skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Lobbyist and K-Street are at the core of the problem in the Beltway. I've spent a long time trying to figure out the root issues there, and I think short term limits are the best way to prevent this, because here how it happens.

You get elected on hopes and dreams, and propose a bill, but you are a freshman. The senior guy you ask to help you sponsor the bill which is only 10 pages long then says he will support you if you add an amendment that says X, even that amendment has nothing to do with the main bill, and he has been donated money or promised campaign support by $KSTREETGROUP. If you say no, you get derailed, the bill never leaves committee, and you have made an enemy. You agree, and then the floodgates are open for 10 other sitting house members to throw in their amendments too. Before you know it, your bill is 250 pages and they removed all your original text and it's no longer your bill. If you rock the boat, you make enemies and forever get shoved aside. Agree and support the bill you introduced, that is actually now bad legislation, and all those people say they will help you next time.

In this case, it's more of the, this bill has to pass, so we can add all kinds of little tidbits and the public won't know about them in time to stop it!. Then you might have a guy or two who actually put that tidbit in vote no just so he has some plausible deniability to his constituents who don't know any better because reports on the hill suck these days.

We need to get rid of excessive riders, last minute riders on big bills, extend time for public review, and give power back to congress/senate to take stances without being pushed over politically. The thing is that the lobbyist will mostly just promise to get the guy fired if they push back too much, or they will then donate to another guy who's been in for 18 years and get him to put the pressure on. If we put short term limits (and I don't mean 12 years, I mean 6 year limits) then you can get people who will do stuff and not care about getting booted out, because they never had the intention to turn it into a lifetime job in the first place.

Also, we need to stop the revolving door between the hill and k-street. Staffers should not be allowed to turn around and go work for them, as Jack Abramoff put it, once he promised a staffer a job, he found out that they would do more for him than he even asked them to do!

We have a broken system, and until we address these fundamental problems, all the other issues people are passionate about will never get fixed properly. Fix the system first, then work on the more mainstream issues.

Vote arca_vorago for congress.
I'm wondering at the actual value of old cases. Surely there's a halflife for law. This worship of precedent as semi-holy writing is strange to me. As an Engineer, old books are far less useful than new ones. Things change; people change; law changes too. Maybe its just fine the books were mutilated for this process. Its a way of 'burning bridges' and putting it all behind us.
If police forces were required to report all killings, then we could know that statistic. But they aren't, so we can't.
> Some gamers can be caustic

Some humans can be caustic.

> But I'd almost want to have tried it under a totally new brand.

Then nobody would notice and they would be promoting the idea that gamers are caustic.
"in 2013": It might be an outlier. We had an abnormally large group of terrorism-related deaths in 2001, but on average it's less, and the same type of thing may be in effect here. That year may have been bad for deaths by police, and better for train safety, than average.
"If so, I totally support the idea of licensing human breeding."

In the context of America this was already tried

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eugenics_in_the_United_States#...

Sterilization and licensing are the exactly same mechanism - the state holds veto right over who gets to procreate.
I have ended a few interviews early when I was absolutely certain that a candidate wasn't a fit, but only when they were objectively not right for a position. What I try to do in those cases is end the main interview set gracefully, then take the candidate in for a one-on-one and talk to them about where their skills don't fit, and what kind of position they would have more success searching for.

In general, my belief is that any time a candidate reaches out, they're putting faith in me to treat them with the respect they deserve -- everyone is a good fit somewhere, and I have no time for people who want to use interviews as a chance to prove their intellectual superiority or to band the team against a possibly inferior "outsider." Same thing with using whiteboard-heavy interviews as a weapon -- I have yet to hit upon the secret sauce for finessing a candidate who might be a great fit but is floundering with the stress of a whiteboard problem, but I do try very hard to not make them feel like they're failing, while seeing if they can approach the problem in a rigorous manner.
That's not at all a rookie move. Using two code bases, preferrably in different languages, makes issues in documentation and standardization far more obvious.

The approach is quite costly but if you care more about quality and creating an excellent standard than getting a product out of the door quickly, it's certainly worth it.
I did a small test, here's the gist:https://gist.github.com/arnists/a9f19af5d9469549020e

Seems like a huge improvement, don't know if it's the recent additions or in general pypy vs cpython but it's enough of a speed bump to sit up and take note.
This is incorrect. It's perfectly possible to make light fluffy bread without adding sugar. Sugar might be added to accelerate the process for economic reasons, but that's something else.
If your comparing something with 1 chance in 10^50 vs. 1 chance in 10^55 then sure the first is more likely. It's still not worth considering.

First, getting a nuke while hard is not enough. Killing 10 million people takes either a really big nuke in just the right spot, or a large number of nukes.

Second, having a nuke is not enough you need to be able to correctly detonate on command which it which is harder than you might think.

Third, you need to transport it to a useful location as there not stored in the middle of city's.

Fourth, you need to decide using them is more useful than threating to use them.

Fifth, if your comparing them to US police then they need to target the US.

So, no it takes far more than picking one up to kill 10 million people.

PS: Simply killing lots of people is not that useful to a terrorist organization. Making nukes less useful than you might think.
What sort of software? Firmware for the charger-inverter, load scheduling & management, something else?
Yeah, they do this to any number that is listed on a business document ever. I ported my number to run through google voice, which catches only a few of them, and pretty much have stopped picking up most calls from unlisted numbers. It's sad.

The major problem with some of these issues is that if I understand it right, the phone system often isn't always aware of the source of the calls because they get routed through foreign gateways and voip and the number you see in the caller ID is spoofed and has no connection to anything.

The FCC is aware this is happening and these fall within its jurisdiction, but they're having trouble enforcing the rules.

The fact that congress is revoking the FCC's ability to enforce these rules for student loans is just bog standard corruption.
Show HN: Mini_printf – minimal, self-contained and verified printf()
Railroad crossing deaths don't involve willful acts backed by billions in government funding.
Not in the Stable or Beta channels of Chrome. (There may be a way of re-enabling it, but frankly, Opera or something Chromium based.)

https://support.google.com/chrome/answer/2811969?hl=en-GB
The board may not have any real voting power, "thanks to a supervoting share structure that gives insiders 100 votes per share." Holmes unilaterally decides who's on the board.

https://www.theinformation.com/inside-private-tech-voting-st...
How would you avoid loopholes, for example getting a free subsidy without doing anything of interest by "selling" your car to a friend and then buying it back from him again?
Agreed. Most of the time, perhaps all, I've heard this phrase, it's a source of pride.

We have to remember, the US was vastly and primarily agricultural and largely didn't attend secondary education in numbers till after WWII with the gi bill and subsequent popularization of secondary education.

The phrase is typically a way to show achievement in the face of slim odds, like from broken home, no tradition of emphasis on education, etc.

The only "racist" element, if it can be called that is the presumption the secondary education is seen as modern sophisticated and good, which I think it is, to practical extents, but can see where some may disagree.
> America has been slowly transitioning from a superstitious nation to a more rational one.

lulz

Rationality requires laws of logic--which do not exist in a humanistic, materialistic world.

Tell me, can you stub your toe on the law of non-contradiction? No? How does it exist then?
Good answer! When I was 4 or 5, I used to ask so many questions my grandparents often wondered how my parents survived ;-) For me it was great, it fostered just that sense of curiosity that I have never lost since. It also taught me pretty soon that my parents do not know everything, which meant that I had to learn how to find things out for myself (especially in books).
Maybe the question you should ask yourselves, is why you have those. Why are inequalities so high in your country ?
> Expectation of privacy in a private/public place.

Private spaces have "always" been private.

Public spaces have "always" been pseudo-private. I used to live out in the country when I was younger with every house sitting on multiple acres. If I stopped in the street and had a conversation with a friend, it was a private conversation because we could see other people from a substantial distance.

In public people generally assume that what they're doing is basically private unless they can tell that they're being watched, or other humans are so close that there can be no privacy.

Technology has outstripped people's awareness of it though. It used to be, for all of history until 20 years ago that license plates were only for other people. Your car didn't care about it, the bridge didn't care about it, license plates were only for other humans (government, police, citizens, etc) to identify your car in some official-ish manner.

Now there are machines which can read them from a substantial distance through difficult lighting automatically, nearly flawlessly and retain that information with near perfect fidelity for very, very long time spans. It shouldn't be surprising that people don't know this, don't like it when they find out about it, and react negatively towards it.

It's like finding out that there is magic, and has been for years, and that you've been purposefully kept in the dark about it so that some entity with a lot of power has a little more in a vague and unsettling way.
I never answer unrecognized numbers. I can't even remember the last time an unrecognized call was someone I actually wanted to talk to.
we did kickstart the python 3 support on our website. Donate!
I wrote it down the quotes four years ago, just because I knew I'd want to write about it at some point. I didn't want to "get back at them", just turn it into something good.
> What do you expect is causing this?

- enormous reduction in child mortality
- increased female emancipation and economic opportunities
- (direct and opportunity) costs of child-raising becomes relatively larger when societies get richer

I don't expect any of those trends to reverse itself

> If the reasons are social rather than biological, then there's no reason why birth rates can't increase in the future.

Sure, and there's no reason why the worldwide decrease cant' accelerate further either. The only question is, why do you think some scenario is more likely than the other?

> The view that overpopulation is a non-problem seems to be based on wishful thinking and/or short-sighted analysis.

To me the view that population increase is/will be some huge problem seems to be continuously redressing the Malthusian nonsense that's been wrong for over 2 centuries
In a pinch, you can use it as an alternative to stitches.
Or Tor.
Germany has a ton of migrant labor, mostly from Turkey.
The quote is talking about a problem the utility companies are facing with the adoption of personal PVs.

Right now, the way your electricity bill is structured is heavily biased towards consumption. The service charge is a small part of the overall bill.

What happens if 50% of the costumers have PVs is that the utilities will lose a lot of revenue but they will still have exactly the same amount of costs because they are not able to turn down their plants during the day and the PV people will still consume the same amount of peak grid energy during the night.

So there is two ways to fix this. One of them is for the plants to downsize their constant power generation methods like coal fired boilers and get a bunch of gas peaker plants.

The other one is to increase the service charge on your electricity bill.
>a problem called "inelastic demand"

Inelastic demand means that the demand for a product is insensitive to price changes (ie a steep demand curve). No idea how that relates to what you're talking about.

>And I must say that I consider people attributing moral values or rights to their usage of ad-blockers to be hypocrites.

That's ironic.

Here's the deal: Anything that is open to me publicly through my browser is fair game. You don't get to control what I do over here as soon as that data enters my house. In the same way I watch TV, then get up and go to the bathroom, or read, or get food, when commercials come on. The cable companies don't get to tell me, "Hey, you have to WATCH the commercials."

If you are producing content and want to make money, take what you can get through ad support, or offer a subscription. If your content is worth it, people will buy it. Period. I have no sympathy for people who feel they have some sort of right to make money from website visits.
yop, as I said, ujson is probably your best bet if all you do is parse json.
Yes, it seems relevant as an effect of the government approach to its citizens, which includes (but is not limited to) the (compared to other developed nations) ultraviolent American policing.
Probably not but he is right - all the git tutorials inevitably lead to explaining how git works internally. It is considered necessary knowledge for "grokking" git.

Mercurial tutorials aren't like that. It is a lot simpler to use so Mercurial tutorials tend to just tell you how to use it and don't mention the internel implementation details.
Is the 1871 hub in Chicago worth it?
I'm considering applying for a nights/weekends membership to the 1871 hub in Chicago to work on a software startup. My co-founder is in another city. If anyone has experience with the 1871 hub or another co-working hub, I'd be interested to hear what your experience was. Thanks!
Iteresting.

It follows then the person that kills a death row inmate is responsible for their death, not the inmate for committing a crime in the first place.
This brought back memories for me. Around this time I was in school running 3D graphics packages on NT. SGI was losing out to commodity graphics cards, NT was fast and stable, and OSX was just starting to trickle in to our labs (and would become dominant within several years with the explosion of the PowerBook titanium.
That's an enormous tinfoil hat, even by hn standards
Bread is Broken
Absolutely. And I wholeheartedly think that enough people support high quality journalism. See the 1 million online subscribers to the NY Times.

The majority of online journalism seems to be regurgitated news agency reports and stuff that no one needs (or can get free from communities elsewhere).

lots of forums, blogs and aggregators perfected clickbait and cat picture distributions a decade ago.
American Drone Assassinations May Violate International Law
The most interesting part of this is, of course, the following excerpt:

"By 285 votes to 281, MEPs decided to call on EU member states to "drop any criminal charges against Edward Snowden, grant him protection and consequently prevent extradition or rendition by third parties, in recognition of his status as whistle-blower and international human rights defender"."
Cubesats can have sensors, radios, propulsion. I'm wondering why this all doesn't scale down to thumbsats. Particularly propultion. Only very tiny impulse is needed to move very tiny mass. Why not a thumbsat Mars mission?
As the writer, let me explain. I read somewhere on the web that Dr. McLoud was Native American and first in her family to go to college. I checked with her, and she said her mom has an associate degree, so I picked my words very carefully. Why mention in the first place? How many Native American mathematicians can you name? How many of those are women? It's kinda noteworthy, so rather than ignore it on a silly "minority blind" pretext, I chose to sneak it in; knowing that it would not sit well with all readers. I teach at an HBCU (for women) and we like to highlight our students' achievements, as underrepresented minorities are not so visible in STEM. This seemed like a great op to say "some cool new mathematics the public can understand has been discovered and BTW, one of the people on the team is not a traditional demographic geek." If nobody covering this story ever mentioned what I did, how would a Native American girl looking for role models in STEM on the web ever find out about Dr. McLoud?
Fight link rot in your bookmarks
Shouldn't this be easy to defeat during the daytime by a guard who has experience shooting clay or ducks?
Bread Is Broken
When I tell them it's X hours, it's X hours, even if we have to start doing katas together pair programming. I therefore try to make certain I want to spend that much time with them before I bring them into an interview.
The authorities can already track the location and speed of all people with smartphones.

The location and speed of all trains is also known.

The solution to prevent crashes is thus obvious. Hit the car before the crash with a drone-fired missile.
I think at 6 you needn't/shouldn't go that specific yet. If he shows interest in IT/technology, great! Help him along if he needs help, introduce him to something new once in a while, but don't focus only on that one area.

My advice would be to encourage his reading (if he has already learnt that). Reading is one of the best ways to expand your horizon and learn new things - much better IMO than games or toys (though they of course have their place too). I'm guessing you have a public library nearby, or his school will definitely have one. Go there with him, buy him books for Christmas; in short, introduce him to the world of the written word. And then: let him explore!
Well. I'm not kidding at all. I read a bunch of reviews as for the Elance/Odesk/Upwork/Etc. Most of what I heard is "stay away from them if you are looking for something really good". I also found a couple companies that do (as per reviews) a relatively good job. But the prices are crazy ($300-500 per article). Some other companies say "30$ for 1000 words article". So I was a bit confused about all of these costs.
Assholes can be unavoidable. You may land a job at a point where there are none. Over time they hire more assholes.

Get the offer from the assholes, and use it as a bargaining chip.
Specifically I felt that going through the YC application forced me to think through questions that any other investor/incubator/accelerator (and even some customers) would also have.

Additionally, since the answers I had to those questions didn't pass muster with the partners I can either shrug it off (YC is extremely competitive and even they admit they make mistakes all the time) and take the rejection as additional motivation or I can take their decision as truth and take a closer look at my current business model to see what can/should be tweaked. Either way it can be helpful :)

Of course it would be nice if the rejection emails were more personalized, but I just don't think that's possible with the number of applications they receive.
Agreed, I worded my statement as "intentionally kill someone else" in consideration of that - largely because the train engineers don't get a choice in the matter of railroad crossing incidents.
Your source does not support your claim. The only thing worse than people who spew lies are people who do so with footnotes that imply that you're not lying.

American police officers are out of control. That's not a "meme" that's being "promoted" it's an actual fact that some authoritarian assholes (read: you) are attempting to discredit and hide.

You should be ashamed of yourself.
I would like to create a similar program that uses simultaneous photograph and depth sensor data (e.g. from a Tango device, or Google Camera app) to make a 3D version.
Haha agreed. But where we live other comparisons probably apply, things like obesity or traffic ought to be feared much more than terrorism.

Internationally it still boggles my mind why there's so much attention for things like Boko Haram in Nigeria. Remember bring our girls home? All the way to the whitehouse. Since the kidnapping of the 219 girls, about 300 thousand have died of aids. There's this fetish with terrorism as a threat to human livelihood I don't understand. Obviously those were 219 too many kidnapped girls, but I don't understand why we focus so much attention on things that relatively affect us in the least, if 200k people died of terrorist attacks in a single country per year, year after year, you'd expect it to be headlines in the press every single day until it's over.
> […] for those of us who were raised thinking a Bachelor's is just part of the natural progression

That’s probably my case. Thank you so much.
Seems like the right direction but I'm not sure why it had to come in response to media reports.

At this point, the company simply needs to hunker down and try to make its technology work. Demonstrating that it works will be comparatively trivial. Building a business if it works, relatively easy as well.
It won't be decided by philosophy or ethics. It will be decided by law. Any company that sells a car that kills its driver will be sued to oblivion. Also, nobody will buy it.

And this isn't some mind puzzle. The first software for the first generations of self-driving cars will have to code something. What will they code?
From the updated Rules of Conduct:

D.I.Y. & Other Permitted Content
In addition to content that adheres to our Creative Rules of Conduct, we have determined the following type of do-it-yourself activities are also appropriate to broadcast in Creative:

Cooking your own recipes
Building custom PCs
Assembling your Twitch broadcast setup
Furniture hacks/customization
Model making

Huh, that's certainly a variety of things they now allow. It makes the exceptions impossible to penalize since there's a giant gray area for what's considered "creative."
Interesting that this obit from 2000 should turn-up on HN.

Recently read Manchester's brilliant biography on MacArthur, his wife was a prominent force in his life. Highly recommend it >http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/20949.American_Caesar
I bought my phone for my convenience, not anyone else's. It has a whitelist, and if a number isn't on it, it goes to voicemail. Which has a message instructing callers to send me an email, as I don't check my voicemail. I've been running this arrangement for some years now, and it works beautifully.
ABC process - http://bankruptcy.cooley.com/2008/03/articles/business-bankr...
Come on Ars; Giga-Watts of storage? I expect that from other places reporting on energy, but I thought you knew better.
Same. I actually use Call Control for this exact purpose.

Email > Phone Calls any day of the week. Especially with strangers.