skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is just an idea but, does depiction of sex lead to horny people who end up accidentally making babies which leads to abortions or often unwanted kids which often leads to dropping out of school and poverty?

On other hand depiction of murder and other violence appears to lead to nothing. In fact as is often pointed out even though apparently media is more violent than ever violent crime rates are down.

I don't know. I know I've seen articles about studies that claim violent movies make people more violent in the short term, and I've also seen studies that show the crime rates are down while apparently violent entertainment is up.

I have no idea if similar studies have been done for sexualized entertainment, influence on sexual behavior and unintended consequences. Maybe you could look at various cultures, the amount of easily accessible sexualized entertainment, and sex related consequences those cultures have. I suspect it might be similar to violence where countries with more accessible sexual entertainment have less sexual consequences? But of course those same countries also have many other cultural differences as well.
Please, Let Me Run Twitter
Eh, this'll end up being a metaphysical debate, but I think that's much too strong.

If someone is of average or higher natural ability, yes, hard work and perseverance will be the biggest determinant of outcome. But someone who's genuinely pretty dumb, wholly socially incompetent, or exceptionally disabled or ill will have massive difficulties being successful regardless of their perseverance.

Which isn't to say that hard work is useless to the people on the lower end of the spectrum: far from it, a stupid hard-worker not only can find themselves with a decent enough job but will usually be able to keep it. It's just they lack the ability to set themselves up for good opportunities like that and to limit downside risk from one-off events. Luck of the draw will end up dominating outcomes.

(Obviously, most people who comment on internet forums, particularly a specialized forum like HN, are not only likely to be average or above but also to have extremely limited contact with people significantly below the mean, so if you're reading this, your life outcomes probably are determined by your own work ethic. On that note, cheers to a productive Sunday!)
The modern policy of no customer support by these services is a little worrying.

I'm in a similar situation with google suspending my gmail account because I tried to make play store purchases while traveling (apparently this is a "suspicious access pattern").

Now I'm out 5 years worth of emails and have no way of contacting google (Despite being a paying google apps customer and registered on their payroll system). Frankly, I'd rather like to be able to pay to receive some support from these companies.

Oh well, at least they made my emails bounce.

tl;dr why don't web companies offer paid support to their users?
What are the small things that tell about a person's psychology and personality
It's a big shell game, hospitals send big bills because they can't legally bill people differently and they know insurance companies are going to be paying pennies on the dollar for their procedures so naturally they crank it up so those pennies from insurance companies will cover their costs knowing they will never see anything close to what's on that bill.
In other nations, universal health care is actually cheaper for the state per capita than our system in the US.

Source: http://www-tc.pbs.org/prod-media/newshour/photos/2012/10/02/...
Yes, and bearings too. For a bearing that will work under heavy load, the balls have to be "pre loaded," meaning that they are actually deformed just a bit, so they don't lose contact with the bearing races.

All of these things are examples of structures held together by springs.
I work without branches but with a large number of good tests, and it works like a charm. On the other hand, I know people who can spend several days to merge their one week changes back to the master which is a great waste of time and really boring.
I've never heard of this being used for hybrid C64/PC discs before, but the technique itself isn't all that new - as far back as the late 1980s there were dual-format Atari ST and Amiga discs which would work on either system. Some were mounted as cover discs on magazines, and indeed at least one magazine managed a three-way disc that was ST, Amiga and PC compatible.

Some released software was dual-format as well - I particularly recall the Atari ST/Amiga version of Starglider. While the ST and Amiga boxes were both separately labelled, the actual disc inside was the same, and worked on either machine.
You have a few superhero stories exploring these themes (eg, The Authority or the old Squadron Supreme miniseries from the 80s), but yes, most superheroes seem to lack ambition and imagination.
I thought not meant to be insulting but hopeful comcast would then improve.
To answer your question, for me it really depends on the site and the product/service. I usually will dig around on the site to make sure it is what I am looking for and then click a get started button if I like what I see. As someone else pointed out if the individual viewing the page is your target audience and they are hesitant to click a "get started" button, the page and/or site failed in conveying the value of the product/service.

There is a lot of psychology that goes into the wording of buttons, and while you may tell yourself "oh that would never work for me", the truth is that subconsciously it probably does work and you just don't realize it sometimes.

I have always found these two articles informative (actually the whole CopyHackers site is a pretty good resource in general):

http://copyhackers.com/2012/11/how-to-find-and-eliminate-fri...

http://copyhackers.com/optimize-your-business-online-trainin...
I'm not certain he meant to imply a divide between smart people and non-coders, I think he was referencing Mohammed's comment that people here were very smart people and that he felt out of place in them. To which the parent of your comment responded that it's okay to not be the smartest person, as long as you have perseverance.
Assuming Instagram is behind this, it is bad business to do that. Instagram by itself is nothing, it's users are what made the service, and showing a lack of respect for them it is their worse publicity.
Because he was going to die (more than likely) without intervention?
> The offshoring of IT workers by Disney, the quintessential wholesome American icon, struck a nerve.

And good for that, the struck nerve. But Disney, being a hyper-large corporation, is wholesome only by managed reputation. Like any other such corporation, they are amoral.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amorality
Annual salaries are not legal contracts. You are paid periodically, biweekly, monthly, whatever, and should the business go under, so does your job and salary with it. I don't see how they are comparable at all.

Predicting the future with 100% guarantees is impossible, obviously. Fortunately, humans have been able to develop models that are able to assist us in predicting the future with some reliability (the seasons for help with farming, weather forecasting for a few days, etc), but being able to say "over the next 30 years, we expect to earn an 8% average rate of return per year" is in a whole other league.

It is true that defined benefit pensions are deferred compensation. Problem is push comes to shove, the world doesn't offer guarantees. How much infrastructure will be neglected? How many cuts to education will it take? We all know the military won't be touched, in any significant way.

Defined benefit pensions are a nice dream, if you ignore the possibilities of corruption (it's still people controlling a huge pot of money, in an extremely opaque manner), not meeting expected rates of return, people living longer than expected, and finally....the tax base moving away or saying the hell with it, we'll just change the laws to tax pensions or not pay them.
A very nice home-made version was featured on Hackaday recently: http://hackaday.com/2015/07/07/on-demand-paper-clips/
Additional advice: During the minibreaks, be sure to interview with a company that isn't terrible for your work/life balance.
Unfettered, for-profit medical system.

In short, capitalism.

The same toxic structure is at work in the US penal system.
The worse advise. If anything, he should just keep away from Instagram and never go back.
I attempted to use my own product, and it was unbearable
Iron Man is an alcoholic, Batman has some deep psychological issues, yadda yadda. Same thing.
Command line based personal assistant developed in python
Jango is a command line based personal assistant which helps you in your day to day tasks. Not a big shot, but yes it is something. Have a look.
https://pypi.python.org/pypi/jango
Slot drives cannot handle mini CD's? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini_CD
And this while thousands or more spam bot accounts are added daily, and while Instagram could easily ask or force the user to change is handle. Anyway, good to know.
Side note: have you tried memory systems like Anki (spaced repetition)? As I've gotten older, it's been a godsend: my ability to pick up memory on the fly is shot, but Anki helps a lot. You're in a different, unfortunate situation, but it's worth a shot.
>I think the big reason for suggesting web development to beginners is interpreters and their ecosystem. Learning an interpreted language is much easier, IMO, for beginners than JIT or AOT compiled languages because the tool chains dev/build/deploy are simpler and many times invisible to the user.

If you want to do web dev in python then you need a local python environment setup (which is actually trivial on desktop Linux or OS X), and that is no different from somebody using python for local programming. Except their code will be far simpler since they can just read standard input and write to standard output, without having to worry about parsing https requests and constructing valid HTML just so that the results of their basic fizzbuzz code is visible. And they won't need to worry about deploying a server, setting up the domain names, setting up a web server and so on.

Setting up a server is also more intimidating because you move into the world of things costing real money and your mistakes being publicly visible. If there's bugs in my small local programs that I write to educate myself then nothing happens the fact majority of the time (rm -rf style bugs can happen of course). If I screw up deploying my server, or do something insecure in php etc, then there are public facing consequences of that (my site gets pwned).
How does the existence of a paperclip maximizer rest on the assumption of recursive self-improvement? Making nanotech weapons to stop humans from shutting you down and thereby reducing the expected number of paperclips doesn't require exponentially increasing amounts of intelligence. It only requires a fixed amount of intelligence.

Also you should justify "this is clearly [1] not the case". You're probably taking the "necessarily" phrasing really literally, instead of as "with non-negligible risk", and thinking of corporations or evolution as "superhuman"? On the other hand, evolution and corporations respectively did and plan to produce smarter entities so that's not so clear cut.

1: https://medium.com/science-and-technology/how-to-spot-a-weak...
It is an interesting piece of software. What is the differentiator to other social media account management tools?

And I am not sure, but I guess you are mixing the sites from chargeloop and unify or so?
http://tryunify.com/guidelines.html
Open-Source Information Reveals Pro-Kremlin Web Campaign
Out of interest, was it this: http://prog21.dadgum.com/ ?

Because if so, I had a very similar experience. I also find material that has a lot of interesting in-text self-links will suck me in, ala TV Tropes, Wikipedia, etc.
> whether the state can honor expensive obligations that a lot of people are depending on -- and that distinguishing them is pedantry.

Distinguishing them isn't pedantic at all. First, there is a big difference between a defined benefit pension and say Medicare (which is the bulk of the unfunded liability). The former is a dollar amount people expect to receive. The latter is a general public service. It's like school funding or transportation. Nobody has an entitlement to receive a particular level of any of those services, even if they rely on them.

Second, and perhaps more importantly, not being able to "honor expensive obligations" is not the end of the story. It certainly matters what happens when the ends don't meet.

> "oh, I guess I don't have to worry about this anymore"

I didn't say we don't have to worry about it anymore, I said it's a different problem. The pension crisis in many cities and states is an existential problem. They can't cut benefits, so they have no choice but to raise taxes and cut services, driving away their tax base. It'll lead to a vicious cycle that'll gut these local economies. At the federal level, cutting retiree benefits will hurt some people, but the government won't be forced into a position of fundamentally compromising its competitiveness vis-a-vis other countries.

> Let's assume for a minute that Illinois did have legal recourse -- say, but implementing a special tax on pensions. Would you feel any better? I wouldn't; someone is still getting screwed, the situation is still bad.

Yes! I'd rather see pensioners get less than they expected than see tax hikes and service cuts that accelerate the trend of people migrating from places like Illinois to places like Georgia.
they sacrificed >100k guatemalans on the false pretence that they had to 'stop a communist state in their hemisphere' - we later found out it was all made up rubbish (this was after the people were dead) and the actual reason was because their mates were in united fruit company.
I almost always want to see a prominent video or screenshots first (or for developer libs/services an examples page). So I'll look for that link before clicking any big buttons.

When I see "Get started" I usually think "sign up" so it's not going to be the first thing I click.
> The modern policy of no customer support by these services is a little worrying.

I've got a mixed feeling about this.

On one hand, because a friend and I operate a mostly-free opensource online service, I can appreciate the cost associated with even reading customer e-mails and triaging which one is important to reply to. For a free service, especially one that has millions of users, it's just not economically justified to run effective customer support. And it's not a good move to take someone's account away, but then again, it's a free service so pretty much the account belongs to the company, not the person.

On the other hand, not being able to get any support from Google when their APIs change and break our stuff is annoying (keeping it polite :).

Perhaps there is a model there for services such as Instagram to offer paid support. I'd gladly pay for Google developer support if that was an option, but it doesn't seem that they care enough to offer it.
I am not the author of the post but I thought it was interesting because it's related to something I've been thinking for a while: the "namespace" for humans is quite limited.

World's population grow fast and practically no new first or last names have been introduced in the last years, therefore the chances of having another person with your exact same first and last names and more exposure than you is growing exponentially. Plus, thanks to the Internet, if someone with name X does something "remarkable" that name X will be associated to that individual forever, creating a "digital shadow" over those future individuals with the same name.

I remember someone who had my exact same first and last name, and he had bought the domain [fist_name][last_name].com ... The annoying problem was that person was also a developer and his website was awful. I was always worried that someone could google me, find his site and, as he was a developer too, think that poor site was mine.
But I'm not saying provide free download as an alternative - I'm saying provide binaries only with the 1/2$ fee - if the person doesn't want to pay they still have the torrents and the source.

For example if github provided this service instead of binary releases - you would receive say 50% of the income they keep 50% for bandwidth/service. If the person uses alternative means than you're not spending resources anyway.
> We should pay them every dollar we owe them. It isn't their problem if they paid in every year and the government did not meet its obligations.

It's a lot more complicated than that. School districts can unilaterally give raises to teachers, which increases the tax-payer's burden via additional pension obligations when that teacher retires. The most egregious form this takes are large raises in the few years before someone retires to "supercharge" their pension. Should the tax-payers be on the hook for obligations that were unilaterally created by local school districts? If a school board creates a new assistant/associate/full superintendent/principal position and elevates an existing teacher to that position, they've just added hundreds of thousands of dollars to the tax-payer's bill in the form of additional pension obligations with no approval whatsoever.

People on public pension systems are owed a fair deal that gives them a secure retirement. Obviously at a minimum they should receive what they paid in, compounded yearly at 6.7% (adjusted for inflation). But they're also going to have to bit the bullet for the greater good, just as I'm going to have to do when I lose at least 25% of social security when I retire. We've got a fixed pie of blood and treasure and we owe it to all people to spend that pie wisely, even if it means adjusting pensions.
John Markoff – The Next Wave
Create random JSON objects in node or CLI
No, the problem here is that elected officials are given access to the pension fund to begin with. If the pension were set up independently and the government simply handed over their bargained-for monthly contribution to the independent fund then we wouldn't have the issue of politicians running populist "loot the pension fund" campaigns.
It would depend on what you were actually feeling behind your appraising comment, would it not?

On the one hand, one tacitly feels contemptuous towards the other group and tries to come across as dispassionate in their appraising comment. On the other hand, one feels considerate (or neutral) and simply calls a spade a spade in their appraising comment.

When you take the entire context of people's interactions over time into consideration, the former is likely to be hurting (overall) and the later is likely to be helping (overall) even though certain specific instances may come across as the opposite.

tl;dr - feelings and vibes (over time) matter more than words (in individual instances).
huh? The story ends with her succeeding at being a cop, not a developer.
> A collision is unfolding between law enforcement devoted to fighting crime and terrorism

However, the methods that they've decided to use, which can be summarized as "knowing everything," means that in raw numbers they're fighting law abiding citizens.
There's a lot more to a search engine than MapReduce.
This is assuming that instagram held the only copy of those pictures (so loss leads to IP being destroyed). I doubt anyone would keep the only copy of any serious IP on a third-party free service. (just to make things clear - I'm not defending instagram, but deleting photos on a service users don't pay for can hardly be called 'destroying IP')
And it looks like it is being used to create this, http://www.duangle.com/nowhere - A Psychedelic RPG
It is a game. Insurance companies and government insists on paying pennies on the dollar of the cost, so the medical care profession pretends like it charges some large multiple of the cost so that the "pennies on the dollar" is much closer to the true cost. The government and big insurance companies have contracts stating they only pay the lowest published price, so you can't give anyone else a more sensible price. There are all kinds of perverse incentives.

In this particular case, most of the bill is for the anti-venom treatment course. Anti-venom serums are pretty expensive to produce, and if you do not know the exact species of animal the venom came from (which often happens if the creature was not killed), they give you an anti-venom cocktail serum that covers all the common venoms in the region. It generally requires a couple days in the hospital too because the damage to the body from the venom can be extensive even though you survive, it depends on how lucky you are.

Proper treatment of pit viper envenomation is going to be relatively expensive in any country. It isn't like treating a broken bone.
This: https://support.mozilla.org/en-US/kb/how-does-phishing-and-m...

It sends a hash of the file to Google with your IP/print. Worded like it's anonymous and one way, it's not. The hash is unique to the file, if your file-hash database is large enough (like Googles) you can cross reference to get the details of the original file. From this hash, you can then see the exact file the person is downloading. Great if you want to make a list of who is downloading an unallowed file, like say, a list of missing Chinese citizens or anything from wleaks.
Cue the NSA getting jealous of North Korean domestic surveillance capabilities.
I heard about http://recursivecharacters.com last week at a lisp meetup. Just an art project, doesn't actually have an evaluator, but the author went to some detail to describe how an evaluator might work.
It worked when I tried it: https://web.archive.org/web/20070221033032/http://news.ycomb...
Personal Growth Strategy
I thought the issue with GO garbage collectors wasn't so much speed as correctness (as they GO team historically has gotten GCD speed by sacrificing correctness, or is correctness a goal past version 1.3?).
My knee-jerk reaction is to say the people become more insular, but perhaps the opposite is true.

If trekkies come from all over the country, from different age groups, backgrounds, perhaps interacting with your internet trekkie tribe all day will give you a broader picture of things.

In that sense it may be an exchange of intellectual depth for breadth. In a time of a broad globalism that may be just the sort of population you want.

What's more, generally the shared interest is used as a social glue, not as a sole topic of discussion. Case in point, the fact that on Hacker News we are discussing this.
Terrible stuff by Instagram. Iniesta the footballer already has a very successful (5.4 million followers) account on Twitter using the handle andresiniesta8. It looks like versions 1-7 have been deleted. However the guy who wrote the article already has a Twitter account using ainiesta, which clearly isn't one of these imitation or mock accounts.
The footballer hasn't moved Instagram handles, but it does look like Instagram are directing the author's alias to the footballer's existing account. Awful.
Do you honestly think that could happen? How? Who would co-operate? Which OS or browser vendor would knowingly distribute such a certificate? Not even Microsoft or Apple would co-operate, let alone Mozilla or the Linux distros...

And it's not as if they can do it secretly. If they suddenly started to MITM all TLS traffic in the country by replacing the certs with certs signed by the national root, it would get noticed within minutes, if not seconds. And God only knows how much stuff it would break. And on top of that, they don't even have the capability...

There is 0% chance they would attempt such a thing. And 100% chance that such a thing would fail immediately and fail badly. I don't know why people think there is even a slight risk of them trying such a thing. There isn't.