skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We can see what the results of this style of policing is when we look at juveniles.

http://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/2014/03/am...

> This overreliance on imprisonment can be seen most starkly, and sadly, by looking at the juvenile population, which is just under 71,000 nationally. Around 11,600 are imprisoned for "technical violations" of their probation or parole terms, rather than because they committed a new crime. In 11 states such juvenile prisoners outnumber those in for crimes against other people. In only one state (Massachusetts) did juveniles imprisoned for crimes committed against people comprise a majority of juvenile prisoners. Around 3,000 are locked up for things that aren't crimes for adults, "such as running away, truancy and incorrigibility." Incarcerated children are less likely to graduate high-school and more likely to spend time in prison as adults. If America is interested in reducing its prison population, locking up fewer juveniles for silly reasons would be a good place to start.
Does someone have a good list of industries and sub-industries with sizes? Could be an interesting starting point?
"(...) an experiment taking place in dozens of police departments across the country, one in which the authorities have turned to complex computer algorithms to try to pinpoint the people most likely to be involved in future violent crimes — as either predator or prey."

Interesting (eerie) parallel to the intro in the TV series "Person of Interest", although supposedly this system doesn't get its data from the NSA (as with parallel construction etc), but rather the information comes from more-or-less open data (legal surveillance etc) -- and of course it isn't vigilantes but police that will, 'victim or perpetrator, if your number's up (...) find you':

"You are being watched. The government has a secret system: a machine that spies on you every hour of every day. I know, because I built it. I designed the machine to detect acts of terror, but it sees everything. Violent crimes involving ordinary people; people like you. Crimes the government considered 'irrelevant'. They wouldn't act, so I decided I would. But I needed a partner, someone with the skills to intervene. Hunted by the authorities, we work in secret. You'll never find us, but victim or perpetrator, if your number's up... we'll find you".
I'm a long-time Rails developer and unfortunately this release doesn't excite me, though I appreciate all the hard work by the core team/continued support from 37signals. The reason is this:

The intent of Rails is to make writing web applications easier, but that writing web applications actually got much more difficult for me as a Rails developer when Angular and Ember and then later React got popular. I love Ruby, but I respect the fact that the Javascript-client-side-heavy/"single-page" part of the app is where the magic is for at least a few years now- really several years.

Other than Rails helpers in the 2006-2008 timeframe being a big deal, Rails' has not ever really helped out a whole lot on the JS side, and you wouldn't expect it to. The asset pipeline is wonderful, and coffeescript support with in it is ok I guess, even though I don't use it. But, writing JS client-side is not any easier. To be a full-stack developer in today's world I have to accept the fact that Ruby, as much as I love it and would rather develop in it all day and night, is just not taking over in every facet of development. There is no Rubyscript on the client side taking over the world. There is ES6/Typescript- that is the future.

A substantial number of Ruby masters are jumping over to the Phoenix/Elixir bandwagon. I look at it, and want to like it, but I just haven't gotten into it yet. I know it is fast, but it just isn't as readable yet for me. And it won't solve the problem that the client still needs to be written primarily in Javascript.

And the answer is not Node either, because every serious Javascript developer I've talked to says, "Node is still not ready."

I just feel let down. I want to get excited about Rails again, but give me a path. I don't really like Ember a whole lot, because the community is just not where it is with Angular and React. Someone please take your favorite frameworks and show me how my life is supposed to get better by using them. Show me how it is fun. Bring back the magic, because right now it all just seems like more and more of a PITA as attention deficit has fully set in within the web application development community and there is no clear way ahead for the next few years.
Why will you need TTF fonts and antialiasing? The higher the resolution, the less antialiasing you need.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=10274898
> i would be in favour of a separate Bluetooth and Wifi kill switch.

that's what I thought as well.

About the microcode, this won't be fixed. But see the weekly updates on their blog[1] that states progress they make with the coreboot developers. Hopefully they can free the number one problem with intel chips[2] which is the Management Engine firmware.

[1] https://puri.sm/posts/weekly-update-on-librem-production-201...

[2] http://www.coreboot.org/Binary_situation
Making Really Executable Jars (2011)
> Artisanal ad networks

Now I really have heard everything...
How This Startup Got 1,000 App Downloads in Its First Month
Make sense, dynamic languages have a lot of conveniences. If having a REPL helps, there are REPLs for interpreted C

I meant to refer to "tonumber(oldsize[0])" used to cast from a ctype size_t to a lua number (doubles) (I missed that's it's also used for casting pointers). Now I realise that this is needed because implicit casting from 64 bit ints to a double would reduce precision. It's just a very minor thing that "for" loop bounds must be lua numbers.
Sometimes I wonder whether there is a webcam video of me in my bed, lit only by the laptop screen, you know... masturbating.
Seems to stand in rather stark contrast to a system designed to rehabilitate criminals.
The company [GM] continued to recall more of its cars over the next several months, resulting in nearly 30 million cars worldwide recalled and paid compensation for 124 deaths.[1]

No, not really an overstatement.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2014_General_Motors_recall
How to always use the latest Simulator with Xcodebuild
For posterity: the link used to pop an alert() saying that. Doesn't happen for me anymore...
Yet modern missiles are lot more effective when shot from the rear quarter of the enemy. Any fighter pilot interested in staying alive still tries to get there.
Hi…this is your auto insurance co. and your car tells us you’re a shitty driver
"partly responsible" is a highly context-dependent weasel word. You can be "partly responsible" for a brick hitting you on the head, since you didn't look up. You can be "partly responsible" for being raped while drunk, because you chose to get wasted in unsafe company. Your parents are also "partly responsible", because they raised you in a neighbourhood with a high number of violent young men. The bar is, indeed, also "partly responsible", for not hiring competent bouncers to prevent this situation. And so on and so forth until we get to the Big Bang, which is also partly responsible, because it set up the initial conditions which evolved to the current predicament. In short, "partly responsible" can mean whatever the hell you want it to mean, and you can get most people to answer whatever you want to that question by first priming them with other questions.
Interesting article. A pdf version of the East and Gancio paper referenced in the article at at [1].

Its also worth noting that they used a 30 meter dish, which is probably on the large side for amateur radio astronomy.

[1] http://www.britastro.org/radio/projects/East_AmateurPulsarDe...
Could anyone explain what's going on? (I.e. how my mouse position influences the shape?)
> kids will always do what their parents did.

1968.
30 second arithmetic challenge
SolidLUUV: the world's first all-in-one camera stabilizer
All of the reports indicate that the ECUs were programmed to detect tests and enable the changes that reduce NOx emissions. The intended behaviour was to have one performance profile for emissions tests, and one for power/efficiency elsewhere.

The engine shutoff feature is irrelevant, as it happens in the wild when not running emissions tests.
Bit of an understatement. You ever heard of an industry called big tobacco? Half a million killed a year, and they've made it seem cool to put these death sticks in your mouth. Honestly, even I think it looks pretty damn cool.

Ciba-Geigy is another example. Read the reviews of the book: http://www.amazon.com/Toms-River-Story-Science-Salvation/dp/...

These are just two random "success stories" I picked out of many failures. And even though I call them "successes" the results are still truly pathetic. if an individual rather than a corporation committed equivalent crimes they are tried in international court and hanged. Imagine the speed at which justice was served to Saddam Hussein versus a corporation.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Apophenia

Given the problems in police departments (which have fortunately started to appearing in the news), giving the police a system that will essentially let them see what you want to see is a terrible idea. Police work is already full of "forensic tools" that don't actually work (like idea that fingerprints actually identify someone uniquely, or the various techniques that are examples of the Birthday Paradox).

While I'm sure that it's possible to use modern techniques to estimate where crime will occur, it won't work in practice. There are simply too many ways to bias the results (intentionally or not). I suspect giving police this kind of tool is simply a way to give legitimacy and cover to their bad behavior.

> including information about friendships, social media activity

COINTELPRO is a helluva drug.

> advocates say predictive policing can help improve police-community relations by focusing on the people most likely to become involved in violent crime.

That sounds suspiciously like an excuse to improve white communities, by focusing on the blacks (who have historically been seen as "violent savages" by racists).

> because our predictive tool shows us you might commit a crime at some point in the future

The big question is how long until someone tries to use that "predictive tool" as probable cause.
Thank you for clarifying / pointing that out to me. I've never spent time to understand that an apostrophe used in this way made it possessive. I've taken that on board and will (hopefully) not make this mistake again.
Heroku Deflater: a gem that enables gzip compression for Rails apps on Heroku
Yep, my quirky nimbus which was basically a customizable dashboard device stopped working after a few weeks. The API endpoints basically borked, but they refused to fix it. These days, it literally sits unplugged on my desk. Why it's still on my desk beats me....
Yup. Different couples have different agreements. Some share absolutely everything, others argree on private areas. For instance, I myself feel no problem with leaving my SO my Facebook or GMail session logged in, but sharing passwords with each other is off-limits. Not because of lack of trust, but as a general rule. If I happen to discover her password by accident[0], I forget it and ask her to change it.

[0] - it happens, e.g. it's easy to accidentally mis-TAB when logging in to Facebook and have the password, appended to e-mail, saved in browser's auto-complete for login field.
If I'm looking for a bluetooth speaker, or metal snips (got ones the other day), I will look for:

1. Specs
2. Reviews
3. Teardown
4. Product comparisons

Ads just don't give me any of that, the landing pages too often don't even have the specs, and I am never going to choose a brand name if their specs/reviews/teardown/price is worse than any other brand's or non-brand product's.

The only ads that "could", "maybe", "in theory" work on my are from Amazon, since free 1-day shipping is a cool thing... except I already search Amazon when I'm looking for a product, and by the time they get to show me ads about it, I've already made a purchase and are no longer interested.
What about the real old school approach and try XOFF?
Cookies can render secure websites vulnerable in all modern browsers
iirc, Volvo did a lot of testing to find the optimum setup in an ordinary passenger car. The 3-point belts worked best, as they were the easiest to get out of after an accident. Remember that race cars typically have people waiting in the event of an accident to assist in removing the person from the car. In a more typical accident, it can be much longer before help arrives. As a result, seat belt setups must be easy for the user to get out of by themselves. While 5-point systems fared better in the actual accidents, 3-point systems more than compensated by allowing individuals to free themselves from the car and preventing further injuries.
But that logic is hardly complicated. The firmware is the bit that would be really annoying to reverse engineer. The rest anyone can write fairly easily.
> I hope they'll be able to continue to keep up C support as well as C++. It'd been so nice having C99 in MSVC, as cross-platform projects can now adopt C99 features.

I hope that they only keep it as much as required by the ANSI C++ standard.

Annex K was a joke.
Introducing Renewable Energy
I used to have a laptop that when you pressed the function button to enable/disable the webcam would actually install/uninstall the webcam drivers. I found it more hilarious than anything.
I especially like to see this laptop because it's the first that I know of that can effectively turn off the microphone (for the webcam we already have stickers so this is less of an advantage, of course still laudable).

Though I think these hardware kill switches should not be optional. A product that praises itself for privacy and security should have this as a base feature instead of asking $89,- separately for it.
This is excellent news. MSVC is a big pain in the ass for me, as I tend to write C code (not ++ usually) and Microsoft's C compiler is the one with the worst support for language level features (out of widely used compilers). E.g. having to move variables to beginning of block (c89 style) is just miserable. A popular option is to compile C code as C++ inside an "extern C" block to stop name mangling, but this isn't too clean either.

I'd also like to have compatibility of some language extension features, such as built-in functions and attributes. In particular, CPU-agnostic intrinsics for common instructions like atomics, popcount or count leading zeros as well SIMD arithmetic would be great.

My favorite C language extension is SIMD vector arithmetic with infix operators. You can get really pretty and portable (!) vector math code written in Clang and GCC using vector extensions, but again, it's not available in MSVC.

For most of my current projects, I have no intent of supporting the (current) Microsoft C compiler. It's not worth the effort.
Ten days seems really, really low. No legal minimum also seems like a problem.

This explains for me why it seems a lot of US developers claim to suffer from burnout and the like. Breaks from work are very important.
Speaking as someone who has written many well-received essays on LessWrong, I feel like you're approaching the problem from the wrong angle. IMO writing a good essay shouldn't be a goal, it has to be a side effect of doing interesting intellectual work.

For example, there's someone on LW who wrote a chatbot that successfully hypnotizes people over IRC. Would you read an essay about that? You bet you would! There's also someone who sold drugs for bitcoin, and someone who doxxed drug lords, and someone who won AI-box experiments, and someone who independently invented cryptocurrency... My own most successful essays on LW came as as a side effect of my work on decision theory math, which had other nice effects as well (like being invited to speak at conferences). Even Eliezer's essays were a side effect of his attempts to figure out friendly AI, rather than "hmm I want to write something interesting today".

So, instead of mulling over which obvious thing you'd like to write about, try to do some novel work that interests you on its own terms! When you try to describe it afterward, I promise you the words will come much easier.
Assuming they're running Intel Wireless chips (which is very likely), this is impossible because they are run on the same antennas by the same chip.

You can disable this in software by passing "bt_coex_active=N" to the iwlwifi kernel module, but of course, who knows if that's actually sufficient.

I'm pretty sure the situation with other vendors is similar or worse. Big vendors like Broadcom have terrible open source track records.
Ok, maybe I've been doing too much hardware development and more tinkering than the average guy, but this part here, to me, sounds way overblown:

> As you can see, it is not a trivial matter to
> manufacture these HKSes. A lot of research and
> hard work went into the effort.

I mean, compared to all the other things one has to get right to design a laptop computer, switching these few signals is indeed very, very trivial.

And while the webcam/microphone switches will prevent the particular devices from working, I'm not so sure about the WiFi card and Bluetooth. The microphone surely is dead by cutting the single signal line and the webcam by cutting its power.

But there's no guarantee that the W_DISABLE# pins are honored with every firmware of every possible wifi module that could be inserted into that slot. What if W_DISABLE#, on the card, is only a gpio that is checked by the WiFi chip's firmware? It would have been safer to also cut the power there, too. Or at least to verify that W_DISABLE# cuts off power to the RF PAs (transmitter power amplifier) of WiFi and Bluetooth in a way that can't be circumvented.
I disagree with these points on some general levels, even though for this particular product at this particular price point I can see the raionale somewhat:

1) Consumers might be moving away from desktops, but I don't know that creators are so much yet. However I think that's a moot point - desktop, laptop, tablet, whatever. It's not about form factor it's about computing power and it wouldn't surprise me if the latest iPad Pro or even top-end smartphone had the computing power to do these calculations locally.

2) My 3D Printing Systems UP Mini does the heavy lifting on my local PC and then sends that data off to the printer where the printer stores it in memory. Once the print job is sent off and the printer starts going, there's no longer any need for the PC - you can shut the PC down and leave the printer going.

3) Easily solved with a local Wi-Fi connection. Printers (the paper kind) have had this problem solved for ages now. There was no complicated setup for my cheap printer with Wi-Fi; my desktop just found it.

4) Job queue time may vary sure, but once it's sent to the printer it shouldn't matter.

5) This isn't all-or-nothing. What's stopping this from being an optional feature?

"Now that my 3D printer is driven from the cloud...." That doesn't preclude core functionality being available locally. It does mean that if this start-up doesn't succeed, you'll be left with an expensive paperweight until someone writes open backend firmware.

I really love the idea of this product and I can see how cloud connection can be a real enabler (look at what it's done for voice recognition on low-power devices, for example). I'm just really sceptical of this type of cloud-connected device as a general good thing for consumers - there are both good and bad sides to this. We really do need to be asking these questions and getting proper answers and assurances that as consumers we're getting something that's of benefit to us and that we won't be abandoned.
Why do you want to write? Do you really want to write? To me it seems strange to want to write about something, anything, but not knowing what to write about. I have the opposite problem: too many things to write about and too little time to write about them. I don't want to write about them for the sake of writing something, but because I find the topic interesting. It's like the kid who is exploring a forest and found a cave, and is excited about the cave and wants to share that excitement.

So I think the first thing you need to evaluate is whether you really want to write and why. If the answer is you want to seem sophisticated and earn the intellectual respect of being a writer then I can't give you any advice except that maybe you should reconsider the decision to write. Write about topics that interest you. Where does your mind wander when you are in the shower? That's what you should write about. In most cases this is not a topic that you've already fully understood. Those topics aren't interesting any more because you already know the answers. Interesting topics are those for which you need to do additional thinking and additional research. Write about what you are learning now.
Programming Adventure Game Else Heart.Break() Is Out on Steam, Humble and GOG
The real breakthrough in electric aviation will come when it is combined with beamed energy. Rather than storing power onboard the vehicle, you have ground-based stations which power the vehicles with tracking microwave tightbeams. That way, you only need enough onboard battery power to take off, land, and bypass one broken ground station -- maybe 15-20 minutes of total flight time. This would allow electric aircraft to be considerably lighter than hydrocarbon vehicles, even considering the current energy-density of batteries.

Beamed-energy flight systems are being developed for space launch[1], but I don't know of anybody yet doing this for plain old aviation. It's a gap waiting to be filled.

1: http://escapedynamics.com/
Well, it's what iTunes has always done.
Point taken. Seems there is some OSX and FreeBSD support effort going on in the github repo, but i am not versed enough in the BSD differences to say if that will help with OpenBSD support in any way.
It still happens if you use STRG+F5 to force a complete reload.
This is how it should be done. I really hope manufacturers will start going back to physical hardware switches. I hate long-pressing buttons to switch things on or off, not knowing whether devices are really on or off, or being unable to tell the state of a switch/device just by touching it (without looking).

The physical dual-position sliding switch has a lot of advantages, and yet it has almost completely disappeared from the electronics/computing world. I'd like to see it back.
Sounds like a great business model:

1. Get a lot of web pages to show your ads

2. Charge advertisers for showing their ads

3. Charge users for not seeing ads

4. Let the bidding wars begin!
"In Chicago, the police have developed a “heat list” of 400 people who are considered far more likely than the average person to be involved in violent crime. Factors in compiling that list included their criminal records, social circles and gang connections. Also a factor was whether they had been victims of an assault or a shooting."

Yeah and I'm sure that Chicago detectives had absolutely no clue about those 400 people, they really needed a piece of expensive software to tell them where to look for.
The trend is to think that technology will solve all problems, but it's just wishful thinking imho.