skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I appreciate that you have clarified your reasoning, and I certainly don't intend to insult, but I really feel there is some amount of cognitive dissonance going on here. For example, from your original comment and new comment:

> but no amount of enthusiasm changes the fact that high-quality research hasn't happened yet.

> I didn't say that all positive evidence is low quality

You are now conceding that there is high-quality research, but have since made more claims which are completely dismissive of that evidence. So, while I wouldn't argue with most of the points you just made, I still feel that your basis for dismissing positive research is flawed, at best.

The purpose of linking to Reddit was to provide an encompassing list of the published papers. It isn't a list of comments from random people on the internet, it's a list of scientific journals and websites which you, yourself, would recognize as being respectable sources. Likewise, the purpose of linking to Wikipedia entries was to give an overview or example. You are more than welcome to scroll to the bottom of the page and look at the actual sources for that information. It is unreasonable to insist that someone provide hundreds of sources at the bottom of a comment, when they are already consolidated elsewhere.

As to your point about negative results being more likely or common than positive ones, I don't see how that has anything to do with the topic at hand, which is that you seem to be convinced that positive claims are either flawed or tainted to the point of being illegitimate. Even if 99 out of 100 research efforts resulted in negative outcomes, that is not a reason to dismiss the one. Just as it is not a reason to dismiss positive research based on some (or even a majority) of it being supported or influenced by third parties.
Author has things reversed. Automation is affecting jobs with higher wages and higher productivity first, turning those markets into winner take all or eliminating labor altogether. The remaining workers are forced to crowd into lower productivity jobs and work longer hours for lower wages to make ends meet. Automation appears to cause lower overall productivity, but the actual effect will be quite obvious when the cost of automation is low enough that it comes for all the low wage workers.
People often express opinions like yours when talking about any subject that has to do with the government. Where does this inherent distrust come from?

Is it really so weird that a company would hire someone with intimate knowledge of a system in order to help navigate that system? This type of hiring occurs all the time, it literally has a name in the tech community - "acquihire". Do you find acquihires just as distasteful and filled with conflicts of interest?

Why do you doubt Zimmerman due to his current relation to Nestle but not Loe and Earney due to their current relation to the conservation movement? Surely, Zimmerman's position as forest supervisor actually makes him more credible than a biologist and a permit administrator?
Google officially ends forced Google+ integration–First up: YouTube
It'll be the 'best thing since sliced bread' until there is a big 'friendly fire' incident. Then the robots will be quietly disabled by the soldiers who might at risk from them.
I think comparatively, Thai's sex industry is way more foreign-friendly than any of the other asian countries (with maybe the exception of Phillipines).

And yes, I do know the genesis of the "me so horny" line, but my point still stands. Thailand, especially the seedier aspects, is synonymous with "sex tourism" in the west.

Compare the image of Thailand's sex industry with say that of Amsterdam's red light district...
Why would it be corrupted? Just because it contains a malicious payload doesn't mean it has to be unviewable normally. Could even just tack onto all outgoing MMS by default and never raise anybodies suspicions.
You've answered your own question.
Obviously their government and King are complicit (perhaps not explicitly so) because it is such a profitable industry.

I'm surprised that even though you managed to venture out of your bubble, you still remain woefully (perhaps willfully) ignorant on how the real world works.
They dumped a ton of money into it. They literally bought game developers to make sure Xbox would get good games. And then Xbox Live basically redefined online gaming.

But the other thing is that Microsoft has a surprisingly strong hardware game for a software company. Most of the hardware they push out has solid fundamentals, even if the overarching idea or business model has flaws.

Examples:

- Keyboards (they're consistently good middle-tier, budget keyboards)

- Mouses (again, nothing to write home about, but they'll last you many years)

- Zune HD (amazing hardware, no traction)

- Xbox (other than the controversial huuuuge controllers and then RROD problem on the 360)

- Phones (again, solid hardware even if the software leaves something to be desired)
How the obsession over Apple's stock plunge reveals a skewed view of the economy
It sounds like it would require a lot of throughput to run so many transactions. How do they plan to scale that?
> if you can call the police or get the authorities to intervene... then it's not slavery.

I'm not sure this definition pans out. This would mean slavery cannot happen in a country where it's not legal.

Take an unfortunate whose been enslaved in a nation where it's legal. They're kept in a basement, chained to a table, made to work every waking hour.

One day, that nation passes a law making slavery illegal.

While this person's situation has not changed one iota, using your definition they were a slave yesterday and not a slave today.

In fact, since 1981 there is no nation in the world where slavery is legal.[1] So, using this definition strictly...slavery literally does not exist.

1. http://www.cnn.com/interactive/2012/03/world/mauritania.slav...
@hhandoko: I'm a programmer at an international school. My day to day task is to making sure the websites running and developing new features. But the thing is it seems like I'm getting bored and want to jump into something big in a different country but not far from Vietnam. Singapore looks like an ideal location.
According to you. The definition of the word slavery isn't nearly as specific.
My team added something four weeks ago that might be an idea to try - we're still trailing it ourselves. It started accidentally and became a tradition on our team though so your mileage may vary.

If the pull request is small, fixes a bug or is a blocking you, then you can spend you quick-code-review-chip for the week and ask the team to look at it at their first available opportunity. (Sometimes reviewed within 15 minutes, usually an hour tops)

It allows team members to ask the rest of the team to unblock them quickly. Limiting it to one a week prevents abuse of their team mates' time and encourages all team members to plan their work out ahead as to reduce blocking.

We also wrote a quick HipChat bot that keeps track of who's spent their quick-review-chip too.
Since an optimizing compiler is free to go to town on functions such as string comparison, are these functions typically written in assembler per-architecture? I.e. one for x86 and x86-64, another for MIPS, RISC, etc?
Unfortunately, now this method will be flooded, and everyone of note in SV will be inundated with similar ads. But it is an interesting case study in how to be creative and think outside the box.

Facebook recently paid me a bounty for pointing out a problem that enabled this type of pinpoint targeting accuracy on their ad platform despite a policy that greatly limited it. It's interesting that LinkedIn doesn't consider it a privacy problem. I noticed that you could create custom audiences for ads by simply using anyone's FB vanity URL and appending @facebook.com to target by email. So if the vanity url of the target was facebook.com/mark, then you could target an ad to that person by simply adding mark@facebook.com to a custom audience list. They have now fixed it, but this same thing the author did here could have also been done on FB until about 2 months ago (and can still be done, but now you need their actual email address to target them).
There's a lot of humanity problems solving talk in cryptocurrency land. I think it's because the people that run in that scene can finally glimpse what this technology can do, when wielded correctly. That said, there's still a lot to do before we replace the government with a crypto contract!

Ethereum uses a cryptocurrency under-the-hood called 'ether', which pays for 'gas': compute resources like networking, storage and compute. These resources are used in a decentralized way by programs which are capable of carrying their own cryptocurrency wallets. As long as the programs can pay for their own existence, they get to keep running on the network. Like Bitcoin, the network is comprised of a bunch of 'miners' that provide the resources for running the code. You could run a miner if you wanted to. Unlike Bitcoin, the code keeps running as long as it can pay for the resources it uses. I could write some code that does this, if I wanted to.

In theory, you could create some code, have it generate a wallet, pay the wallet, and then let the little guy go wander off onto the network doing things. BTW, this little guy I'm describing is called a DAC, for decentralized autonomous corporation (or smart contracts). The 'things' it can do are limited, but it can, in theory, pay for stuff or pay other DACs, access storage, do computations, and access the network. Keep in mind this is isn't a NodeJS application framework you are dealing with here. Ethereum is primarily designed for implementing logically governed contracts between entities that need to exchange value. It's like Bitcoin scrypt on steroids, without the possibility of a halting-state. In theory.

Fun fact: Bitcoin scrypt doesn't support loops, so it's limited in scope in what it can do with a given transaction. Not so with Ethereum.
Hi. I'm Vinay Gupta, the release coordinator for Ethereum.

I'll tell you exactly what Ethereum is: a blockchain for storing code. Bitcoin stores transactions, Ethereum stores programs. Those programs have persistent state on the blockchain and are capable of moving value around the system, hence you can build games, financial instruments and so on. These things are called "smart contracts" for historical reasons - nobody would call them that if they were invented now!

How's that? Clearer?
I have to roll my eyes at the VR announcement gimmick. But hey, marketing.

I'm keen to see this device as I'm in the market for a new phone and the Nexus series lost it's value proposition in my opinion.

I think my next device is going to end up with Plasma Mobile on it anyway as I like my control.
It almost seems to me like this one fell into their laps. They might not have been in their sights initially but upon the initial fraud investigation they must have identified a weakness in them. Maybe their willingness to cooperate which I imagine is unheard of in that sector, seemingly?
> But it's one of several such experiments with using the blockchain

Well, using a blockchain. Its not using "the blockchain" in the usual sense; Ethereum is specifically using an alternative to the Bitcoin protocol and blockchain, not built on top of it.
No it isn't, unless you like catching falling knives.
> If a thing is designed to kill you, it is, by definition, bad design.

Which definition? Whose definition?

This entire article hinges upon this assumption - that good design cannot coexist with something designed to kill living creatures (humans included, though the article also conveniently leaves out the use of guns in hunting) - without making any attempt whatsoever to actually back this up, instead resorting to nonsense like how design is an "ethical trade".

> nothing whose primary purpose is to take away life can be said to be designed well

Again, says who? The author? On what grounds? The only grounds I can think of involve an apparent squeamishness about death on the part of the author.

Of course, this is very obviously an opinion piece, and this "design student" is entitled to that opinion. Presenting such opinions as facts, however, is not helping one's already shaky case.
Go Rocks – How Can We Avoid Something This Bad in the Future? (2011)
the real benefit would be to dedupe every resource on the Internet

Hopefully not. Even if we ignore the possibility of hash collisions (since that's not that likely yet with SHA 256).. There's still the issue of cross origin data leakage. Using a known hash and whether a request is made for the resource to tell if a user has visited another website.

This should require a cors header
What I'm saying is that it's really easy to make memory accesses explicit without putting it in language semantics.

If you have an aggressive optimizer, you can mark cases that bypass the aggression with a handful of lines of code and still end up with something that's very fast.

In fact doing it with function calls can be easier and better than teaching the compiler about memory access semantics. Code for calling functions is a lot better tested than code for handling volatile.

It is not at all weird.

I'm not talking about a way to trick the optimizer, I'm talking about a way to make an optimizer and a forced memory access coexist in a super-easy fashion, by very slightly altering the compiler. Normal functions would be inlined transparently. Only the special memory access functions would be opaque.

Memory-mapped I/O is a platform-specific thing. It shouldn't really be baked into the language. Especially when the simplest way of putting it in the language pessimizes you all over the place in code that doesn't need those specific accesses. And even that would be a notable bloat; Lua does not have a big spec.
so just the stuff we knew... xko
Boy Scouts End Nationwide Ban on Gay Leaders
Excellent question. Here are some blog posts on the subject:

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/09/17/scalability-part-1-buil...

https://blog.ethereum.org/2014/10/21/scalability-part-2-hype...

After skimming these, I'm comfortable assuming that someone will figure it out. Blockchain architecture doesn't excite me. Decentralized applications do.
Voyager’s Golden Record for Aliens Now Available on SoundCloud
right, but I never know what time it is there. I only know what time it is here. And maybe I have a relative sense that there is 6 hours east of here. Often I don't even know where it is I'm talking to. I called the help desk, I have no idea what continent picked up the phone.

"office hours are 22-6 UTC" would be much simpler than "office hours are 9-5 EST. hmm ...is that european standard time, or east coast of the usa?"

death to timezones and daylight savings!
It's not a conflict that he works at Nestle now. It would be a conflict if he treated them differently while holding his old position... especially if the preferential treatment was quid pro quo for a consulting gig post-retirement.
Could also be https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fallacy_of_relative_privation

"Well there are places were there are NO law enforcement so all other definitions of slavery aren't as real."
Expect to continue seeing more of it.

It works, of course.

But it's also much less obnoxious than previous methods, so it also generates less bad will in the community.
> But that's not the web, the web is not intended for lynx, it's intended for a browser

Lynx is a browser!

Your username is quite appropriate, since you are reason's bane.
"So you want to abolish time zones": https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8902765 -> http://qntm.org/abolish
Searching for Jagari: The “Mick Jagger of Zambia” (2014)
Great read, thanks. Title is a bit off though
Ycomb's API and karma level
Why does ycombinator's news API require my karma to be higher to use?
A lot of the stuff on iStock is good. Here's a window one:

http://www.istockphoto.com/photo/white-window-frame-and-wint...

Not sure I see the difference between that and Unsplash.
Microsoft Changes Its Script with Free Windows 10
These are some great ideas. There are little features in DevTools that I wish my IDE had (or I am not aware of the features if they do).

Be sure to post anything awesome you create to HN!
Obviously this is just your opinion, but I think Brian Eno completely on point here, for music at least.

The best real-world example I know is the resurgence of cassette tapes. Whenever I go to see a not-very-popular (indie, for want of a better term) band, the merch stand, without fail, has cassettes and vinyls and sometimes no CDs or optional Internet downloads. Is there a practical reason? No, not really, it's all marketing. Making tapes and vinyls is hard, burning CDs is easy, but people want the nostalgia of the more interactive process of flipping tapes and vinyls.

I guess they could be moving to those mediums for the "grit" of the sound produced. But that sound can easily and effectively be reproduced with an equalizer, sound filters and effects.
On the flip side, I'm not very happy with my Nexus 7 2013 (LTE, although I never have used it). As a disclaimer I am on CM since 12.0, but even before then there were a number of issues. Tablet would stop recognizing touch or it would inconsistently recognize it; core apps would start to randomly FC; YouTube in particular has an issue where it often would say (and this continued into CM) that there was no Network and you've to press retry 3 or 4 times and then things would work. Hangouts in both regular and CM versions of Lollipop consistently has a bug where switching apps then switching back to Hangouts takes you to a random location in the conversation requiring scrolling back to the bottom frequently. This is an annoying one because there's no way to clear the screen that I've found, you can either delete the entire chat history or you can archive, but the archive is "restored" to the chat window when you begin talking to that person again.

And I apologize, after that rant I realize it doesn't really have anything to do with the topic, but I've sunk the cost already!
This was the first thing we read in freshman World Cultures class in high school -- the context was to make us aware of our own ethnocentric bias when studying "other" cultures.
I would say it's one thing if people perform their duties adequately and in the name of public service and then go on to use the skills they've gained in the private sector.

This is different, his actions/inactions in his public service directly affected his future employer in a beneficial way. Is it so weird that people would be distrustful in a situation like this? If there was no issue do you really think anybody would doubt he doesn't have a conflict of interest?
You bring forward the typical NRA argument. It's not quite accurate though.

(I don't agree with the article OP linked. So it is not my point to argue in favour of it.)

Your argument is: A weapon is just a tool. A weapon does not kill. It's people that kill. Someone who created a weapon cannot be held responsible if someone else gets killed.

But what about the abundance of weapons? Or the ease of use? Or the accessibility of weapons in situations where you are emotionally unstable?

Maybe a better comparison would be the abundance of sugar in pretty much every type of food (from ketchup to some meat products) - instead of the spoon you used in your example. And the comparison becomes less ridiculous.
Recording of Greek FM on having to hack his country's tax computers
I would love to see Quora's qlint tool open sourced. Sounds like a great tool.
My curiosity is piqued:

Do any of you gophers out there feel that the situation has changed in the 4 years since this was discussed on HN?

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2746698
Pilots Who Fly Drones into Wildfires Are Idiots. Punish Them
Also the century that perfected and industrialized it.

But yes, the exposure and outrage and "never again" is legitimately progress...
Tracking a Pacific typhoon using barometers in smartphones on affected islands
As the article mentions, the USFS is underfunded and understaffed. As a result, (and as is also the case with USFWS and NMFS), permit related matters are often "triaged" with items having a low percieved environmental impact (or politically risky, or risk an expensive lawsuit) put off so that limited resources can be spent on more pressing matters.

That doesn't mean corruption and regulatory capture aren't issues, but they aren't a complete (or even major) part of the problem.

I guess also it doesn't bother me too much if drinking water is being extracted from a national forest as these forests are required by statute to be managed for multiple uses including resource extraction. Relatively speaking, siphoning off water for drinking seems like it is likely to be a relatively low impact activity, even when it's a bigevilcorporation like Nestle who is doing the extraction.
Google Gives Up on Google+ as a Facebook Rival
maybe, they could check to see if a phone number supports imessage which would reduce the number of iphone users.

they may also blast texts out to android only phone numbers (maybe if you gave your phone number to an android app)
JSPM has fairly seamless support for loading libraries from npm, Github, local Git repos in any format (global, CJS, AMD, ES6) as ES6 modules.

So you don't need to bet on any particular ecosystem.
I think the phrase or meme goes like this, "you had one job." The fact that this occurs "all the time" means that either corruption and payoffs are the norm or incompetent people are allowed to keep their jobs and are never penalized for being incompetent. I find the former more probable than the latter. YMMV
If it delivers on the technology, Ethereum will eventually enable the elimination of everything in the world governed by legal and monetary contracts. That's a big IF, but if that IF is real, you are going to be dead wrong in your assertion of 'perspective'.
Don't publicly expose .git or how we hacked you – An analysis of Alexa's 1M
Nobody should be acqui-hiring our government.
The future of advertising has been around forever
Ads for Podcasts Test the Line Between Story and Sponsor
I think you're confused. "Acquire" is a process where a company buys another, usually much smaller company, and hires that company's employees as part of the acquisition.

That is totally different than what is happening here, where a government employee gives preferential treatment to a business entity that he or she is supposed to regulate and keep in check in the hopes that he or she will be hired by them after they leave their government post. It's a clear conflict of interest.
Varoufakis' Plan B: How to introduce a parallel currency in a monetary union
Could you find me an inventor in history of a technology that actually changed humanity who made such a claim before it did so? Did Google claim or even knew their search engine would change the world? Did Apple? Did Facebook? Nope. You should focus your message on why your tech is useful, not that it might save humanity, most startups don't change humanity, heck, most startups fail. So it's a bit premature to claim yours will. Don't you think?
At Google the worst offenders for broken builds & minor bugs were often the most experienced & productive devs. They developed reputations around their particular teams, which meant their teammates would think "Oh, X wrote this, he usually knows what he's doing, so I don't have to be quite as careful with the review." As a result, a bunch of silly mistakes would make it through. I had one (very productive) coworker who would slip intentional bugs or style violations into his changes to see if the reviewer was paying attention.

Strangely, this didn't hold for major bugs, which were often done by newbies to the codebase. Major bugs are often created by not understanding the implications of a change or the other systems that might be impacted; experienced devs usually know this by heart, so they don't screw it up in their designs.
The Friendship Shower Challenge (ft. Humble the Poet)