skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The way I see it, there are two reasons a person might want a handgun. Before I begin, I'll mention that I'm in favor of heavy regulation but fall short of an actual ban in many cases.

Reason 1: "I like guns. They're fun."
And that's basically the entire argument. They have a hobby, and they don't want to see that taken away from them. Sometimes it makes sense to take things away from people and sometimes it doesn't. Obviously, gun enthusiasts argue that it doesn't make sense.

Reason 2: "But the bad guys already have guns."
This is actually where I am. I'd love to see new regulation and harsh penalties for violations, but it must start with criminals. Gun bans do effectively remove guns from a population and criminals would also be affected (see Australia, among other places), but I believe there would be an ugly transition period in America when the good citizens have all dutifully turned in their guns and the criminals hold on to their already illegally owned guns. I'd prefer a system that takes guns from criminals and heavily regulates (but allows) qualified citizens to own them.

And to address your other points, especially where it concerns rifles: I grew up with people who can only afford meat in their diet if they hunted it themselves. Not only is it fun, but it IS a tool. A hunting rifle costs only a few hundred dollars, but it can not only enhance social time with friends who hunt but it can also put food on the table. It's considerably less dangerous and more useful than smallpox or mustard gas, and it's not guaranteed to bring damage to people or their property.
What I like the most about Uber is that I click, wait (and in the meantime can track where is the car) plus I can use this application worldwide. If there was a similar, international app for regular taxis (including price estimate), then I would use it.

(Taxi claim that regulations are to keep quality. But my brother's experience with Uber is much better than with regular taxis.)

So, in short, while Uber is making it harder for regular taxi drivers (especially bad regular taxi companies), it makes it better for the users. If taxi companies catch (instead of: complain), it will be win-win (for drivers and users, not necessary - Uber).
If you want to see the images in actual 1:1 resolution, here is how:

* Click on the image in the text.

* Click on the image in the tweet.

* Right-click on the image in the pop-up.

* Open image in new tab.

* Change the "large" at the end of the URL to "orig". Load that URL.

Congrats, you now see a huge (blurry upscaled) image that you can actually read. You are out 3 times the network traffic that was needed. Why would anyone link to their own tweet just to show an (already thumbnailed) image in an article is beyond me. And don't even ask me about my thoughts on Twitter's UI, showing a tiny version of images when you click on them is not sane.
This is great, didn't know there was a computer Go mailing list !

I am at the moment planning on paying some money to attend programming courses in basic languages like Python, Ruby and C++ in Singapore and start hacking a GO AI prototype.

My idea is to build one that thinks more strategically rather than just relying on brute-force search. Since Go is such a large game, there are some areas especially mid game areas where computer programs in their current form simply cannot compete with the human brain at the moment.

Professional Go players use strategic thought and positional awareness in huge chunks of the game , especially mid game when they are vying for territory.

My intention is to try to capture some of these professional Go player's strategic awareness and sense of positioning through software and translate this into a machine that is more "intuitive" and able to think creatively and come up with new moves and variations by itself ..
This is the kind of article that makes me scratch
my head when I see it in the New England Journal of
Medicine, because my preconceived notion of "doctor"
includes "can perform thoracic surgery", in which case
this knowledge is old hat (as he acknowledges). If you
don't already know how to perform a heart bypass,
nothing written here is going to shed much insight.

There are lots of hackers with deep, deep knowledge in other areas of "hacking" that are miles away from Unix file descriptors and so forth. A lot of "true hacking" doesn't even involve Unix, just like a lot of talented medical doctors aren't qualified to perform a heart bypass.

How about the crazy geniuses that made the first wire-wrapped Amiga prototypes? Or the heroic coders who pulled off various feats of assembly language coding on the incredibly constrained hardware in various game consoles? Or the people who write web frameworks. Or the people who build robots, or the people who built the chips that Unix runs on?
Future of Less Hat
He wants us to to look for ET's, but not reveals ourselves to them: to see but not be seen. So just like in the AI question, his stance is to be cautious.
Why would anyone use their real name or email address on a site like that? Let the hackers reveal all the info... should just be a bunch of "FAKE FAKERSON" accounts and people who probably aren't bright enough to have an affair anyway.
While the household debt is lower now (still high, though), you conveniently omitted:

1. the student loan debt, which, in $ terms, recently exceeded the "regular" household debt.

2. the gross federal debt (April 2015) is $18.15 trillion. Went up from 10.63 trillion in the last 7 years (under Obama's administration)

3. reflating real-estate prices back to absurd levels

4. while not a debt indicator, an important factor: Record LOW number of people in the work force (the lowest in 30 years or so). If you don't work, it is hard to pay down your debt, no?
As easy as it might be for some people to buy into your narrative, on HN, it realllllly isn't true.

The basic statistics to calculate the RoI on a banner ad spend isn't particularly difficult when you have a software dev/web dev available.

No matter how much click/impression fraud there is...you are trying to track conversions not clicks/impressions at that scale.

If I know I spend $500 and get 10 sales, it isn't a statistically valid sample but its pretty clear if I break even on that $500...I should keep doing it since its essentially free marketing. Similarly, if I'm willing to eat $N per customer acquired via marketing, the same is true as long as $50/customer is equal to or less than my margin per sale + $N. "Sale" in this context is tracking what exactly those 10 people bought over the lifetime of them being a customer, generally.

The only real thing the "already successful" people have is a bunch of smoke and mirrors that honestly doesn't have verifiable value that they use to bullshit clients. Conversion rate is literally the only statistic that is verifiable, cost effective to verify, and able to give you a concrete idea of whether or not the RoI of the campaign is worth it.

We have an on staff statistician and his primary job is just automating the conversion rate calculations, the return-per-ad-campaign, etc. We spend enough money its worth hiring a staff statistician to do that but honestly any programmer with a book on statistics would 90% as good.
Seems to me the major reason is that the hardware manufacturers are from Spain (BQ) and China (Meizu). There might also be license/compliance issues or software patent problems that hold up a US release.

And my guess would be that the Chinese smart phone market is actually bigger than the US one, especially for the price point of these phones (and Europe is probably not that far behind the US).
"My personal desire is to have a multi-core, multi-gigabyte, 8-10+ hour battery life software development workstation, in my pocket, which can also receive phone calls. If this is the future, with Ubuntu, then color me converted."

That is exactly the plan and is being worked on at the moment.

X11 apps will work through XMir - they won't be touch optimised but will still work, will however be much more useable when connecting the phone to a larger display and a bluetooth mouse/keyboard.

Additionally we are working on a Qt/QML toolkit which will allow developers to write apps that work well on both mobile and desktop
What up Joe? I just switched to Atom from Sublime, and while I keep it stock, I do have a few packages I use daily.

https://atom.io/packages/docblockr

https://atom.io/packages/linter

https://atom.io/packages/linter-js-standard

https://atom.io/packages/terminal-panel
...and a link to a classic book: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Surely_You%27re_Joking,_Mr._Fe...!
Yea, for things where you're giving the private key to somebody, there's a whole corpus of debate on how useful a passphrase would be even if you could give it to them.

For that reason, I'm OK with the default being to passphrase and there being a section of the docs that says "hey, if you need to not have a passphrase for your use case, here's how to strip it off"
Didn't we lose that battle when we sent the Voyager with the Golden Record [1] that carries the exact coordinates [0] (with respect to nearest stars) to the origin of the spacecraft.

Voyager 1 and 2 both carry with them a 12-inch golden phonograph record
that contains pictures and sounds of Earth along with symbolic directions
on the cover for playing the record and data detailing the location of
our planet. The record is intended as a combination of a time capsule
and an interstellar message to any civilization, alien or far-future
human that may recover either of the Voyager craft. The contents of this
record were selected by a committee that included Timothy Ferris and
was chaired by Carl Sagan.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#/media/File:Vo...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program#Voyager_Golden...

________________________________________________________

Edit:

Voyager has on board antennas and a sufficiently intelligent civilization would be quite interested in intercepting a spacecraft which seems to be on a mission to somewhere carrying <creator>-knows-what.
Where addresses live
Theo de Raadt and Tame – process sandboxing
Ebay is just giving Paypal shares to its shareholders—it isn't selling Paypal. It is, however, sending Paypal off with a big wad of cash.
This can be a one-liner in openssl:

openssl req -new -sha256 -x509 -days 365 -newkey RSA:4096 -nodes -keyout domain.key -subj "/CN=example.com" -reqexts SAN -config <(cat /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf <(printf "[SAN]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:www.example.com,DNS:mail.example.com")) -out domain.crt

For a CSR, the same technique can be used:

openssl req -new -sha256 -newkey RSA:4096 -nodes -keyout domain.key -subj "/CN=example.com" -reqexts SAN -config <(cat /etc/ssl/openssl.cnf <(printf "[SAN]\nsubjectAltName=DNS:www.example.com,DNS:mail.example.com")) -out domain.csr
How can I buy a product or service I'm not even aware exists? That's the value of display advertising.
Lots of people including myself make heavy use of the mouse in Emacs. And pretty much the only time I use a terminal these years is to recover from having inadvertently messed up my .emacs file.

In fact, in at least one way, Emacs has better mouse support than either Firefox or Chrome do, at least on OS X: in Firefox or Chrome, even when the browser's window is right up against the right edge of the screen, the rightmost column of pixels does not belong to the browser's scroll bar, which makes it hard to interact with the scroll bar, particularly since OS X 10.7 or 10.8 when scroll bars got thinner. In contrast, in a properly-designed OS X app, like TextEdit or TextMate, whenever the right edge of the app's window is up against the right edge of the screen, the user can just jam the mouse cursor to the right and start interacting with the scroll bar without the need to get the cursor into a thin target region. Now most Macs these days come with trackpads, and the problem I just described doesn't apply to users who scroll by using (two fingers on) the trackpad, but if the Mac is a desktop Mac (i.e., not a MacBook) and the user prefers a mouse to an external trackpad, this is an important issue.

Emacs, particularly the Mitsuharu version of Emacs (which everyone who uses Emacs with a pointing device on OS X should be using because the FSF version often has bugs that affect Emacs's integration with OS X's graphical subsystems) gets this "rightmost column of pixels" issue right. (Sublime Text and Atom are 2 more apps that do not get it right.)

So in summary, although Emacs looks like an ncurses- or terminal-interface app and not a native GUI-based app and although many Emacs users are vocal pointing-device skeptics, not all Emacs users are mouse-haters, and Emacs actually has very good support for pointing devices.
I don't think this is necessarily true. Attractive, non-animated banner ads are my "favorite" type of online advertising to encounter. Standard AdSense text ads are ugly and add so much clutter to the page because of the added text.

If ads were usually like this, instead of resource-heavy Flash ads or ugly AdSense ads, I probably wouldn't use any ad blocking software. Static image banner ads are probably the only online advertising I have ever clicked or taken notice of.
What things? One seems highly unlikely, the other might be impossible.

In on would have to be able to read complex human thought, in the other we would basically would have to predict the future.
Judge not?
> How many of you developed iPhone apps? Us? Over a dozen. How many of you are developing Apple Watch apps. Us? Zero. No interest in working for Apple for free.

I think this is the best point you’ve made. If we throw every other argument out, we’re left with the simple fact that the watch follows the phone, and the market for phone software has already commoditized itself into the toilet.

iOS is a dog’s breakfast. So what’s the lure for writing watch software? That the first players in have the least zeroth chance of becoming the next unicorn, one of the few apps actually turning into a sustainable business?

There will be exceptions, but I feel safe in predicting that most successful watch apps will be free or nearly fee accessories for some other business model, like ride sharing.

“Commoditize your complements.”—Joel Spolsky

Apple is the watch. Your software is the complementary product they will inexorably commoditize.
You know, I've struggled with this concept. I agree that we shouldn't pipe a URL into a bash script without knowing what it is.

But an unsigned software repository that calls post install scripts seems just as absolutely easy to modify, and we see those regularly.

My software is most easily installed with a piped bash script. In the script contents, I try to explain what's going on. I also at the top indicate that you shouldn't just trust what I am telling you. And then in the documentation, where you are told how to run the script, I tell you to be cautious there as well. (The script just installs the repository, and from there it's all signed and delivered over https).

I could never get over how easy it would be to whitewash a bash script with an rpm just to get some psychological credibility.

If it's not signed and/or delivered over https, it's completely hackable.

That first step of trust, how?
Not sure if it's in this link or not, but from krebs it was stated that the 'erase me completely' for a fee was just taking money and laughing.

That may have the largest impact if someone's identity is released and that person had paid to be completely removed from records.
If the odds of landing on an edge are 1 in 6000, it's not particularly unbelievable that you wouldn't have seen it in 10,000 tries. The odds of not seeing it are about 18%.

I saw a coin land on edge once.
Sure. And we definitely need some kind of motivation to focus our efforts on space exploration (it's very noticeably become an afterthought ever since we stopped trying to compete).

But if we could somehow find that motivation, it would be far more productive to work together -- we'd have a lot more manpower and a higher budget that way.
I've used a similar script to create CSRs; you'll have to use the same messy OpenSSL syntax. See https://gist.github.com/praseodym/8186510
I should be clear, by free time I mean time outside of work.
An appeal to authority is never a valid argument, as it is a logical fallacy (i.e. by definition invalid).

Sure, authority can be a useful heuristic for non-authorities, but is useless in argumentative reasoning, e.g. "X, who is an authority says Y, and so [therefore] Y is true".
I would hope that Amazon seeking to buy eBay would be blocked on competition grounds.
Numerators of harmonic numbers
...and you also don't get thousands/millions of billboards put up for $500. This part of the comparison should probably be ignored as it is more to do with the intrinsic differences between the physical world and the digital "world" than it is with banner ads vs. billboards.
> It's ... designed to ... supplant critical evaluation of ones needs....

> No, people want to buy things

That's rather the point. The desire to buy things is driven not by critical evaluation of need, but by psychological trickery that falsely associates buying stuff with a whole range of actual needs.

If ads promoted critical evaluation of a person's needs in relation to available products, that would be a different thing entirely. It is quaint, but I can't help think naive to suggest that the core of advertising is informing customers, and the psychological trickery is 'misuse'.
I am glad you asked:

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Orion_%28nuclear_propu...

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Longshot

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Project_Daedalus

- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mini-Mag_Orion
That one person doesn't know it doesn't mean it's not common knowledge.

That said, the edge is not always below 1%. It varies based on the rules. Some games don't allow a surrender, for instance, which changes the edge pretty drastically.
Do they really?

See e.g. this http://crookedtimber.org/2012/05/30/in-soviet-union-optimiza... which is a discussion of the difficulties of computerized central planning and argues that -- even allowing for approximate solutions being good enough, and even allowing for computers to get much faster -- we don't have algorithms that would allow for real-time central planning of a real economy, and even if we did there would be substantial further problems in actually doing it.

(It's in the context of Francis Spufford's book "Red Plenty" -- which is actually pretty much about computerized central planning, I believe -- and it's by Cosma Shalizi who is a very smart guy, knows a lot about economics, and is sufficiently leftist to be more than averagely sympathetic to the idea of a planned economy.)
Quick and dirty way to have OpenBSD running on Linode
> it just takes more time

That's the key. Willingness to risk that money increases with the time it took to save it, and not just linearly. When the time increases by almost an order of magnitude, you're going to find darn few willing to risk it.

> that's a matter of willingness rather than ability

It doesn't matter why; the fact stands. Entrepreneurs are far more likely to come from the first and second quintiles than the more populous third through fifth. Sure, people in some parts of the country could live on $30K if they're willing to make severe sacrifices in their quality of life, but treating that as just a matter of slight degree compared to a software engineer who can still live as they please while making the same attempt seems a bit callous. At a certain level of sacrifice it's a qualitative difference between "crazy if you do" and "crazy if you don't".
Sorry, I meant the most common flow I see - Jekyll+Github.
>I do not know how R. Feynman's university lectures sound like

Enjoy. You might also find the audio in mp3/ogg/etc format.

Video http://www.feynmanphysicslectures.com/
YT https://www.youtube.com/user/FeynmanVideoLectures
Another video source http://research.microsoft.com/apps/tools/tuva/
Text http://www.feynmanlectures.info/
Links to more stuff http://www.feynmanlectures.info/links.html
> I think this could also explain why managers who worked their way up from the bottom tend to do well, whereas professional executives who are helicoptered in to companies fail.

While intuitive, I have doubts about the truth of this statement. Citation needed.
Some context: Al Viro is an ex-Plan 9 developer turned Linux kernel hacker.
Well, agree to disagree. The average person doesn't really care if there is or isn't water on mars, or if someone spent millions of their dollars taking a photo of pluto.

Year after year the news reports another big experiement which cost millions to setup, and which claims to "give us answers as to how the universe was created". I just couldn't be less interested. It's rich people (Or taxpayer funded people) playing with their toys.

It must be great fun if space exploration is your hobby, like explorers of days gone by, but for most people it won't have any impact at all on their lives (Apart from wasting their taxes).
An Open Letter to Britain's Leading Violent Extremist: David Cameron
I think the problem is more that most people only learn about the Great Depression in a strictly historical context and only the theories about its causes that were popularly discussed at the time make their way into high school history textbooks. I doubt there are many serious scholars of the Great Depression these days would talk about the stock market crash as causing the depression. However, all the policy makers at the time knew about the stockmarket crash because it was obvious. The monthly industrial production numbers took months to assemble and while they show a decline that started well before the crash that information wasn't available to politicians until well after information about the stock market was. And it never really made the newspapers or got into the public consciousness.
The only issue I can imagine is Paypal dominating mindshare among top execs. In any other way, this is a huge benefit for Paypal but a pretty pedestrian move for eBay, IMO.
> I assume this isn't true for everyone, but for me, price is quite a ways down the list of reasons I prefer Uber to traditional Taxi service. If I'm at an airport, big hotel, or somewhere else with a taxi line, I'll take a taxi. Everywhere else, Uber is just vastly more convenient.

Even if the hotel doesn't have a taxi line they usually have a strong relationship with a taxi company. I've had a taxi driver get woken up to drive me at the airport at 4am when no one was available because of those relationships. I can't get Uber to do that.

> I'm only an occasional Uber (or taxi) user, which I suspect makes me less price sensitive than some, but my perspective is that the reason Uber is eating the taxi industry's lunch does not have as much to do with pricing or regulation as people seem to think.

Given the number of times Uber has cut corners on regulation to enable that pricing...eh. I've honestly never found Uber worth using except to save money. It could be because I generally only use taxis for to/from airport<->hotel [or another business with a relationship with a Taxi company] but I've had far fewer problems with Taxis than I have the couple of times I tried Uber.
Good luck getting a credit card with "FAKE FAKERSON" on it.
Another outsider guessing: A lot of Ebays profits are reinvested into PayPal leaving only little for the development of the Ebay marketplace.