skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You seem to be confusing finance with retail banking.

>Didn't people manage somehow to have a house without something which name suggests it will be paid for the whole life?

Well, for a while people were indentured farmers, then you got people renting tenements and apartments in cities, with some land-grant family farms/homsteads being passed down through inheritance. Mass suburban home ownership is mostly a post-WWII phenomenon, and mostly funded through credit. Though for a time, most people got their mortgages from community credit unions (or similar), those were still financial institutions, just in decentralized cooperative form. Big banks ended up being able to provide better rates through sheer scale.

>A casino, right? On average you lose, but for a price you buy a hedge against unforeseen?

My mother had a brain hemorrhage last week, we paid about $1000 for $500k+ of medical care. The insurance industry works only because insurance companies can invest their giant pool of money and see large enough gains to both cover all their costs and make it worth their while. Insurance premiums aren't sitting around as cash.

Your point?

>that's those same deposits

Nope, it's the interest on those deposits, the core service of the financial services industry. Retirement is entirely predicated on compound interest.

> Same thing. Banks don't "fund" - they "serve". Money aren't theirs, but theirs', banks', depositors.

It's hard to imagine how you could possibly be more wrong. We're not talking about business checking accounts here, we're talking about banks investing in businesses. Banks absolutely do fund businesses, and own (shares in) those businesses in return.

An investment bank owns a business and, in turn, its checking accounts in retail banks.

I don't think you understand banks' roles in philanthropy and education - successful nonprofit institutions like universities draw their operating budgets from interest on their endowments. Were it not possible to park $x billion in account and draw $y million a year in interest for literally forever, many such institutions could not exist.
How does caching work in this scenario? Caching REST responses is fairly straightforward but caching arbitrarily complex queries to a single endpoint seems much more difficult.

Sorry if he answers this in his talk. I haven't had a chance to watch it yet.
The weird TempleOS has similar features:
http://www.codersnotes.com/notes/a-constructive-look-at-temp...
You wouldn't want to use this. The key exchange is vulnerable to replay and identity misbinding attacks. To fix the replay attack, you also need to sign a nonce from the peer (or its ephemeral public key) to prove that the message is fresh. To fix the identity misbinding attack, you also need to sign the identity of the peer. Then it's probably secure, but the protocol would lack identity hiding. You really want a key exchange protocol like SIGMA, which is secure and provides identity hiding.

See the following presentation, which presents insecure key exchange protocols (the key exchange from the article is on page 4) while building up to SIGMA: https://www.ietf.org/proceedings/52/slides/ipsec-9.pdf

As you can see, this stuff is hard and you really shouldn't be designing your own. CurveZMQ (basically, DJB's CurveCP over TCP) is probably a better choice if you want a NaCl-based secure channel. CurveZMQ also happens to be pretty well documented if you want to learn about what it takes to design a secure protocol: http://curvezmq.org/page:read-the-docs
The cigarette problem does seem to make a compelling case for recreational drugs being a more complicated problem than most people anticipate.

Most people put themselves firmly in a pro- or anti- legalization camp, but in reality there are major problems (and solved problems) with both approaches.

Fully legalize and you'll encounter this horrible scenario where big companies emerge to profit off addictions. They'll lobby governments domestically and abroad. They'll engage in all kinds of shady practices to protect their businesses, just as cigarette companies have. (the oft-proposed solution to the flawed status quo)

Don't legalize and you'll miss many opportunities to help addicts, allow the black market to continue, etc. All the things you're already familiar with. (the status quo)

It's complicated.
Yeah this is clearly by someone who doesn't really understand how Tor works. Revealing exit node IP addresses is completely useless—this is a fundamental tenant of Tor's security. In fact, I believe that at any given time you can easily query the network for a list of all Tor exit nodes.

I think the "why I now think Tor is the devil" question is answered in the opening—because it has illegal/immoral stuff on it. I'm not sure why anyone would be surprised about this though...

EDIT: In fact, I don't think that the security scanner was even that effective: "around 5-10% of the registered users chose to run the scanner" (later, he changes this to 4-7%) and that "some of the users who opted to run the software appeared to be government or private researchers". I don't know what percentage of people using Tor for illegal activity would be incautious enough to run some random program on their computer, but I would be surprised if it was very high.
Its possible to borrow money, blow through the cash on some unproductive investment and then be unable to repay the principle on the agreed-upon schedule.
> I thought my taxes pay for that :) . Do you mean "finances" as "machinery which helps moving money"? I think there are several definitions there.

You are correct in that the money used to build highways etc. does start as your tax dollars. However, I would imagine that it is then held (and allowed to appreciate) in the form of a reasonably liquid portfolio of cash, bonds, and equities. I suppose you could technically reduce finance to "moving money around", but that is such a gross simplification that it would be like saying programmers just type for a living.

> Nah, that's those same deposits. I largely pay myself for retirement, by saving the whole life.

If your entire retirement savings are in simple savings accounts (i.e. in a bank instead of a brokerage account), I am afraid you are losing out on quite a substantial return that could allow you to either retire earlier or enjoy a higher annual income during retirement (or both).

> > Funds the college fund that paid for your school
> Again, it's either another example of "moving money", or an oddity - as people managed to get educated even without banks.

The statement that college funds, loan programs, and scholarship endowments (all powered by "finance") pay for the education of practically every student in the country is true, unless you save for college in a piggy bank.

> you ought to share risks and benefits

If you want to share the risks and benefits, there's an easy way to do that: get a brokerage account. If you have deposited your money, the basic assumption is that you are willing to accept a lower rate of return in exchange for a (practically) risk-free place to store your money.

depends on how much you want to rely on the FDIC
Bill+Gates's+Top+10+Rules+for+Success
Let's play a game:

As long as X can X freely in their own X while their children are there and unable to escape it, the X has not been eliminated.

...

As long as parents can endlessly stock junk food freely in their own homes and cars while their children are there and unable to escape it, the influence of junk food has not been eliminated.

The problem, fundamentally, is that people can be inconsiderate of others. I would classify someone who smokes in their car with non-smokers in their presence, children and adults alike, as jerks. It's a dick move. But don't try to legislate against every dick move - teach people to be more thoughtful of others.
There should be a bot that posts everything that Matt Levine writes to HN -- It's such great quality writing from someone deeply knowledgeable in finance.

Another good article where he discusses the Goldman software developer who 'stole' company code:

http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2015-07-07/goldman-cod...
I can relate to this article. I go to bed at 1am and get up at 5:45. I prefer to be at work by 6:30am and work solid 12+ hour days, with ideally a gym session mid-morning, a run at lunchtime, and 2-3 hours more sport in the evening. Dinner is often at 10:30pm. Basically, I can go all day at full speed and never get tired from mental or physical effort. I'd pack even more into each day if my partner would let me.

Sometimes I worry my body will break. That rarely stops me though, so long as I get 4.5 hours' sleep. Less than 4 and my concentration span is reduced, I get susceptible to colds and am more easily irritated.

Clearly there's a genetic difference here. I count myself very lucky for my extra productive hours.
The only good innovation in the intervening century was the ATM..
Someone somewhere is.
Netflix Is Not Afraid of the Big Screen
Does 1) mean we can make use of advanced optimizations (like dead code elimination) on libraries written in one of these formats without any additional configuration?

If so, that would resolve what I consider to be one of the biggest barriers for CLJS/JS interop.
Yes. For instance, before invention of vector notation, many laws of physics were extremely complex. Before Copernicus system, describing the movements of planets was very complex too.

While not hundred percent sure, it is highly possible that finance complexity will magically disappear once we get a proper model for money transactions. I certainly hope so, because a better model means more means to solve economic issues.

Right now economists are like the physicians in the time of Molière, they understand nothing and have only two cures: bloodletting and lavement (change interest rate and remove taxes)
I think the implication is its the devil because mostly Tor is used for pedophilic reasons - drugs, counterfeiting or political protest (I'd assume) are almost insignificant in comparison to pedophile traffic.
Glosses over the role of dynastic succession as a primary motivation to institute what we now call monarchic control over subjects.

As much as I dig ontological psycho-historical speculation I find myself beginning to realize just how different we moderns are from the ancients. I fear that any resemblance between our own systems and those that existed several millennia ago would, like "Business Secrets of the Pharaohs", be purely coincidental.

It just so happened on this moist summer eve that as I stumbled upon this link I happened to be perusing Tagore's Sādhanā.

In "The Relation of the Individual to the Universe" he indeed speculates about what caused the ancient forest-dwellers to acquire wealth, build cities and become kings. After failing to become one with Nature, the ancient sadhus sought to emulate the wider Cosmos in a controllable microverse, in which they could achieve a limited all-consciousness.

Perhaps somewhat analogously to the way mathematicians in the 1930's, stymied by Gödel's proof that axiomatic formalism would always remain necessarily incomplete, created their own artificial oasis of finite and deterministic binary logic in the form of early computing.
I think what they meant was more along the lines of "for upvoting the things that are supposed to not be what the website is about".

If you are referring to the "Unless those users are punished for failing to evaluate."

I think that was meant to mean "unless those users are punished for not distinguishing whether the thing was in an appropriate location, and therefore upvoting something which does not belong where it is."

Not sure, but seems like a likely interpretation to me.
Novgorod: The Archaeology of Medieval Russia
Speaking of smalltalk, was project Oberon inspired by Alan Kay's STEPS project to implement a full OS + apps in under 20k LoC?

http://www.vpri.org/pdf/tr2008004_steps08.pdf
I'm pretty sure the answer is yes. I watched the video a few hours ago, but I think I remember him saying that.

Of course, just like the current state of affairs, your library has to not thwart advanced optimizations (using eval, accessing properties by strings, etc).
I got a 403 error while accessing the site.
The caching happens at the "DB" level, where it can happen more efficiently (e.g., Datomic caches segments on peers).
I don't think that's true. The darknet drug markets are insanely popular, just take a look at https://www.reddit.com/r/darknetmarkets for a small taste.
NASA’s New Horizons on Track for Pluto Flyby
> 41:15

Pretty sure Apple won't approve of being able to update iOS apps outside of their regular release cycle. If they don't care, I should be doing that now with my HTML5 app.
Are there any index funds that track the entire market? Wouldn’t investing in all companies solve the problem of index tracking?
The opinion about Seveneves varies quite a lot. I found it to be really bad and a great disappointment, and I am a huge Stephenson fan. Anathem being one of the best reads of my life. Seveneves is far from being a new Anathem.
Did you try the "Embeddings -> Forbid <AUDIO> / <VIDEO>".
Strangely enough I find myself increasingly curious about this. I've got all sorts of perl utility code sitting around that might gain from it.
> I can't apply force to individual atoms of the cup. I can only apply force on a large number of the atoms of the cup at once.

But that number is still much smaller than the total number of atoms in the cup. So you're depending on a relatively small number of atoms to transmit the force you exert to a much larger number of atoms.

> If I took a thin thread strong enough to support the weight of the cup, and threaded it through the handle of the cup, I would be applying the same total force to the cup, and I would be applying it to a much smaller number of atoms, but I think the number of atoms the force would be applied across would still be very large.

You're right. The number of atoms would still be way too large to introduce any issues with removing atoms from the cup instead of lifting the cup, at least for any material that's reasonably solid. (If you want to test that statement, try lifting an ordinary cup with a very thin thread. You might break a styrofoam or paper cup, but you won't break a ceramic coffee mug.)

To really apply a force to a single atom, you would have to use special equipment (which I'm not even sure exists at our current level of technology). If you could, in fact, apply the same force you apply to lift the cup to a single atom, it might indeed be sufficient to remove that single atom from the cup (I haven't looked up specific numbers) instead of lifting the entire cup. (In fact, it might depend on what the cup was made of: a styrofoam cup would certainly lose an atom, even a ceramic cup might, but a cup made of diamond or carbon nanotubes might not. Material strengths vary over many orders of magnitude.)

> removing a single atom probably does not require 10^3 times the force to remove due to the fact that the other atoms nearby do not have a similar force applied to them, I don't think (? but maybe it does?)

As I just noted, material strengths (which are a measure of the forces between atoms) vary over many orders of magnitude. Certainly more than 3; possibly as many as 9. So, as I said above, it might well depend on the material.

> I've been assuming that you are, like me, just trying to reason this out, as opposed to actually, unlike me, really knowing the physics behind how materials stay together. If that is not the case, oops, I have made an error.

I'm basing my statements on the actual physics involved.

> the gypsum pillar seems to be something that people would classify as an object, it seems like it would make sense to revise whatever definition we choose for "object" to include such a pillar.

That's up to whoever is using the term. Different people use the term "object" for different purposes. In any case, this is really a question about language, not physics.

> seems to say that water has a higher tensile strength than gypsum

Note that this is for a particular case, very thin columns of water in capillary tubes, where the water can actually act somewhat like a solid, at least in resisting tensile forces (i.e., being pulled apart). A liquid in bulk doesn't really have a meaningful tensile strength.
A rainbow table? The key space is 2^256. If you're talking about building a table containing the ciphertext of "HELO" with all possible keys, that's totally infeasible. As you correctly state, NaCl requires each nonce/key pair to be unique. If you start the nonce at 0 for a given key and increment it for each message, as is commonly done, that satisfies the requirement and is secure.
I predict that middleman entities across all verticals will suffer an almost complete collapse due to enhanced automation of trade, including more complex cases of trade in services or renting of physicalia that need to be underscored by community feedback and reputation systems. This will be as true for Uber as for Airbnb, as true for Amazon (the retail interface only; not the warehousing or the IaaS) as for Ebay. I am in fact working on this problem. If anyone's interested in a long term bet and development in this direction, get in touch.
Some of the technical points of this article are simply wrong...

> The exit node IP address of the user was easily obtained using the two different methods discussed briefly above.

This is really not a vulnerability but simply how tor, and the internet at large, works - hidden services by design protect the service not the user (the user is protected by tor by default) - what the author actually did here was "leak" their non-hidden services IP.

> and true external IP address (see partial data example to the above). And to answer the second question, “no”, this did not involve the placement of malicious malware. Read on…

The author then goes on to state that they gave the users malicious malware to run which revealed their ip address. They justify that this was not malware by stating:

> It should be noted that this was not malware per se. It did not replicate and was run voluntarily by the user. The user was notified that a “security scan” was going to be run on their machine and they freely chose to run the scan.

The author then goes on to publish a list of tor exit nodes with tor user agents...which they could have gotten directly from the tor directory services...

And, as pointed out by others, the author never really goes on to state why they think Tor is the devil - they built a honeypot and were disgusted by the flies it attracted....I'm not really sure what they were expecting...
Taxes also had a lot to do of the complexity of the system.
I think we're talking about documenting the interface that or-tools provides. Even someone with an excellent understanding of the underlying concepts still needs to know exactly how or-tools exposes those concepts.
Striped Shark Mitigation Suit to Help Prevent Shark Attacks
You need a mortgage because you don't have $400,000 in cash sitting around.

You need insurance because you don't have the personal finances to adequately cover the risk of "life"
> On two different occasions I contacted the FBI about the project and offered to provide full sets of data that I had collected.

The FBI twice rejecting a set of information that could have reasonably led to the arrest of several pedophiles seems like a big mistake.
A list of Birch Bark texts : http://gramoty.ru/index.php?key=bb&date%5B%5D=all&city%5B%5D...
I use a mix of asking about what's on your resume (chronological works nicely, so I understand why you switched jobs and how your skills evolved) and a set of standard technical questions (so I can compare candidates over time). I'll usually dig deeper technically until you give up. Giving up doesn't mean failing, on the contrary.
This is just based on what he said, which was based on what he observed from the traffic to his honeypots. Understandably you probably cant create a honeypot to gauge political activism so that might be hard to measure :D
265M Reasons to Look for Startup Funding in Austin, Texas
"Another question is if the market is ready for a $50B+ IPO. The current IPO record holder, Alibaba, was valued at $25B."

He misunderstood the reference; Alibaba raised $25b in their ipo but was valued much higher ($231b). There's plenty of room for a company worth 70b to ipo.
I'd simply be interested in seeing more of working people's spending money available to increase the economy. I am not sure that this must be at the expense of banks.

One natural experiment in the effects of speculation is home prices in Texas ( which taxes land rents more than most states ) vs. Florida ( which taxes them less ).

It would also help address some examples of misallocation of land. Since the tax base is now largely market driven, it's all but impossible to game.
Another problem with Java applets was that they were slow as hell for that time.
This is really nicely done, thank you!
Smoke a pack of cigarettes over the course of a few weeks, and then pay close attention to your body the first week you stop. You WILL crave cigarettes during that week. That is the feeling of physiological dependence. The pack of cigarettes has affected your body in ways you can't control. It isn't a "personality" thing (like other addictions which are purely psychological). Although, obviously, people will react differently to this subsequent craving, and will have different levels of strength in resisting it, if they desire to do so.

I do agree with you that the occasional cigarette can be very pleasurable.
Isn't there an argument for abstracting and preparing data at the backend level, rather than facing the db nearly directly from the frontend?
I'm not familiar with the approach either, but the video mentioned that you would mainly execute these queries using a client side library. The library would be backend agnostic, and offer remote sync capabilities.

So I believe you can set the primary backend for the library to a local, in-memory data-structure to serve as the local cache, and have the library handle synchronization between the local cache and a remote backend that can also execute these queries.
The message board nerd who was also a crack shot at driving revenue growth is a bit of a unicorn.

I wonder if this is part of the problem. This is one reason why problems with Yishan-style CEOs needs to be fixed I think.
PewDiePie's response to making $7.4M is exactly why he's so successful
The author appears to believe that "Tor is the devil" because "4,000-5,000 hidden services are running at any given time. Secondly, the content served by these sites is almost universally illegal or immoral (by my definition anyway). A conservative estimate would be maybe 1 out of 200 or so hidden service websites contain content I would deem worthy of the protection an anonymous network provides. Sites featuring free speech dumps or libraries of hard-to-find underground literature are few and far between on the Dark Web."
"full sets of data" seem to include Tor exit node IP addresses (public information that you can obtain from the Tor directory service) and a few possible real IP addresses—but not ones he can directly tie to any actual CP. As he says, "Admittedly, after introducing the security scanner, traffic patterns changed. Scans on the server dropped and some of the users who opted to run the software appeared to be government or private researchers. Most visitors were reluctant to run the security scanner." Later he says that between 4 and 7 percent of his registered users ran the scanner. He never says how many registered users he had, and never said how many uploaded child porn or could be directly connected to it (and how many of those ran the scanner)

I'm not surprised the FBI turned him down.
GoPro and Red Bull Should Merge and Become a Full-Time Media Company