...

For about $9. We used to have those growing up.

But those can be very unsafe. (Or at least those designed and built by the Soviet industry were...).
You've seen Travis Goodspeed's work there?

http://events.ccc.de/congress/2012/Fahrplan/events/5327.en.h...
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D8Im0_KUEf8

It's _really_ nice...
Yes. If your problems are essentially trivial and you are just trying to gauge customer moods, shipping and shipping again quickly is the way to go...and thinking about the problem will probably not help.

However, while quick iterations converge rapidly on a local maximum, they really, really suck at getting you out of that local maximum.

I notice this with trying to create a new and different programming language (http://objective.st): for almost all the problems I am tackling, there are quick and obvious answers...that get me stuck in the same mess we are already in. So I've found it necessary to deliberately delay implementing stuff, going slower than I can and make sure I leave the time for my not-quite-conscious thought processes to work out the problem and present the results during a relaxing shower.
You hit the nail on the head.

Beyond the scope of HR, in my experience it's the mix of both breadth of knowledge (context) and the depth of understanding (skill + experience) that is most useful.

Having a high-level understanding allows you to step back outside of the 'work' to instead focus on the objective, and someone with significant background knowledge and experience can utilize that to first conceptualize the optimal approach before hammering the nails.

Knowing what to apply, where, and when is equally as important as how. And there are fantastic programmers & hackers on each end of the spectrum, but in my experience developing that contrast is more intrinsically valuable.
This is not the sort of "bit rot" that the parent was referring to.
Interview with Lifestyle Coach Rebecca Weller – Naturamin
Is this Richard Branson's next investment?
My solution in brainfuck, given a finite tape:

-[>-]-
An interesting read but poor tools can't only be attributed to shipping culture. A more important reason is the tools are good enough (only just, but that's enough) and at that point priorities change. And once momentum becomes big it's hard to change direction i.e. Javascript, so hard to revisit the fundamentals.

Better tools are coming, such as Lighttable / Bret Victor's talk: https://vimeo.com/71278954 . But it's not clear when they'll arrive! Will we still be developing web-apps in Javascript after another decade? It feels like we can do better.
Amazing! I wish I had seen one at the Commodore tent during the 2010 TNMoC event. I guess they are very rare indeed. Would be good to get one in the The National Museum of Computing in the UK.

Also, slightly strange timing - this came up in last weeks B3ta newsletter.
6 Reasons You Need to Join Cyber Dust Today
I ended up implementing this in JavaScript using Rx, but the core concept is the same:

Incoming requests: --a------------->
Requests to server: ---b------------>
Responses from server: -----------d---->
Updates to app state: ---c--------e--->

a - User "sends message" to chat room

b - Handler for that action queues a request

c - Handler for that action also queues a local update

d - Server responds with the sent message

e - Handler for that response queues a local update
I'm definitely missing something about his position. I think I understand why he accepts addition and multiplication but not exponentiation. But I don't understand how he can illustrate that with 80^5000 or other concrete examples. While you can't guarantee to him that x ^ n is a countable number for arbitrary x and n, for any specific x and n, you can, right?
Comments from the author over at Wolfram Community: http://community.wolfram.com/groups/-/m/t/138400#_19_message...
I hope he has found a job by now!
Chapterhouse - Pearl never left my playlist since it dropped... back when second-hand CD shops had staff willing to frindly-sell you on 3 other things you might like when they looked over what you were checking out at the register. The OG "You might also be interested in..."

But who sampled Shoolly D - P.S.K. What does it mean? first in 1991? Chapterhouse or Souxie and The Banshees?
> but are there really people that want to argue it's wrong for the US to use its power to stop other countries from obtaining nuclear weapons?

Funny, the US did nothing to stop the Pakistanis in the 80s. Or the Israelis, for that matter.
This is a great place to ask 2 questions:

1) Anybody using single serve electric kettles that have variable temp heating? Some teas need lower temps and I'm usually drinking 1-2 cups at a time.

2) I've always imagined building some kind of adjustable mechanical whistle into a kettle to accomplish this. Is that possible to make a kettle whistle with "low" steam?
So it works with glass, ceramics, anything non-ferrous.

What if I had a ferrous mug with say a wooden handle, would I still need the iron rod, or would the system not work at all?
I feel like you wanted to reductio ad absurdum with a conclusion I feel is not absurd... um. It is staggeringly dangerous for anyone to have the tools to end civilization, because sometimes we lose track of things, and unless you're a comic book villain, destroying all human life within a multi-mile radius is not a super useful tool in wartime or peacetime.
>You seem to be advocating that we do nothing at all, and that is what I disagree with.

Not at all. I'm only suggesting that what you're doing is counterproductive.

> Now, in a conversation where the sentiment is so anti-NSA, why do you think this has so many upvotes? That's evidence of rigged voting.

It might be. But we don't actually know how HN's voting algorithm works (secret sauce), and we do know for a fact that the HN staff will manipulate vote gravity in order to make the content of a thread more accurately reflect 'quality'. So it's not exactly ironclad evidence of government vote rigging, when Hacker News is a black box which is rigged by design.

It's also not out of the realm of possibility that more people who agree with yeahyeah's point of view have upvoted him than people have upvoted other threads. And this is a long thread, so the effect of commenting and upvoting throughout may be cumulative. And some comments in other threads have been downvoted into near oblivion.

>If government agents actively manipulate public opinion in favor of them, and the public opinion is different from what it otherwise would be, then there is no democracy. That is wrong.

Actually, I would argue that is democracy working as intended. The government has the right to present its point of view and try to convince people to agree with it - that is literally how democracy is supposed to work. The government may be trying to 'actively manipulate public opinion in their favor,' but on a discussion forum, so is everyone else. That's the point of a forum, and it's especially true on HN, where die-hard capitalists and anarchists and everyone in between all fight for the intellectual high ground. The government doesn't actually have some kind of magic that makes people believe them, theirs is just one more voice in the herd.

>What can we do, when there's no proof? We can use our brains and examine the evidence. We can call out obvious shills to try and stem the tide.

I think a more effective countermeasure would be to examine the evidence of the arguments presented and call out lies when you encounter them. Attack the comment, not the commenter, particularly since you're never going to have more than suspicion and confirmation bias as evidence.
Cometh the Censor
Using Computer Vision to Improve EEG Signals
Maybe there's just less longevity researchers. The absolute funding makes little difference from an individual career perspective–even if it does have a large effect on the field as a whole.

I've linked to a page of academics from top institutions[0]. If you're at Harvard researching longevity, then you're doing OK career-wise, imho.

If you sell your company for $720 million, you're doing OK career-wise, imo.

Demonstrably, you're incorrect.

[0] http://www.elysiumhealth.com/team
Which countries have no problem with foreign workers on tourist visas

Working on a tourist visa is illegal in most countries I've been to. If you talking about working online on a business which is not tied to the country you are staying in, then you can do that on a tourist visa for a short period of time, but eventually if you are staying longer you are no longer a tourist and need to somehow justify your presence in the country. As much as those laws don't make any sense to people working online, that's the current legal framework in most of places.

Where are co-working locations?

I don't see a point of working in a coworking space. Wouldn't you rather explore nice cafes in the area? The only benefit of a coworking space for me is networking, and this is huge, this is what distinguishes a "I'd rather go to a coffeeshop" coworking spaces from "I belong to this community" type of coworking places. Those are extremely difficult to find, and in my experience are impossible in high-traffic nomadic locations, due to their nature (travellers just pass by).

Where are the best locations for connectivity vs. price?

You look at the spreadsheet at nomadlist, and some places look like paradise - live by the beach, very cheap, etc. But in my experience everything comes with pros and cons. For example, SEA is cheaper than Mediterranean countries, but the climate is nowhere near as good. USA is better when it comes to networking, but it's also more expensive. Everything comes with a cost, and there is no magic bullet.
What makes you say that? Honest question.
The Kaspersky report[1] states that GRAYFISH (which contains the HDD firmware reprogramming code) works on Windows NT 4.0, 2k, XP, Vista, Windows 7 and Windows 8, in both 32-bit and 64-bit builds. One can't help but to be impressed.

[1] http://25zbkz3k00wn2tp5092n6di7b5k.wpengine.netdna-cdn.com/f...
Well.. would you look at how that competition works. Amazing!
Ultimately companies (the shares) are owned by persons and managed by persons. This is very fundamental to our (Western ?) system. Its nearly impossible to start a company or have a bank account without identifying the Ultimate Beneficial Owner (UBO). Only possible in a very few (questionable) places.
xkcd forum has an interesting (and longish) thread playing this exact game. [1] Starting with nine thousands, it quickly becomes a mathematical nightmare or something.

And also, the Big Number Duel. [2]

[1] http://forums.xkcd.com/viewtopic.php?t=7469
[2] http://tech.mit.edu/V126/N64/64largenumber.html
No, and that's the key point. His claim is that if you tried to express 80^5000 as an ordinary number, you would just end up going in circles. Your calculation would never terminate. Now we can't in practice compute 80^5000 directly, in the sense of writing down this many 1's, so it's a good example to use. If the example where 2^10, we could indeed demonstrate that 2^10 is a real number.
Seattle has a small startup community and its own startup lawfirm: http://www.sophoslaw.com/ . Maybe you could learn something from them?
> - Iran does not recognize Israel.

Neither does Saudi Arabia! Why does it even matter, since 32 countries do not recognize Israel; including huge US beneficiaries like Afghanistan, Bangladesh and Pakistan?

> From 2000 to 2004, Hamas was responsible for killing nearly 400 Israelis and wounding more than 2,000 ...

... and in turn Israelis killed 4907 Palestinians and wounded 8611? If the number of killed is a factor in determining one's "terroristness", then surely you can't claim that Israel is a victim here! Just last year, in Operation Protective Edge, 73 Israelis were killed and 664 wounded; whereas 2100 Palestinians were killed and 11000 wounded: http://www.jewishvirtuallibrary.org/jsource/History/casualti...

> Iranian proxies killed an estimated 1,100 US troops in Iraq.

... and Saudi proxies killed nearly 4000 on 9/11 !
Getting Gigabit Networking on a Raspberry Pi
I'm a big fan of HN Digest. Weekly email of the top stories, not great for discovering content that didn't make the top spot, but it's useful to catch up when I'm too busy to hop on throughout the week.

http://www.hndigest.com/
The problem that I have with this thesis (that shipping culture is hurting us) is the results people have. You can certainly argue that a better result could be achieved by taking more care with your design, but it is unclear that in doing so you would have achieved something more "valuable" than you did by shipping and iterating.

I do agree with Gary Bernhardt that infrastructure is not getting the attention it deserves, but as we saw with GPG it isn't something that is easily funded. Sun paid an engineer who did mostly nothing but maintain xterm (and the Sun tools equivalent) for several years. Where are you going to find a sponsor for a new terminal? Current terminal code could be improved of course, but in so doing would you get better code? Better systems?
Apple to Revamp Its Stores
For the computer part of Sam's essay, I'd
suggest that we are a long way from
artificial intelligence (AI) software
being significantly more economically
valuable than what we've been writing
for decades -- various cases of applied
math, applied science, engineering,
and business record keeping.

To support this claim, once I was in
an AI group at the IBM Watson lab
in Yorktown Heights, NY. We published
a stack of papers; I was one of three
of us that gave a paper at an AAAI IAAI
conference at Stanford. My view of the
good papers at that conference was that
they were just good computer-aided
problem solving as in applied math,
applied science, and engineering and
owed essentially nothing to AI.
Later I took one of our major
problems we were trying to solve
with AI, stirred up some new
stuff in mathematical statistics,
got a much better solution (and
did publish the paper in
Information Sciences).
That experience
and observation since is the support for
my claim. Sure, this support is just
my opinion, and YMMV.

Instead of AI with a lot of economic value,
I would suggest that
closer in is a scenario of
people managing computers managing computers ...
managing computers doing the work.

And what work will those computers do?
Sure, first cut, the usual -- food,
clothing, shelter, transportation,
education, medical care.

So,
maybe John Deere will have a worker
computer on a tractor doing the spring
plowing, the summer cultivating, and
the fall harvesting. Then food can
get cheaper. Maybe before the
plowing a tractor will traverse the
ground, take an analyze soil samples
for each, say, square yard, and
apply appropriate chemicals.

Maybe GM will have car factories with
robots driven by computers doing essentially
all the work. Then cars can get cheaper.

Maybe Weyerhaeuser or Toll Brothers
will have pre-fab house factories
with robots driven by computers doing
essentially all the work,
self-driving trucks delivering the
big boxes, computer driven earth
movers doing the site preparation,
computer driven robots putting up the
forms for the concrete basement
walls, computer driven
concrete pumpers inserting the
concrete from self-driving
concrete trucks,
and houses will get a lot cheaper.

And the computers get cheaper.

So, right, we're talking deflation.
So, have the government print
some money and spend it on
K-12 and college education,
guaranteed annual income,
parks, beautiful highways,
etc. Print enough money
to reverse the deflation
and hire a lot of people.
Those people buy the
cheap food, cars, and houses,
have children, and fill the
classrooms of the
additional education.

What education? Sure: How the
heck to develop all those
robots, managing computers, worker computers, computer
driven farm machinery,
car factories,
pre-fab house factories,
etc.

Or, as computers eliminate jobs,
basically the result is deflation,
and that's the easiest thing
in the world to stop, and the
solution is the nicest thing
in the world --
just print money to get us
out of deflation.

We already know what people want
from the famous one word
answer "More".

Computers should be a blessing,
not a curse.
'It's My Party' Singer Lesley Gore Dies at 68
Equation: The Death Star of Malware Galaxy
The NSA hides surveillance software in hard drives
Ask HN: What book/s changed your life?