skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> An operating system isn't an emergent property of a hard drive. An operating system emerges out of the minds of the many programmers who work on it, out of the interactions these programmers have with each other and with their users, and out of the society in which they live. It then gets installed on a hard drive by a human, after which it can function by interacting with the computer's hardware.

Perhaps I am using the term "emergent property" incorrectly, but your argument does not seem to contradict my point. That the operating system exists because many programmers intentionally developed it while interacting with one another and society at large, and that the OS only functions when the drive is connected to a functioning computer is immaterial. Intelligent consciousness was crafted by evolution rather than human hands, and it requires the hardware of a human body to function (as far as we know) rather than a computer, but the result is the same, is it not? That is, under the right conditions, a unique property appears that was not readily apparent from the existing components.

Incidentally: I should have said, "...an emergent property of the particular arrangement of bits on a hard drive" to be more precise, but I think you knew what I meant.

> Just as an operating system is a separate entity that needs to be installed onto the computer for it to be able to work, it (in the view of the author) is plausible that consciousness is something distinct from the physical matter of the body and brain.

Ok, consider the example of just the core components of a computer; CPU and RAM, and the hardware for them to communicate. This can be thought of as a very complex circuit from which the emergent property of computation arises when interpreted correctly. Without an understanding of clock timing, the CPU's instruction set architecture, binary and many other concepts, the ability to measure the voltages of various components does not make the large operation or organization apparent.

Ultimately my point was that the author was incorrect in stating, "We can deduce the characteristics of all known emergent properties by examining their constituent elements", and I wanted to give an example of a system for which we would likely not understand the emergent property had we not built it ourselves. Although I agree with the author's point that we cannot be certain of the origin of consciousness, I disagree strongly with his certainty that it is not an emergent property.
Very nice clean and simple interface! I'm not religious but this is a pretty awesome reference to link to for use in discussion online. It would be cool to be able to link parts of the text to others and even cross text (to allow for users to link similarities).
This kind of equivocation is really harmful. Nobody today says "progressive" meaning "Eisenhower," but by splitting hairs we can convey something dishonest to almost anybody who reads us.
Factoryless Goods Producing Firms (example: Apple)
I work out every morning and don't regularly drink coffee unless it's in my morning protein shake (it may sound gross but it's yummy and efficient).

This produces two nice effects: (1) I have no caffeine dependency but still feel energized throughout the day and (2) the effects of coffee are stronger when I really need a boost.

I promise if you take care of your body your work will improve in the long-term.
I have a remote team, but it's because I'm taking on 2 markets that have synergy - the US & Seoul. Both share strong ties. We have one team based in NY, the other team in Seoul.

Advantages: Remote teams can give you access to new markets & you have greater flexibility in hiring.

What it comes down to: strong communication, personal drive, the ability to work alone & trust - this is vital for people working remotely.
Yes, I had a similar experience here with my local Ham club. I used to go to meetings in my home town when I was a kid. I must have watched too many YouTube videos, but I had visions of guys swapping stories of their latest eBay spectrum analyzer repairs, home brew microwave transmitters, RF pcb designs, and RF DSP. Nope: It was the same club I had been to 20 years ago. I'm sure it differs by area, but most of the interest seems to be in Ham culture. QSL cards, bunny hunt. I still like to go, there is a ton of experience in one room; guys that have been in the industry for their whole life.
Like many others, I travel a lot by myself and I feel totally comfortable with it. I wouldn't go as far as saying it's a better experience, but it's certainly better than being stuck at home waiting for an hypothetic traveling companion. And there's a sense of freedom and independence that is somewhat rewarding.

However, I feel really awkward by myself in a bar (unless there's a show of some sort). I really feel like a loner desperate to meet other people. Interestingly, I have no problem if I'm waiting for someone.
Note: I don't think there is anything wrong with a daily cup of coffee. However, many people in our field abuse our mind and bodies in order to meet deadlines. I don't advise this.
> There is no overpopulation and no realistic prospect of it.

If everyone stopped dying, there's a very real prospect of this occurring. Unchecked, it results in the population equivalent of compound interest: when combined with our current population growth rate of 1.1%, we end up with a projected population in 100 years to over 46 billion.

Even Japan, with their currently negative growth rate of -.14%, would experience sudden and staggering (for them) population growth rate of upwards of .6%.

To address the Malthusian argument: could we alter our behaviors to reduce the birth rate to mitigate the population growth caused by "slaying the dragon"? Definitely.

Could we potentially find a way to support humanity's exponentially growing energy and dietary needs sustainably? For a little while (there are hard limits[1] to how much more energy we can create while limited to the Earth).

Could we convince everyone to cope with an even higher population density? That one's harder.

The real problem is that most of these hurdles aren't technological. They're sociological - a place where we have historically advanced much more slowly; the eradication of death worldwide couldn't tolerate slowness. China's current condition is a great example of how hard it is to impose checks on population growth.

All that said, there's an even more fundamental question: could we find a way to prevent an asteroid from hitting earth and wiping out all benefits of "slaying the dragon"? Unless something major changes, no, we could not. In my opinion, this is more important than creating any form of superlongevity. It's the difference between the continuation of humanity and our extinction.

The Earth has a ticking clock, and we don't know the position of the hands. What will we do with the time we have?

[1] http://physics.ucsd.edu/do-the-math/2011/07/galactic-scale-e...
American history (and the history of many other countries) has lots of open racism. But it doesn't follow that the building of the interstate system was essentially racist.
You're right, the major selling points had nothing to do with ease of transportation
Can't happen since that would let people more easily circumvent bans and further reveal any behind-the-scenes mechanisms to promote YC compliant statements and suppress opposing views.
good, so back to my feminist sweat pants and couch.
Newton also had the famous quote "If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants." I was taught that in school as well as the apple story. So I think the article is a tad hyperbolic.

Unless things have changed considerably when learning about atomic theory you get taught about Thompson, Rutherford and Bohr before you get to Schrodinger. Science is full of examples about building on the work of others. So I don't think kids are given unrealistic expectations that you have to be a genius rogue thinker to make a contribution.
The article reads like something that a computer generated program for fake scientific paper generation would produce. I understood almost nothing.

Can anyone ELI5?
As somone who's lived in different European and Japanese cities it just saddens me that highways replaced local public transport in many American cities rather than added to it. That really doesn't make any sense to me. The way I see it, any healthy city needs local transport like metro or streetcar so sou can do your business there without wasting time (getting back to your car, drive to the next place you need to go, find a parking lot, walk). It seems like shopping malls have replaced that 'going to the city' activity - the problem there is that you have no choice in the individual stores - they tend to have one, max two of the bigger stores you need. Low competition results in low quality - then the next big thing gets built further away, people drive there instead and the whole cycle continues. The lesson here is to stop lobbying from becoming too powerful - building highways is not the problem, ripping apart public transport is.
In essence, RSA is a crypto-algorithm that relies on the fact that "Factorization" is a very very hard mathematical problem for standard computers to solve.

For example, what are the factors of 143?? Answer: 13 x 11. Factoring is hardest when the number is made up of two prime numbers. Public Key cryptography is basically a giant puzzle based on the difficulty of factoring numbers.

Now, instead of small numbers that we humans use, what is typically done is two 2000+ bit prime numbers are chosen and then the resulting 4000+ bit number is used as the "encryption puzzle".

This 4096 bit number happened to be 231, which is 3 x 77. Huzzzahh! I guess 231 is a 4096-bit number... but generally speaking, you'd hope that the number at the center of your "encryption puzzle" would be a bit... larger. So that it'd be harder to factor it.
How does this differ from the Python support Vim already has?
RMS is a genius programmer but debating his opinions about what makes for a better website is like Debating Don Knuth's opinions about what makes for a better email client. We canonize these people and yet they are luddites.
There's really no call to be a jerk about this. Keeping this site running is a galactically annoying job, and Dan and his team --- who have repeatedly said that nothing like this happens --- do it for us round the clock, for free.
That would be tricky, because YC has business processes (applications, IIRC) that run through the same code.
You know, my feeling for rms is quite bipolar. On one hand, I respect the severity of his commitment. On the other hand, as time passes, he sounds more and more like those extremist whackjobs. Seriously.

For example, what is wrong with paying for digital services on the web? I mean, serious, what is wrong with it? Or, I found his opinion on Netflix quite funny. Netflix never intends to sell its users anything. The whole premise is to watch without buying. Like library (but you pay for the service). You can't exactly complain that you can't, says, tear apart a library book, can you? So, why DRM on Netfix a problem? The users don't own those video! Well o well.
It's not a side effect of the cure; it's a problem we're facing today. The earth is in the middle of a cosmic shooting gallery which could end any population on earth at any point in the future. We're going to quickly run up against some hard limits on how much energy we can extract from the sun and earth based on our current growth rates.

Ultimately, for humanity to survive this planet, we will need to expand. Even with all Malthusian predictions aside, humanity's existence is up against a ticking clock whose hands we can't even see.
Organize the keys in your Pocket
> Curiously, urban planners were absent — the profession barely existed at the time.

Huh? Wouldn't it have been even more curious to include people who didn't exist?
Isn't this also one of the goals of NeoVim? That you can script from any language.
Maybe he was alone, he went to buy a drink and came back to find his seat taken? I wouldn't be too surprised if leaving your jacket to claim a seat is a common practice among older generations. If I imagine the setting to be 50's/60's, and watched it in a movie, it would seem you were the assholes. At least offer him a space in the table to join you. Alas, this is the modern times, so my critique does not apply, it's only a suggestion why the older man might be angry.
The area already had an owner, just like one can own a pond.

Also, I doubt there is much new land here. This project is widening the river bed, so it's more giving back land to the river than claiming new land.
I said a selling point, not the selling point. That's a distinction clearly made in the article as well.
For anyone else (at a very high level):

- written in Scala

- $1250 or $5k("real-time") per month

- https://github.com/snowplow/snowplow
Eisenhower is from the era when the South was all Democrats and the North East was all Republicans.

The most Republican state in 1952, his first election, was Vermont and the most Democratic state was Georgia.

Point being: political parties have changed so much over the generations, they aren't very useful as labels. This is why people are so confused about our first Republican president -- that guy from Illinois that fought against state's right and to free the slaves.
HN has submissions and comments.

Submissions can be upvoted, or they can be flagged. They can't be downvoted. No one confused the upvote button for the flag button.

Comments can be upvoted, or downvoted, or flagged. People sometimes mistake the up and downvote buttons.

> User X posts a news that gets 2 points in a few minutes. With point 3 the news would stay a few seconds in the home page, enough if it is interesting for other users to be upvoted and end stable in the home page.

This doesn't happen. People can't downvote submissions. Comments don't get ranked like that on /newcomments.
I'd say heavy-handed urban freeway construction is all the more unfortunate, even tragic in how it caused the pendulum to swing too far the other way, resulting in the current culture of nimbyism and reign of misguided anti-development community activists.
As a programmer who majored in mathematics at the graduate / post graduate level, I want to add that the 'purity' thing can be interesting.

I find it a little difficult to work on programs that don't have a mathematically sound (water tight) solution, but it still needs to be fixed (hacked) in a practical way so the product can ship.

I am rarely happy with my programs. But when I am happy, its awesome.
Straight from Wikipedia:

> Close associates of Moses claimed that they could keep African Americans from using pools in white neighborhoods by making the water too cold.
Ask HN: Why do some of the engineers/hackers manage their own mail servers?
I want to know why do some engineers/hackers have email setup on their private domains. I like most of the people use gmail. Is the desire to learn how to manage the system makes people have their own private mail servers? I don't really see security or privacy as an issue unless gpg is used extensively.

Do you configure/setup/manage the mail servers yourself or is it handled by the hosting service providers?
I feel like everyone is being quick to write this off as "some random, harmless error", probably because the focus is that RSA is not broken, rather than asking what this was really about.

"The only case where this could matter would be a broken implementation of the OpenPGP key protocol that does not check if subkeys really belong to a master key."

I'd be curious to explore that further.

This kernel developer has been targeted in the past:

http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/09/who-rooted-kernel-or...

"During that time, attackers were able to monitor the activities of anyone using the kernel.org servers known as Hera and Odin1, as well as personal computers belonging to senior Linux developer H. Peter Anvin. The self-injecting rootkit known as Phalanx had access to a wealth of sensitive data, possibly including private keys used to sign and decrypt e-mails and remotely log in to servers. A follow-up advisory a few weeks later opened the possibility that still other developers may have fallen prey to the attackers."

Edit: The key in question was created the day before this post by HPA regarding the compromise:

https://lwn.net/Articles/460376/
That may be true, in all honesty, I don't know enough, but am trying to learn as much of this history as time permits. Not originally from US...

That said, US on average seems to be doing a hell of a lot better in owning up to such injustices than many other place. For example, I was bored last night and reading about the Great Northern War between Sweden and Russia circa 1700s, and somehow managed to find out about TWO distinct ethnic groups and languages that barely exist today, but were more or less thriving as late as early 1900s in the area I would have considered nothing but Russian. If you are interested, read up on the history of Vyborg and Ingria: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingria. Good luck getting the current residents to even knowledge this...

At least US is not in complete denial and that is quite laudable. Hopefully, more progress is made to that end.
Don't make the mistake of conflating liberal with progressive, republican with conservative, nor the idea that someone who values small govt is necessarily a conservative. Those are all substantially different things, even though current majorities make them SEEM equivalent.

As a thought experiment, consider that most of our nation's founders were liberal but they favored small govt. Also, there is a number of people today who believe in classical liberalism but don't identify as progressive nor conservative; they are usually called libertarian.

Libertarians would generally eschew both Eisenhower, big govt programs, AND progressivism.
My understanding is that a significant part of the motivation for the interstate system was military, which doesn't seem to get any consideration in this article. Wikipedia says:

"The Interstate Highway System gained a champion in President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who was influenced by his experiences as a young Army officer crossing the country in the 1919 Army Convoy on the Lincoln Highway, the first road across America. Eisenhower gained an appreciation of the Reichsautobahn system, the first "national" implementation of modern Germany's Autobahn network, as a necessary component of a national defense system while he was serving as Supreme Commander of the Allied forces in Europe during World War II. He recognized that the proposed system would also provide key ground transport routes for military supplies and troop deployments in case of an emergency or foreign invasion."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Interstate_Highway_System
"So he thinks emails can't be spied on."

Actually... if you use a console based email program (like pine) that you use over SSH, then all of your email to other users on the same system never traverse a network.

If it's a web based interface, then you need to worry about stripping SSL and rogue CAs and all of those threats.

But if two people SSH into the same system and send email to each other with pine (or elm or whatever), the email itself never traverses a network (it's just a local copy operation) and the reading of the email is over SSH.

It may interest you to know that not one single piece of rsync.net internal company email has ever traversed a network.
Interesting if true, it will once again put wind behind the push to get Professional Engineer status for software engineers.
Well the projects were successful, it's just people didn't care as much about disenfranchisement at the time. So of course the projects didn't magically care about that. In this case the federal government succeeded pretty well in doing what it set out to.
RSA without CRT optimization of private operations will work regardless of how many factors modulus has, if key was generated correctly. With "correctly" meaning using correct value of phi(n), which is not (p-1)*(q-1) when either of p or q are composite (which in effect means that it will not work at all with essentially all interesting implementations).

IIRC PKCS#1 even supports more than two modulus factors in it's private key format (not that it is particularly useful for anything).
I subscribe to reddit's /r/retrofuturism and I've formulated a hypothesis about this. The future we used to want was full of what I like to call "garden cities" [1][2][3][4]. Massive structures spaced far away from each other and in between carefully curated green spaces. The obvious problem with this vision is that getting around anywhere turns into a huge problem. This appealed to transportation companies and car makers came out on top and we ended up with the rest of the problems, without ending up with the garden cities. It turns out these visions of the future are bad for a whole host of reasons, transport was only one.

1 - http://static1.1.sqspcdn.com/static/f/415544/5082948/1260951...

2 - http://www.fldesign.net/blog/images/imgRetroFuturism3.jpg

3 - https://youtu.be/Rx6keHpeYak?t=379

4 - http://www.wired.com/2014/07/a-north-korean-architects-crazy...
GM Motorama Exhibit 1956
This seems like it would make more sense for Filld and consumers on a recurring delivery model.
Los Angeles is the prime example of it.

So what are we doing now? We are having to build it back up! Unfortunately, the current construction is a far cry from what the old red car network was and doesn't really touch the San Fernando valley in a meaningful way. I am excited about the Expo line phase 2 though...
Chalking everything up as racism is a real one dimensional way to look at this issue. You really got to think through process in context... The world had just been through two devastating world wars. The past was 30 years of depravity... People were focused on building a better future.

I think in those days, nobody saw vibrant neighborhoods. They saw cold water flats, often desperate poverty and the legacy of the past. A rare visionary would look at a 1950 industrial waterfront or tenement neighborhood and see a valuable public resource that the public needed to be connected with.
Approximating images with Voronoi diagrams
He's trying to make up for getting rolled on Celebrity Jeopardy?
One other good reason for fixing it is that upvoting comments now has the dual function of both expressing agreement and logging them in your profile (which, as you know, is now in parity with how upvoting stories works).

It's too bad that accidentally downvoting a comment means that you cannot ever save it in your profile.
Tom Hall – What Do We Have in Computers (SICM)
Does `#pragma glslify : foo = require('foo')` leave an awful taste in anyone elses mouth?

Not sure if it's because it's totally opaque, or because it adds a dependency and potentially a whole heap load of transitive dependancies. You're putting your game/app/whatever's performance in the hand of someone else (moreso than for infrequently run CPU code), not only hoping they didn't write a crappy implementation of whatever, but hoping nothing they depended on did either.

Not to mention, they might have done it differently than you would. For example, lots of times you want to do gamma correction using square/square root, and not using pow 2.2 (monitors vary so much that this is in all likelihood just as/nearly as correct, and it's vastly cheaper).

... Also, you'd think in a discussion about how to do most of these things, they'd actually show the code and not just say 'oh a library magically handles it'
YOW Lambda Jam 2014 Videos (Functional Programming Conference)
I never said that TP is more sanitary. I was more concerned about poopy water dripping from your hands while getting the soap, or poopy water splashing onto your legs, etc. However as I've never used a bidet, perhaps these aren't problems.

I think if you really want to get clean after a particularly messy poop, the best way is to have a shower from the crotch down.