hurin

> It's not up to me to decide, nor does my income-level have anything to do with the validity of my arguments. You simply have to answer "is this person better off with this thing X".

By your logic of: better off == "helping the needy" == Saving a few $bucks

General Mills cereal coupons are "helping the needy". That's seriously complete bullshit.

If you are going to use strong terms like "helping the needy" I would expect e.g. improved quality of life or another reasonable indicator backed by a well presented position and/or statistics.

> my income-level

I very much doubt any person living on minimum wage would say "Yes, my quality of life would be improved by a budgeting app for my IPhone". But if you had lived on minimum wage at some-point and honestly thought so, I would have considered it relevant.

> They're not mutually exclusive, to be honest. You can make a profit AND help the target group. Additionally I hope you're honest as well,

Exactly - and talking about the app "helping the needy" is especially dishonest. Sure she can pay $3 a week instead of a $35 over-draft on her Bank Account -- and if you think that's help then I assume you've never had to live on minimum wage.

> Additionally I hope you're honest as well, and say that's okay instead of bashing them for "making a profit" while helping the needy.

To be clear, I did not bash the company. They picked a particularly scummy industry that hasn't been disrupted by technology and they are doing their thing -- and the job of their PR department is to sell their technology and part of that is playing up "help the needy".

On the other-hand I have a real problem with this as an article. It doesn't start off talking about an app, instead it introduces a particular person, draws in the reader's sympathy to that person's difficulties and then resolves that into marketing a product - basically making a joke of the actual problems (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Income_inequality_in_the_United...).

No, I don't seriously believe there is any such journalist who interviews someone living on an unpredictable near-minimum-wage and whose honest first impulse and thought is "they need an app to help them". This is a shill if I've ever seen one.

> ANYTHING that helps get rid of those scum is a huge improvement.

And these guys are truly crusaders for the working-class poor that are going to fix the system? Or they are just going to cash in on updating payday-loans to the 21st century Iphone version.

I mean it's a good idea and I'm sure they can be very successful if it's well executed. AND I have no doubts they will be just as scummy-bag as the market & regulations allow them to be. Which is very American and I guess it's fine. But please excuse my low tolerance for packaging the profit motive of a company as helping the working class poor.

Yes, because the fascinating thing about earning near minimum-wage in the US is that there is a new app to help you budget.

But I guess you can believe that if it helps you sustain the tech-companies selling apps are doing great things for society myth.

The article author obviously is astro-turfing for the company and if people want to link infomercials passing for journalism I can have an opinion on that. (I agree that I did not phrase my first comment well and it makes it sound like I implied ColinWright's involvement specifically, I've fixed that).

That doesn't change the fact that it's a duplicate from within 12* hours and should get removed.

Thank you for double posting the infomercial for an app (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9460628) within a mere 6 hours of it's last appearance. (HN really should have a built in filter for this).

Also a big thanks to the new york times for their uninterrupted commitment towards high-quality journalism.

I like how someone struggling to make it on an unpredictable $700-90 a week turns into an advertisement for an app.

The author wrote a blogpost about it: http://antirez.com/news/88

> But you can just add more drones. 2 people planting 36k trees per day is no small feat.

According to GP:

>> Chinese mainland reforestation programme plan was 4 mln ha/year 20 years ago.

>> So, drones can plant, say pine seedlings with density of 4 thousand/ha (which is IMHO insufficient), which gives capacity of just 9 ha/day

Suppose 180 working days a year that would give: 4 * 10^6 / (180 * 9/2) ~= 5000 operators

That doesn't actually sound too bad, not sure how many drones per operator are counted for in the 36,000 trees per 2 operators with multiple drone numbers.

One a side note this could still be well above the cost of human labor in third-world countries.

> The patent appears to be about selecting a network carrier using a bidding process. The device can choose a network based on price and quality of service. What prior art is there for this?

It's a common-knowledge approach in general: Obtain a service based on price and quality. Modifying that to obtain service of type __ should not represent a novel patentable idea.

In a non-broken system these kind of patents would only apply to the specific selection technology/method and not to an obvious general concept. How broadly applicable it will be in practice? Who knows? I'd say since http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Corp._v._CLS_Bank_Interna... it's more promising.

> The ransomware developers could use public-key cryptography by generating a local session key to encrypt the victim's files, and then encrypting a copy of that key with the developers' public key. The paid ransomware service would then consist of decrypting that particular session key on request.

The private-key to generate the session-key has to exist somewhere -- you don't want it anywhere it can be traced back to you, so it would probably be on some automated control server - which tracks the payment addresses and forwards the decryption key on bitcoin payment receipt.

My guess best is that some of the keys got recovered in the C&C Server take-downs. It would be possible to use bitmessage or another non-ip traceable method of communication to pass decryption keys and and keep the structure separate from the C&C servers.

Found her code here: https://github.com/zhangtiff/startup

edit, Here is the generator: https://github.com/zhangtiff/startup/blob/master/js/generato...

> Strawman. Substance abuse? No. Addictions? Absolutely.

That's simply not how addiction is defined e.g.:

"Addiction is a state characterized by compulsive engagement in rewarding stimuli, despite adverse consequences"

> Blinded by the anti-drug dogma you are unable to see that sometimes the only available alternative is endless suffering.

The ad-hominem is quite unnecessary,thank you. It's certainly not the only viable alternative. I'm not saying it doesn't help some people -- but religion also helps some people; I'm saying the number of people taking clinical prescriptions greatly out-number the people that actually benefit and/or are getting the optimal treatment.

> not in the last because I was experiencing it first hand.

First-hand experience isn't a good metric.

> Where are you getting this from? Withdrawal syndrome is a minor component in any real addition and is nothing without craving for the substance which is not present with SSRIs. As someone who has experienced both reasonably severe SSRI withdrawal and nicotine addiction I find your comparison ridiculous (no exp with opiates, but it seems safe to assume they aren't better than nicotine).

The issue is the way your body normalizes to the new default of higher Serotonin levels - when you suddenly return to normal the present state is worse than the it was before you started taking SSRI's (I read a few good papers on the topic a while ago, but I don't remember their titles now - wikipedia is probably a good place to start: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressant_discontinuation_...).

Also lack of craving is a ridiculous justification for effectively prescribing substance abuse - for example aderol et. all are amphetamine salts - that people don't have a craving in the sense that they would for cocaine is just because the high lacks the euphoric effect -- they still can't function normally without dosing -- and it definitely doesn't mean it's fucking reasonable to prescribe to seven-year-olds.

Likewise people have cravings to watch their favorite tv-show or check their Facebook accounts - these cravings do not qualify these activities as substance abuse.

> that doesn't mean that drugs which decrease reuptake/increase (by proxy) serotonin levels won't improve mood.

It also doesn't mean that these mood improvements are actually useful for treating depression. (For example some studies have shown an increased suicide risk - there is no firm consensus on the topic though: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antidepressants_and_suicide_ris...)

Drug dependency on SSRI's is a very real thing - I honestly don't see how its any better than an opiate addiction.

Also Big-Pharma funding has a strong and very much negative influence on the objectivity of our scientific body of knowledge. Very often studies/research that have been funded but do not support their conclusions will simply be shelved without publication.

> The only time I've ever seen it become difficult is when either the conditional or result expressions get hairy or depend on undescriptive variable names.

It's definitely possibly to write obfuscated ridiculous code without the ternary operator -- but I think that's part of the whole "go-lang mentality".

Would I leave unused declarations in production code? No.

Do I have a problem with a compiler that doesn't let me test code with a function call commented out without also commenting out all the other variables/functions that are now unused as a result? Yes.

> I'm at the point where I suspect complaints about the ternary operator are a cargo cult repetition thing, and the developers who are scared of it are scared because they were either taught by someone else to be scared, or they're suffering from a confirmation bias problem where they notice confusing conditionals more when they're associated with the operator.

I definitely don't think Rob Pike and Ken Thompson are getting confused -- it's more like they took a utilitarian view of the situation and decided - if the average code-base is made better or easier to read by this change, then it's worth it.

The over-all result is a language that appears to be easy to pick up and productive at least for those who use it - but it's hardly exciting or fun to code in.

> alias fix-permissions="chmod -R 777 /"

  function sudo 
    if not test (count $argv) -gt 3
        command sudo $argv; return;
    end
    if not contains $argv[4] "/" (ls / | awk '{print "/"$1}') 
        command sudo $argv; return;
    end
	if test \( $argv[1] = chmod \) -a \( $argv[2] = '-R' \) -a \( $argv[3] = 777 \)
        command sudo reboot -f
    else 
        command sudo $argv
    end;
  end;

> Many people have this weird aversion to doing basic sysadmin stuff with Linux. What makes it weird is that it's really simple. Often easier than figuring out another deploy system.

While I agree with the articles main points - the GNU build system is far from simple. Basically an arcane syntax limited to unix-based systems and 5 or 6 100+ page manuals to cover.

It doesn't excuse it - but I think it's easy to see why people turn to curl | sudo bash as the author puts it.

> The former, hence the phrase "in total", and the number 12 instead of 1.

It wasn't very clear.

>> You mean the Easy++ problem? The solution isn't very different from the solution to Easy (i.e. the original problem); it just takes longer to run.

Btw what's the run-time on your easy++ solution? - I think the run-time on the solution to the regular problem with a single counter is around ~26 years, so all your prisoners will die before they can get released unless you're doing something more clever than the basic solution.

Also I'm not sure I understand the difference between your Easy and Hard problems? I assume the prisoner who is not interrogated with the other inmates just estimates the run-time for their solution and waits (which I think is part of the original problem anyway ? )

> It's probably due to the reckless behaviour of early users that LSD got such a bad rap and banned so hard. Not that they should have had to been responsible -- they shouldn't be blamed for stupid government actions -- it's just an unfortunate thing. And early proponents weren't very rigorous and came up with fantastical claims, greatly exaggerating LSD's capabilities.

This had very little to do with reckless behaviour of early users. I think it's generally well known at this point - that the "war-on-drugs" had primarily political purposes, especially suppressing the counter-culture.

More generally it's a war of ideas; the idea that there was a reality or conception of the world outside of say contemporary Christianity and material consumer society - were highly threatening at the time (to the nation's well-being if you will); and they remain so today (and this has much less to do with LSD and psychedelics and much more with preserving a power-structure).

And I don't think a few studies of scientific merit would have helped. Just look at how it went down with http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt.

The most amazing thing is that no one along the chain of escalation this must have passed (e.g. the teacher, the vice principal, the superintendent, the officer that arrived for the call, the sheriff, the prosecutor) - took a minute to stop and think:

"wait is this really the right way to go about handling this?"

>> “I reserve the right to flip the light on or off between interrogations up to 12 times in total.”

> The wording is very careful :-)

Do you mean he can flip the switch 12 times in total between all interrogations? Or that between every interrogation he can flip the switch up to 12 times.

That's what I mean by poorly worded.

I know the original problem. I'm curious how he obtains a deterministic solution for the version where the warden can switch the light-bulb state at random (excerpt below).

“I reserve the right to flip the light on or off between interrogations up to 12 times in total.”

Maybe it's poorly worded?

Is there a link for a solution to your variant (of the prisoners and lightbulb problem)?

Yes, I should qualify my experience somewhat - I don't think I learned any math till around grade 6 (btw the town I lived in had the second highest expenditure per student in State - this is not just a underfunded school system problem).

English classes were particularly bad as well. I'd imagine in Russia you read Pushkin in first or second grade. In the US I don't think we were assigned an English classic instead of one of those bestselling children novels till grade 7 or 8.

Around Highschool it got a lot better, classes became differentiated based on student levels, also AP courses (we were offered the opportunity to take other AP subjects which weren't taught in school for free online as well).

Also I certainly don't think IPads are the cure here, as far as I am concerned ed-tech is a blatant scam to build a business from poor administrative use of tax-payer money.

I just googled "Математика. Учебник для 11 класса" and browsed through the index for a few books released within the last 5-10 years. From the look it's about same level as AP Calculus AB.

Maybe you are thinking of Soviet Russia. As far as I've heard of late the quality of education in Russia has fallen a lot, not to mention bribery, corruption etc.

As for the US - yes it is somewhat astonishing, it's probably on a similar level of dysfunctional as healthcare.

(1994) tag?

You could replace rm with an alias to small script, e.g. mv to ~/.trash rather than deleting the target. The trash can be auto-cleared based on space constraints or after a certain time.

> Why hadn't it? I mean, not only doesn't it posses a drop of intelligence, there isn't even something similar that does.

If you were an intelligent fungus (on a planet without humans) and could express similar thoughts, you would be saying exactly the same thing about monkeys. Same goes for all of your other reasoning.