skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
It's about having theories that explain/predict altruism, in the same way you'd have theories which explain/predict chemical reactions, electrons or the motion of blocks on slopes. You start with some basic assumptions and derive (mathematically/logically) the outcomes.

You should check out kin selection for more detail on Dawkin's side of the debate, but basically the idea is that a "gene" for helping out your brother (for example) is likely to spread through the population because your brother probably also has the same "gene". You don't have to survive personally for your genes to live on, so your genes don't focus wholly on your personal wellbeing.

If you want to be less hand-wavy you can work out the probabilities based on what we know about genes, and therefore work out how much altruism you expect to show towards members of your family vs. random strangers. For example, your relatedness to your siblings is a half, to your cousins 1/8th; hence the quip:

I'd lay down my life for two brothers or eight cousins.

— J.B.S. Haldane

My knowledge of Wilson's argument is limited but I think the crux is that he (or at least someone) believes in selection on the level of groups of individuals (as opposed to just genes) and uses that to explain altruism instead / as well. Dawkins and others disagree. Taleb has basically argued "the maths checks out", but that's pretty much irrelevant when it's the starting assumptions that are under scrutiny, not the logic that follows.
That the value of land is substantially based on the environment around it, one that is largely driven by societal factors. 1 acre of land in Manhattan is extremely expensive. 1 acre of land 20 miles north of Manhattan is not expensive. The difference is everything surrounding the land.

If the people in a community have decided to spend a lot of their money to reduce crime, improve transit, improve schools, and improve the economy, every land owner benefits. Yet the way that we do taxes (based on the improved value of the land), means that those that sit on the sidelines and do nothing gain quite a bit of value by freeloading on those around them.

If we figured out the taxes based on the underlying value of the land, then the vacant lot owner would be paying as much as the person that just invested in building a new business next store. That seems fairer to me considering that the vacant lot is now worth more due to its proximity to a shiny new building.
Desalination is expensive because of the cost of power, but what is being proposed is not just "we should desalinate", but is "Why don't we make better use of the power opportunities," such as a desalination plant with solar panels and/or generators for waves/tides. We could offset the electrical cost of desalination if the plants could help generate their own power. Why not pass water through turbines before desalination? There are tons of opportunities for refining the process, and it's just the initial cost that's large. Over time, the plant will pay for itself and if ever optimized, could actually provide power back to the grid.
brought to you by Partnership for a New American Economy. What kind of New American Economy? The kind this guy likes: http://www.renewoureconomy.org/home/call-reform-grover-norqu...
One thing a lot of people don't realize is you don't have to be a developer to work on open source products. You can do design work (logos, branding) and lots of other stuff. Documentation is endless, and not just technical documentation there are a lot of features that just need to be explained in plain English (or plenty of other languages as well)
For bureaucrats it is very important that they are perceived as being proactive and doing something, preferable make it as visible as possible by as many people as possible. Someone out there will get a pat on the back for "taking initiative", "being proactive" or "making an impact".

Residential water restrictions seem to qualify maximizing those things.
That and overcrowded tenement buildings full of fire hazards going away helps push down density, but in this case for the better.
Did the TPP risks to harm both Europeans and Americans, or only one side?
A lot of funny stuff there, this was my favorite:

Describe your location:

Cool
East London
Quirky
Stylish

(If it's anything other than these, please consider relocating your offices)
Well, I'm not sure this is a good joke for April Fools.
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Cryptocurrency mining ASICs cannot be used for password cracking because they are not designed to hash arbitrary strings, and do not support arbitrary scrypt parameterization. They are designed to take in a block template of some sort, and then internally handle iterating the nonce to minimize load on the communication bus and the host processor.

An interesting thing about GPU password cracking that many people don't realize is that the GPU is responsible for not only hashing candidate passwords, but also generating those candidate passwords. The bus bandwidth isn't enough and the CPU isn't fast enough to keep it fed with candidate passwords otherwise.

You could, of course, build password cracking ASICs that have internal processors for generating candidate passwords, but I'm not convinced that it doesn't make more sense to stick with GPUs or maybe FPGAs there.
Which have a wide array of other mechanisms by which to DDoS your application.

Why use any of those other mechanisms, which might require a few thousand hosts, when a method exists where a hundred hosts can do just as much damage by getting the server to punch itself in the face.
Exactly what problem is this solving?
Do C/C++ programmers really have trouble specifying their dependencies?
I'm all for less "accidental" work for programmers, but I just can't imagine this tool ever solving a problem that I have ever had.
Show HN: Free Java Game Development Tutorials
yes but we bundle a lot of things into the term management

hierarchy will always exist (if at least someone has to pay or fire you)

authority will always exist (if at least someone will be more experienced in a topic)

processes will always exist (and someone has to put them in place)

you can have processes in place for emergencies, deciding if those emergencies are worth dropping stuff, for boring bugduties etc

the shift is imho not so much about making everyone his own boss but about pushing decisions as far as possible "down the chain" until you do no longer need to think in "hierarchy chains" but roles and groups of people
I think the principal critique of Nowak et al.'s work is based on how it gets the biology wrong, not the math. Chicago evolutionary biologist (and prolific public intellectual) Jerry Coyne, reviews a recent paper that challenges Nowak et al.'s paper [1]. The answer to Taleb's weird post is within Coyne's review of Liao et al.:

> As I (Coyne) noted at the time (of Nowak et al.'s publication), their (Nowak et al.'s) dismissal of relatedness and kin selection from their model seemed bizarre, since they didn’t vary relatedness in their model. If you don’t do that, how can you say it’s unimportant in evolving eusociality?

"Math checks out" is a questionable approach to understanding science.

On a possibly related note, Taleb has recently been on a strange anti-Dawkins spree on Twitter and elsewhere [2]. Taleb has also done some weird anti-GMO bashing in the past [3].

[1] https://whyevolutionistrue.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/new-pape...

[2] twitter.com/nntaleb

[3] http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2014-11-18/news...
A Summary of ‘Antifragile: Things That Gain from Disorder’ by Nassim Taleb
I sometimes get the feeling that traffic signals in my home town (Chicago) are designed to maximize ticket and speed camera revenue, rather than improve the flow.
Sweden has taken in a lot of immigrants. 15.9% of the population are immigrants, compared to 14.3% in the US. Most of these immigrants don't know Swedish.

http://ftp.iza.org/dp8032.pdf has commentary on school sizes in Denmark. They are much smaller than in the US and UK. It describes some of the reasons that people think larger schools are better:

> Policymakers often appear to prefer large schools due to scale economies associated with administrative costs. In addition large schools are generally able to offer a broader curriculum and better career prospects for teachers. This may attract more experienced and more qualified teachers. The students (and teachers) in larger schools typically come from larger geographical areas and may have a more diverse social background. To the extent that diversity and being exposed to students and teachers with different social and demographic background is a positive production factor in the human capital production function, this may be an argument for large schools. Further, in large schools it may be easier for students and teachers to change classrooms or peer groups if, for example, a match between a teacher and the students in a given class is not optimal.
This page brought to you by the Partnership for a New American Economy. They self describe as:
"The Partnership for a New American Economy brings together more than 500 Republican, Democratic, and Independent mayors and business leaders united in making the economic case for streamlining, modernizing, and rationalizing our immigration system."

I have repeatedly seen H1-B visas applied for people very unlike PJ. The bulk of people on H1-B visas I have met cannot leave the company they are at for fear of losing their visas. They've started families here. They have children who haven't known their citizenship country. These smart, brilliant people are paid significantly less than their peers (like me) who can choose to easily move between firms.

If you sign this petition, yes you're supporting PJ, but these incumbent large interests will use your assent and leverage to get what they want. Yes- PJs will stay, but the partnership will open the floodgates for more foreign talent that can be kept in a limbo state at the mercy of a large firm.

Don't support astroturf! If you want change, support actual grassroots movement!
One symptom, phantosmia, is the only information he needed to suspect seizures or cancer.
Two overlays that cannot be closed by ESC. Nice article, but this just sucks.
There's a good post on marginal revolution that puts California in some perspective.

http://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2015/03/the...

> As David Zetland points out in an excellent interview with Russ Roberts, people in San Diego county use around 150 gallons of water a day. Meanwhile in Sydney Australia, with a roughly comparable climate and standard of living, people use about half that amount. Trust me, no one in Sydney is going thirsty.

> So how much are people in San Diego paying for their daily use of 150 gallons of water? About 78 cents.
You repeated yourself there.
SEEKING WORK
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dan@200apps.co
Why do companies partner with Managed Services Providers?
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Somewhat OT, but I worked in the building constructed due to that eminent domain process, it was really nice.

Pfizer later sold the whole thing for pennies on the dollar to a defense contractor after pulling out of that town, all that after never actually building on all of the land that was leveled.
If the TSA is security theater, this is conservation theater.

It's all about feeling good and conspicuously "doing our part" but has nothing to do with solving the problem.

I wonder what's next, maybe a ribbon or wristband campaign?
Or keeping Kim Dotcom's assets?
Yikes.
How do they plan to get users ? For all the talk about Android's fragmentation, it has been conceived so that the sdk is as back-compatible as possible (and Play Services and the compatibility libraries only improve that).
Correct. If you store the scrypt hash directly, it effectively becomes a plaintext password and a compromise of your database lets the attacker login to any account.
It's much more convoluted than that, unfortunately. There are many layers of rights to water. Farmers will get anywhere from 100% to 0% of water from government sources. For instance, my family's farm is getting 0, so they are forced to rely on well water.
There and Back Again – Moving to Toptal Office – Toptal
also admin/letmein
Thanks. I’ve been looking for this for a while.

Why would anyone release their work into the public domain, and at the same time, disallow their site from being included in the Internet Archive?

http://eelis.net/robots.txt
From an academic finance perspective:

Assuming access to capital, companies should invest in all projects with a positive Net Present Value( the net of money coming in discounted for inflation and money going out, including interest expenses) greater than zero. Simply put... if a project makes money you should invest in it if it doesn't you should not.

Taking away the assumption of access to capital, companies should take projects with the highest Internal Rate of Return( essentially the return on investment) for a project.

It seems that you do not want to/are not capable of using external capital(ie taking a loan or venture capital) so we will consider the IRR method of choosing projects.

If you will receive a greater return from building this product than extending another line of your business, then that is the right thing to do with the money.
I don't see how it could be classified as "renewable," but I'd argue the more relevant terms would be "clean" or "sustainable."

"Renewable" makes you think of "some of this stuff is going to run out!" which is all wrong. Sure, oil and coal and gas are finite, but if we actually burn through a good chunk of the reserves, the emissions will totally screw us long before we actually run out of stuff to burn. The problem with fossil fuels isn't their finiteness, it's the long-term effects of their use on the planet. If there were an infinite supply they would still be just as bad.

Alternatives are clean, in that they don't emit nearly as much harmful stuff, and they're sustainable, in that they can keep being used for centuries without massive ill effects. Nuclear fits into that just fine, even though it's not really renewable.
> I really hope not to see that day. So, how to avoid it and not be open to security issues like these?

I don't know. Part of the answer likely lies in determining who the "owner" actually is. I want to be the owner of my computer, but business interests go against it. For instance, MAFIAA doesn't want me to be the owner, because they want secure means to enforce DRM on me. Other businesses would also like to be the owners, because they can monetize me better this way.

> I don't think we have much to fear from the 'professionalization of programming', not if the kind of code I see on a daily basis is anything to go by ;)

Let's hope so, but I think it naturally follows from Trusted Computing - the technology will enable proffessionalization. Because right now, there isn't much you can do to prevent people from getting their hands on a compiler and using it.

> There have been numerous attempts at slapping a gateway on the ability to write software for the hardware that you already own, the only environment where this has taken hold is on mobile platforms, I sincerely hope that that is a development that we will sooner or later be able to revert.

I hope so, but I fear we won't - that at some point a company will finally figure out how to lease PCs to general population instead of selling them. You'll get a nice, cheap laptop, but it will be locked down, equipped with trusted computing hardware (the company will be the trusted actor, of course) and require to connect to the Internet every now and then to verify everything is ok. Basically, what happened to mobile, only worse. And people will buy into it if the price difference will be significant enough. Actually, I'm not sure what's stopping companies now from doing this.

> But in order to revert it you'd have to come up with a solution for the pandemonium that would ensue if everybody and their brother would use the likes of 'download.com' or some equivalent to install their software from. Maybe something along the lines of apt-get for phones would be a starting point.

Yup. Crap like this is a huge problem, but I'm not sure if it requires locking things down. You can go the Apple way and aggressively verify every piece of software you allow in your repository. This makes you the trusted authority, which carries risks like abuse of trust, but solves the problem without heavy sandboxing.

So far I see the issue of distributed vs. centralized as a tradeoff between secure but inefficient, and efficient but with serious failure modes. I wish there was a way to capture benefits of both while avoiding the risks.
That's "Ralf"!

http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~ralf/
User replaceable? No.

Brave hacker replaceable? Hell YES!

http://liliputing.com/2015/03/upgrade-a-surface-pro-3-with-a...

http://surfacepro3ssdupgrade.blogspot.mx/2015/02/surface-pro...
food shortage leads to revolution.

The real problem here is we tried to turn a desert in to our national bread basket.
Like I said, it's the same debate as GPL vs MIT which has been had on the Internet a million times.
A great in-depth read about this era is Den of Thieves by James B. Stewart. http://www.amazon.com/Den-Thieves-James-B-Stewart/dp/0671792...
>taking other people's property without their voluntary consent is wrong.

Knock! knock! Oh Hi Mexico...

Toc! Toc! Hola Ohlone Native Americans...

Possession is nine-tenths of the law. The law is man-made.
Because it is government controlled mainly, and at each level (state, district, municipal) there are way too many squabbling parties that would need to agree.

I recently listened to a great EconTalk (http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2015/03/david_zetland_o.htm...) on the subject.
Yahoo Mail Now Displaying Ads on Paid Email Subscriptions
I have been a Yahoo paid email customer for 15 years. One of the advantages was being able to read emails without being bombarded with Ads. Recently the Yahoo "experience" has changed, with the first entry always an "Ad" appearing to be an un-read email. And some of the right hand side has been dedicated for other banner ads.

Others seeing this? Or has it been a slow "roll out"?
Yeah, fancy west-pacific door technology. Who would have ever thought that a door can block your view if built properly? :P
The trees they're trying to keep alive have ridiculously high water consumption, almonds for instance consume 10s of litres of water for each _individual_ almond.

They need to stop growing trees like that in a desert, which is what they're doing.

The wells they are digging are tapping into the underlying aquifers that are the last resort, so they are in fact getting _free_ water while complaining about the cost. In essence they are stealing the water that other californians pay for.

At the same time they are asking for subsidies, to support a business model built on the ridiculously stupid idea of growing high water use crops in a _desert_.

The solution is to actually treat this as a free market (as most HN commenters seem to believe is the solution to everything), everyone pays the same amount for water, including farmers. This would mean farmers would actually make sane use of their water - maybe they can't grow almonds for a profit anymore, and switch to something else. They will probably fairly quickly find some new food stuff that people really want to pay lots of money for, but uses less water.

That's how things work.
Feds Nabbed for Big Bitcoin Heist Involving Gox and Silk Road
Here's a much better idea: write your makefiles in your favorite (functional/scripting) language (no special syntax required). While making, memoize calls and data-dependencies, and use ptrace to record dependencies on files. When re-making, use this recorded information to redo as little as possible.
And are still paying for AOL as it's the only way to get on the internet.
Obscure ecommerce platform ABC doesn't have an API with inventory management software XYZ. The ABC customer is considering paying a few thousand bucks for the integration with XYZ. Other ecommerce platforms have an API with XYZ. Should the customer pay for the integration or seriously consider changing ecommerce platforms? What are the critical ongoing performance and maintenance factors to consider?
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