polymatter

I read it as saying that Japan was not a country with solid laws that relate to Bitcoin. One requirement for having solid laws, would be some sort of compulsory security audit of the code by independent experts. Japanese law did not require this, so did not have solid laws relating to Bitcoin exchanges.

I don't think he is promoting being arrogant or cruel and find your comment rather obscure. He is saying things like "learn to say no when friends pressure you to go bar-hopping" and "it's better to be loved by a few people you care about, than to be liked by everyone". Really tame stuff dressed up in foul language. This all sounds like the basic philosophy of Feynman to me.

I assume its for him/her to claim the referral bonus.

link showing DanBC is indeed correct (http://www.national-lottery.co.uk/player/p/help/playinginsto...)

though UK lottery winnings will still be taken into account for inheritance tax if the winner dies within 7 years.

Indeed. Why can't people just act like rational automatons? Its almost as if they think that their emotions, feelings, perceptions of social status, cultural 'way its done' behaviors etc. matter to them!

Actually, I just want to point out if you've had any training on how to run a training session, you ought to know that asking "do you understand?" is pointless in every culture. From an asian culture it can even come across as threatening and dominating. Its like asking "do you want to keep your job?". Who is going to stand up and say "actually, no I don't" to that? Work in a western company is often the very first time in peoples lives where voluntarily admitting you don't know something doesn't carry significant penalties.

I find I spend most of my time on the engineering than in understanding types. (I recommend 'Types and Programming Languages by Pierce for general type stuff and Typeclassopedia for Haskell specific). Though I confess Yesod is the first real time I've seen quasiquoting and template haskell before. I haven't yet got a familiarity of what certain errors mean. 50% of the time when I get a compile error, the error message seems to be off on a complete tangent and is nowhere near where the actual error was.

Eg. I had some problem where a Data.Text was being passed into a function where Data.Text.Lazy was expected (Network.Mail.Mime.simpleMail for the record). The error message was deep in the internals of Data.Text.Lazy rather than in my code. I had to play a ridiculous pecking game of using undefine on each time I use Data.Text in turn in order to find which particular Data.Text was causing the error and then explicitly force one particular argument type to be a Data.Text.Lazy. I didn't feel like the compiler helped me at all.

Stepping through a program linearly doesn't seem possible (though not entirely sure why not) so I have no intermediate or step through capability. I also can't (normally) just stick in a println in the middle of a function or view the data structures at any particular point of the program. These are two tools I use all the time with Java and C#, but in Haskell I am rendered blind.

Sorry for the hijack, but if anyone has any tips on Haskell debugging, please share. I loved Yesod, and get such satisfaction when it compiles because of the confidence it gives me that its working as intended. I love the type safe routes :) But I find debugging to be 99% what I do and I am terrible at it.

Also, any decent Haskell IDEs out yet? I'm using emacs purely for the syntax highlighting. I tried leksah but I gave up trying to configure it properly on my box.

Commuting doesn't actually save you any money in most cases. Transport costs eat most of those savings. The thing that commuting gets you is access to a nice area with nice family homes close to good schools.

I'm not sure WhatsApp is tackling the "many billions of possible combinations of human beings having conversations here on earth have never happened" problem. WhatsApp tackles the 'outrageously high SMS and MMS fees' problem.

Besides, the value in WhatsApp is mining the data for value. Eg. to target ads better, identify the key trend setters for special offers, discover what is trending, brand perception etc.

I can't believe I'm saying this here, but just wanted to show that I agree with you, that peoples tastes are subjective and should not be stated as fact. Even if I happen to agree entirely that I find US chocolate disgusting (which I do), I am capable of entertaining the possibility that other people may prefer that taste over European chocolate.

EDIT: As in fact nnq does (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7276196)

even if removed, WhatsApp could store metadata like who is talking to whom. This is valuable to try to identify the trendsetters and key people to market to. With a bit of text analysis like google do with gmail, they can personalise ads more. all very very valuable data.

Not in the short term see (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asteroid_mining#Financial_feasi...). It is a lot cheaper, easier and less risky to mine even very rare minerals on Earth rather than do so in space. And will be too for the foreseeable future. Plus any investor doesn't want to dump platinum on the market as then the price would plummet and seriously erase the profit. And you'll want a lot of guaranteed returns to undertake such a financially risky investment.

I could see Space Tourism taking off though. Taking space jet skis out for a spin round the moon and back that kind of thing. Perhaps some exclusive space hotel.

Taking on the local council over stupid historical-accident religon-based laws that actively damage a major local industry during difficult economic times is one thing. Taking on your national government, and directly challenging the authority and interests of the US at the same time, is quite another.

I'm not trying to be defeatist, but you'd need massive civil disobedience Ukraine-style before NZ decides to soften its stance on "piracy" (or more properly, copyright infringement).

I am a great fan of Haskell.

But the tooling and libraries of the JVM is a significant real-world practical benefit. Scala can get away with a lot of nasties for that. (In fairness Scala is very well designed, nastiness is normally all to do with Java compatibility)

Plus it allows Java programmers to start writing code almost immediately.

"A credit card is not sufficient ID for a loan or withdrawl"

Not completely no. A little fraud is normally necessary. A little social pressure, just one person not following proper security procedures. Note how Jeremy Clarkson published his credit card number to prove that leaking credit card numbers wasn't a security issue, and someone promptly withdrew £500 from his account (http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/7174760.stm). I understand that the bank takes the hit in cases like that, but in the meantime you are out of pocket of far more money than you were carrying in cash.

My point is there is a non-0 (albeit small) risk that they do get something from it. And then its a hassle to sort it out (check statements carefully for the next few months, phone bank on any suspicious items). I realize I ought to be doing that anyway, but it normally falls so low on the priority list I end up checking once every 3 or 4 months.

But your risk exposure is much much higher. When a mugger steals $70 from me, my maximum exposure is $70. There is no way that mugger can use those bills to extract any more money from me or as a launchpad for fraud. When a mugger steals my card (and then commits a little fraud) my maximum exposure is my bank account + overdraft + other accounts I have with the same bank + whatever loans they could get.

Thats assuming they don't rot in the process! Now Gold people can trust because that doesn't rot and can last 100 years in a damp jar. You'll never get the public away from the gold standard.

well, depends if you're concerned with security or appearance of security. Security engineers need to do both.

Very interesting article.

tl;dr the Federation is a not a political union, its a human-dominated protection racket. Non-human worlds pay Earth for protection and Earth maintains a post-scarcity economy from living off the proceeds of tribute. In this context, the Prime Directive ensures ambitious captains don't takeover planets that are likely to be a net drain on resources.

I am unable to comprehend your lack of understanding. He was mentally ill. He was treated for it. He operated within society in a fashion that does not comply with the stigma of mental illness (no murdering people, no sociopath manipulation). We need to remove this stigma (that all mentally ill are dangerous psycopaths). This will help those who are mentally ill find treatment.

I think perhaps you do not believe that depression is a mental illness. Perhaps you also believe that drugs and hormones can not affect mood, that heroin and alcohol have no affect on the body. Or perhaps you believe that there are absolutely no circumstances in which a human can grow to adulthood without exactly normal sensitivity to mood affecting drugs and hormones. Like how we all evolve slightly different nose shapes and patterns of hair growth, but all the organs in the whole body act with perfect regularity with drugs with no variation at all.

I don't know, as someone whose 8 year relationship ended with a partner who never accepted depression wasn't something I can control. To me its like not believing that lung cancer exists or something. We have evidence, diagnosis and treatment for it. Depression is hardly a made-up condition.

"while electing commission members". Minor point, but EU Commissioners are not elected. They are appointed by national governments, 1 per state. MEPs are elected, but have significantly less power than EU Commissioners.

* They aren't like Asmiov laws. The order doesn't matter. In either the Articles or the order of the Constitution. They are numbered more for convenience than anything else.

* There are similar restrictions on the US 1st Amendment. Crying "fire" in a theater is the common example. I note that the 1st Amendment didn't protect Manning for very similar reasons. The EU law is just being more explicit.

Seems to me you are defining AI as a generalized categorization algorithm. This sounds very narrow as it doesn't take into account any actual intelligent behavior. For example, I believe constructing tools in order to accomplish a specific goal (eg, constructing a net in order to catch fish) to be intelligent behavior. The categorization AI you describe would be incapable of this. Though it does sound like it would be a necessary prerequisite.

I think he was suggesting his son wasn't going to do a GCSE in IT which is eminently sensible. 15 years ago, I don't think many people could do a GCSE in IT. There were a few compulsory computing classes where we got to play with spreadsheets and word. But they didn't count towards anything and didn't distract much from the core curriculum. And we had a computer programming after school club that was very popular but then immediately shut down when a senior teacher discovered we were making games.

I'm interested to hear in the problems you had and how getting 2nd hand computers turn out to be lower cost than the Pi. Do you have a write-up of your experience somewhere? Couldn't find anything on your HN profile.

I've toyed with the idea of not using a fair RNG for games for this reason. People expect die rolls to converge to the average distribution much much faster than they actually do. So perhaps you can make a RNG program that does exactly that and does what the user expects, even if mathematically ridiculous.

For example, if 20 is rolled then the probability of 20 being rolled again is halved (so it has a 1/40 chance) while the probability of its inverse is doubled (so probability of 1 is 1/10). This dramatically reduces the chance of the three 20s in a row scenario and would very quickly regress to the mean, just like people expect. Added flair for affecting the probabilties of all possible values subtly (so that after rolling a 20, a 2 becomes more likely and a 19 less likely).

I'm sure I can't be the only person to think of this.

What you did was wild speculation.

I think you mean "Google is much more scary than MS". The gerund doesn't make a lot of sense in this context.

For bonus fluency points, it reads better if you say "I fear Google much more than MS".

I apologize if feedback on your English was unwanted.

---

On another note, I generally agree. Google has a lot more scope for evil than Microsoft does. Embrace, Extend, Extinguish applies to what appeared to some Google properties too (eg Reader).

I will caution optimism based on tone. The reporter also filed a complaint on the officer in charge of this very incident. The SPD review concluded that "The officer took a normal contact with a member of the public and turned it into a confrontation and escalated it to a point where he was acting in a completely unprofessional and inappropriate manner". The punishment for completely unprofessional behavior by the officer in charge was "one unpaid day off of work" which was "an appropriate measure" in the "middle of the range of possible disciplinary actions". That doesn't strike me as taking it seriously. The sounds to me like a slap on the wrist for being unlucky and causing a PR issue for the police by doing this to a real journalist.

There was substantially more than just mere lying. From TFA:

"Saulet has long history of misconduct, with approximately 120 allegations against him and 21 cases of sustained misconduct (more than any other officer in the department). The sheriff's letter says that Saulet repeatedly was told to improve interactions with the public, and provided with remarkable investments of coaching and counseling. Saulet underwent three performance-improvement plans, two training sessions, and two multi-visit sessions with a social psychologist, coaching sessions with supervisors, and 80 hours of time off without pay. Saulet was demoted from sergeant to deputy for another incident in August"

In that incident "Saulet accosted a family that made a wrong turn into a Metro transit station last December [due to following their GPS]. Saulet reportedly threatened to arrest the parents in the car—including a visibly pregnant woman—and then suggested the couple's 18-month-old daughter would be seized by government authorities"[1].

Its also worth noting that the reporter filed a complaint against a 2nd officer who was also found guilty, but that officer was just given a day off without pay.

So the conclusion seems to be this was a problem officer who had been given many opportunities to improve and this was merely the last straw on the camels back.

[1] http://slog.thestranger.com/slog/archives/2013/08/19/king-co...