skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Can you explain in what sense American government is not representative?

Because it produces outcomes where the distribution of power in government does not follow the distribution in the preferences of the electorate (even the distribution as expressed in voting, which is already distorted by tactical accommodation to the known features of the electoral system.)

This is problem stemming largely from the use of single-member winner-take-all elections by majority/runoff or plurality rules, as is the case for most legislative (and many other) elections, and which is compounded, at the federal level, by distribution of representation disproportionately to population (obviously in the Senate, but granularity results in significant variance in district size for House seats, as well.)

Arend Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy provides pretty good coverage of both the degree to which various modern democracies have representative government, the structural features that are associated with effective representation, and the effects that those variations in effectiveness of representation have.

> People freely choosing to vote for people that you don't consider to be in their best interests does not make a government unrepresentative.

True, but America, nevertheless, among modern democracies has a notably poorly representative government.

> There are a few factors that impact representativeness - gerrymandering and the ineligibility of felons and illegal immigrants, for instance, but all-in-all that impact is pretty minor.

Gerrymandering actually has a lot less impact on representativeness than it gets credit for (but it having any significant effect is a product of single-member, winner-take-all districts, which have a very large effect on representativeness, even outside of gerrymandering.)

> In particular, of course, at a local and state level, those impacts are reduced along with the scale.

No, the scale might be reduced, but the effects of gerrymandering and disenfranchisement, such as they are, are not reduced at local scale (and may actually be exacerbated, depending on the locale -- there are locales above and below the national average for distortion from any of those sources.)

Additionally, there are systems used at local scale (such as multiseat elections on a Vote for N system, with N winners) that are frequently used in local elections that are more hostile to effective representation than single-member, winner-take-all districts.

OTOH, the effects of unequal allocation (at least for legislative districts) are reduced at the state level.

> If Americans have a divisive, gridlocked federal government that produces results nobody likes, that's the natural consequence of a divisive, gridlocked populace that doesn't know what it wants (lower taxes! more social security! balance the budget!), not un-representative government.

Well, no, its a product of a combination of unrepresentative government and a Constitutional system deliberately made to have many veto points, which means if the distortions that effect different institutions work in different directions, the result is gridlock.
Green Flash
That's not true anymore, as the permission system was overhauled in Android 6.0 Marshmallow.
The money didn't go to people. It went to banks.

The reason the Fed issued the money to banks is so they don't collapse.

Why would they collapse? Banks use deposits as collateral to make investments. During the crisis, a lot people and institutions were panicking and withdrawing whatever they had in the market.

So the Fed issued a bunch of money and loaned it to banks on generous terms to prevent a Domino effect where institutions fail one by one.

It's probably what prevented a giant meltdown of the economy.

It also changed the dynamic for the banks. They were loaned trillions by the Fed for next to nothing -- much better deal than fighting over people's deposits. So we won't see deposit interest rise until some of that money is taken away. (My understanding is that hasn't happened.)

A couple years ago, the Fed paid the banks to sit on that money and not use it, but I'm not sure if that's related. Somebody more informed might be able to fill that gap.
Actually, part of the problem is that they don't have to ask for 37 permissions... they are grouped together in such large groups that you don't know what permissions they are really after. Cyanogenmod has Privacy Guard that I think can help with this privacy nightmare.
Just a personal thing, but I'd pay extra to run the one or two windows applications on linux rather install windows. Just because of system maintenance, security, licensing, privacy, etc. reasons.
Ways Venture Capitalists Burn IPO Investors
If you look at the parent of my comment, you'll see that I wasn't referring to if [what the doctors have faith in] is true or not but rather their faith enables (some of) them to do what they would otherwise not be able to do. Which is contrary to the parent's comment stating that having faith would deem you less capable of fulfilling your job.
Machine Politics: The man who started the hacker wars, George Hotz-geohot (2012)
12 Perspectives to Embrace This New Year
Can't the people migrate or try to? That's a large part of what forced the Syrian issue.
Well, that's still not true. Savings are put to use by investing - either by the saver or someone else on their behalf (capital markets/banks). The savings further production by being used by someone else.

Keynes had to kill the idea that production is the foundation of growth in an economy. He did this by implanting the idea that production is irrelevant, all you needed as spending (the fantasy of aggregate demand). This was further pushed by the universal declaration that savings were a problem because it was postponed - rather than transferred.
Once this foundation was laid, the idea that throwing more money at people would increase wealth was created, and enthusiastically adopted by politicians who could use it as an excuse to throw money around in good times and bad.

Savings are the foundation of future production, and future production is the foundation of future wealth. This is so self evident it takes a high level of internal contradictions to believe it not to be so.
"Why would they?

There's been lots of noise lately about how conservatives don't respect science or the intellectual sphere. Why would they? They know we're politically biased."

This is where it took a turn for me. I'm basically in agreement with everything else, and it's personally eye opening to gain a greater understanding of these kinds of biases, but when you take a few bad apples in the social sciences (literally what? five? six?) and extrapolate that out to justify distrust of all of science, it becomes problematic.

The leftists I know (not including myself, though I share similar views) don't dislike conservative attitudes towards social science or other "soft" sciences, in fact most of them take it as a foregone conclusion that conservatives won't like them. They dislike point blank denial of facts such as that of human-caused climate change perpetuated mostly by conservative think tanks and consumed by an undereducated population of people who legitimately don't know better.

The problem is really that we live in a culture that does not value education very highly, nor does it enable good forms of it for the majority of our nation.

And just for fun, let's take the opposites of this so-called "urban intellectualism" that is expressed with these characteristics:

"... is ingenious, a deep thinker." vs. is dumb, a shallow thinker.

"... values artistic, esthetic experiences." vs. values uncreative, ugly experiences

"... is inventive." vs is uninventive

"... is sophisticated in art, music, and literature." vs. knows nothing of art, music, or literature

"... likes to reflect, play with ideas" vs likes to avoid introspection, take things at face value, and move on.

Pardon me if a few of those don't seem obviously better to more than just liberals than their alternatives. I know a lot of conservatives who would be exceptionally proud to call themselves inventive, sophisticated, deep thinkers with passions in art and literature.

You're doing intellectual conservatism a disservice by acting like these are all things conservatives would be offended to see described as "openness." If being an intellectual, sophisticated person is synonymous with being a blinkered bourgeois intellectual liberal then I'm friends with an awful lot of blinkered bourgeois liberals who are also big fans of Austrian economics.
I ride my bike around Fort Lauderdale 25 miles north of Miami. Sometimes I'm riding through 1/2 foot of water in the one of the most affluent neighborhoods in the United States. These people are underwater. They deny that it is going to get worse and they deny that it caused by humans. All new builds require being elevated several feet but I don't think it is going to help. I would never purchase a house here.
> So, basically, we should restructure our entire economy so some multi-millionaire's luxury vehicle and lawn won't flood on an island?

The economy will restructure itself and the area will depopulate. The article mentions the role of banks and insurers. Almost nobody can afford to buy a home without a mortgage or to self-insure.

Already, many Florida homeowners have only one option for homeowner's insurance: the Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, which is a non-profit "insurer of last resort". There is no profit in insuring the Florida coasts.

[0]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Citizens_Property_Insurance_Co...
All I can talk is from my personal experience, but as the founder of a startup that sells physical goods online, we've had no issue with fraudsters. At all.

Granted, we are quite small and our volume of sales is not massive (Hey! Small startup with very little funding and mostly bootstrapped here), but still, I was expecting some kind of issue with this by now. Or at least people trying to get stuff for free.

For the record, we use Stripe and PayPal for payments, don't know if they do anything on their end.
Ah, I think the difference there is + meaning adding instead of + meaning higher. Fair point though!
"The only thing you can do is npm shrinkwrap and never update your dependencies ever again. If you update you are f'ed. It's a nightmare."

Node as npm, Perl has CPAN. Why are modules hard in Node, when modules in Perl work?
I didn't claim my language was "straightforward", any term we use will carry bias. That's how political language works.

"Investment" automatically biases you to think that said spending must have a net-good result. Calling it "Government spending" predisposes you to think about the price of said action.

Biased language is always annoying to the other side. When I hear the liberal euphemisms I groan as strongly as I suspect most liberals groan to my dysphemisms.

If you said libertarians love their dysphemisms I wouldn't hold it against you.
Almost every one of these criticisms I have seen of "self-driving cars" posit world situations that don't happen under the current regime despite nothing limiting them.

Why is this a problem unique to self-driving cars? Is it that it "won't" runover the counterparty? Have you ever even considered the idea of running over a thief? I suspect our legal infrastructure would not look kindly upon you in most jurisdictions.
> The reason many economists are unsure or against the minimum wage is not because they're some agents of bourgeoisie capitalists, but because arguments in favor of it tend to be moral, not economic.

All policy arguments are moral. Economics (to the extent it is a useful, predictive, empirical science) can tell you what outcomes to expect from what actions, but not tell which actions should be preferred, without first assuming some moral values.

(OTOH, some of what passes for economics is itself not a predictive, empirical science but a form of moral advocacy in itself; but in that sense, you can't distinguish "moral" from "economic".)
Its been said a few times already but I'd like to add in my own experience in this area. I grew up in an environment just above what could be considered the poverty line in Australia. Tiny house, no real toys, books, daycare etc. and with parents who had both worked in shops or sales their entire lives. Adding to this my father left when I was around 3 and didn't provide any support making things a little more difficult. When I was old enough to appreciate them my mum got me interested in books and technology, I couldn't get access to a computer but I went to the library and the local school a lot which had some basic tools I could use. This got me a good start in my love of technology and an enjoyment of learning that kept me going through school even when compared to my much better off cohort who were able to do things like powerpoint presentations in class etc. In the long run it didn't hurt me too badly, by the time I was getting to the end of high school I had put in enough part time work to get my own computer and sort of bootstrapped my own learning from that, going from programming to website creation and building from there, that has in a few short years taken me from the absolute bear minimum existence to quite a comfortable life as a 20-something working for a respected financial institution and attending uni. From that I absolutely feel that my experiences of living as I did drove me to want better and to work for my goals, I feel like my drive gave ma an absolute edge against my better-off peers, although I can't say I'm a picture of absolute mental health, I feel like I became a well rounded person despite my origin. With motivation, you can overcome disadvantages like being poor, although there are other things I was lucky to live without like abusive or totally unsupportive and unmotivated parents, against which I feel I would have a much lesser outlook and possibilities.
"On the front end, people are probably re writing the front end every 3 or 4 months. Moving from javascript framework to javascript framework."

That seems crazy! Maybe I am out of touch but how is that even viable or smart? Seems like a time & money suck both of which can be spent on so many other valuable areas. Does the consumer or whoever the site services really care about what front-end framework is being used? No, they just want a decent user experience so why not focus on that rather than the latest shiny framework. I just don't get it.

I feel like some devs have lost site on what's really important with developing software. It is not about the latest shiny thing. It is about the target customer.
You've provided no evidence of anything you've laid out here and you're trying to disprove a theory agreed upon by 99% of scientists with indirect arguments about their source of funding. Why exactly should I believe you? I'd love to hear more about all of these points but find it hard to trust them currently.
Automation: The Future of In-House Legal Departments
> How do you define "a single topic"? Who gets to decide what is and isn't topical?

Easy. If 1/3 of Congress votes for something to be split, then it's split. (Kind of the opposite of the 2/3 super majority rule.)

As simple as that. Let the people actually voting decide if something is a single topic.

Yes, this could lead to nonsense where people split things to insane levels just to disrupt things, but I suspect it would not come to that because they would be ridiculed, and it would be just a waste of time for them since splitting something doesn't mean it doesn't get voted on in the end.
If you have a problem with (pseudo)anonymous users, how hard is it to not the people you don't know?

Also, Facebook is already a cesspool.
WhatsApp to be banned in Brazil for 48 hours starting 6pm PST
The article you posted is not a refutation, let alone a convincing one. This was a bored Sheldon Adelson toying with a reporter in an informal context while waiting for an event to resume.
On the AppStore, apps are required to gracefully degrade where permissions are not granted, and you can be rejected for not doing that. That seems unlikely to be enforced on the Play Store.
Always getting HEAD seems like a rookie mistake that rejects decades of lessons from mature systems and is a real deal breaker.

But that may just be me. I think the same thing about generics, and others clearly don't.
I thought this was a standard feature on Samsung Galaxy phones? It's not for ads but rather to just pause the video when you look away. It will pause ads if that's what you happen to be watching.
Pjen – simple static webpage generator written in Python
A-Frame – Virtual Reality on the Web Simplified
'Voting with their wallet' is actually an expression used to remind people that what they actually buy is what is affecting the market, not what they say or what they wish.

What I'm actually saying is that if you need to enter a physical store for some type of goods, then it is not stupid to pay a markup. That's actually paying for a service you need (and for the record, it is very unlikely that it is a service I need).

In all the example you gave, it is ok to tell people to stop complaining and vote with their wallet. eg: you complain you want mom and pop retailer to survive but you only shop at WalMart, vote with your wallet or shut up. ( again for the record, a lot of the mom and pop retailer just sucked, the added value they provided was limited to the convenience of being located where you once did most of your shopping, not expert advices, choice, accessibility, or any kind of flexibility or service. They were replaced because once they lost the location advantage, they simply provided not reason to set a foot in their shop ever again. If you regularly go to a village lost in the middle of the countryside, you probably understand what I mean )
A company demanding that I provide a Facebook or Twitter login to sell me goods or services would lose my business immediately and permanently.
When was the last time a gay in your home town was actually strung up? How about a black man? As a direct contrast, the number of minorities in my little hometown has increased at a startling rate the past 3 years. People mumble and grumble, but none of them would ever consider not hiring one of them because they were black/mexican/democrat.

Thank you for perfectly demonstrating my point.
This is a mistake I've seen MS make twice. First, it was OneDrive and OneDrive for Business - they're actually completely different products, and you might remember the outcry around here a while back when it was discovered that OneDrive for Business adds metadata to XML files. A lot of people didn't get what product was really being discussed.

Now it's Skype and Skype for Business. S4B is a steaming heap compared to Skype in terms of features, and I think in the end consumers are going to end up confused and angry about this new Skype that doesn't have the features of the old one.
I think they were referring to the "extra credit" portion at the end
You have to pay extra for the poison. This is libertarian land, dude. NOTHING is free, even poison.
Even such prompts are disingenuous. They amount to a salami attack against the user's privacy, because the overwhelming majority of users will authorize Yes on a per-app basis just to take a look, without really considering the potential consequences.

See also: server admins who accept SSH host keys without verification.
Same - though in some of the earlier stages and/or during experimentation I would say "And at the end, you can try and eat it."
There are lots of "table" like solutions out there: R's data.frame and data.table are obvious examples.
Speed, the ability to persist data as an actual database system, and the ability to work with data "out of core" would be the advantages over Pandas. I'll be releasing various performance comparisons over coming weeks to demonstrate these advantages.
Being brilliant doesn't necessarily make you a good scientist.

Skepticism is a core quality of being a scientist. Believing in something without proof is contrary to being skeptical. Thus, believing in god or Elvis are anti-scientific beliefs.
I think that a 'bill' should have a statement (which is not actual 'law') that clearly records the intended effects of the 'bill'. This could be seen as an executive summary.

The contents of the bill that are actually the changes to the code of law would prescribe how that effect is to occur. I would also like to see bills define, in law, how they are funded (even if that is, 'this is funded from a general fund').

I think that the above should be true for every level of governance. The bill should be rejected (patch refused), in it's entirety, if any material not 'directly' related to the intended purpose of the bill is within it, or if it conflicts with existing law in a way that is not corrected by the bill's application to the law. This is what the legal system in a given jurisdiction should do. All law would automatically be reviewed for correctness and compatibility.
F is for Fantasy
Yes! I was thinking Spaceballs as soon as I read the title.
Yep, I've worked at a pension fund, and they find lots of ways to diversify their investments. In addition to the usual stocks and bonds, they invest in real estate all over the US, owning a number of commercial high rise buildings in cities around the country.

They have the money to finance these big building projects, and it the rent they generate usually provides them with steady returns over the long term.

I hadn't heard of them investing in residential properties, but it wouldn't surprise me if they owned some.
"agents of bourgeoisie capitalists"

I don't wonder about the sincerity of most economists

I do wonder if there are selection pressures to becoming an economist that prevent a diversity of viewpoints on certain issues

sometimes those neatly line up with the bourgeoisie capitalists (who just coincidentally disproportionately have their names on university building and have levers on which university departments get generous funding)
"Apparently the conditional move is good to avoid branch mispredictions, but cannot hide memory latency as much as the regular implementation."

Anybody knows what actually happens there? For a real analysis I'd like to see the generated assembly in a classic and conditional move case, and also an example of the indexes accessed in one and another algorithm.
The costs of construction are far less variable than the costs of land. Lower construction costs tend to correlate with higher maintenance costs. With real estate investment governmental stability and integrity play a greater role than many other investment types because real-estate assets can't be relocated or wire-transferred.

All real-estate markets are local. It's a very specialized industry.
Thanks for posting this, can't believe it only has 10k views.
I'm not sure it's entirely clear what you can use an OEM Windows disk for. Isn't that just for new hardware? And that's at least 50/vm if I understand things. The thing to compare reactOS to is probably a datacenter licensed copy of Windows server. Productivity applications will (mostly) run in Wine - I don't think anyone expects ReactOS to be a viable alternative to bare-metal Windows install for gaming.
glancing through... great work! I will take a closer look at everything what's in there.
final thing for me is a collaborative voice+drawing+writing board (math formulas is a nice to have for v1 and a must in v2)
thank you
Yeah certainly. I've found that in practice it's not a big problem with Go, you can easily vendor your app's deps, of which there are typically fewer (not 500mb+). Keeping them updated for security reasons is the only drawback of that approach really. I vastly prefer Go's technique compared to a central registry.