skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In Northern European countries rehabilitation of prisoners to enable reintegration back into society is viewed as the primary goal of incarceration. So if they're unable to rehabilitate someone after 16 years that's viewed to an extent as a failure of the system. The number of people who can't be rehabilitated after 16 years of such a system is likely to be tiny.
The Case Against Dynamic Typing
I've been playing with a scala implementation called sangria (http://sangria-graphql.org/). The type safety of Scala has really been helpful for refactorings and creating the schema. I can't imagine the mess I'd have been in if I'd have used JS.
Credit cards are more expensive than most would like them to be. We don't need another expensive system.

Besides, credit cards offer protection in that they are able to give insurance on purchases by doing charge backs.
Ask HN: What is an accepted practice to manage vpn access within a company?
Hey HN. I'm currently researching how to manage giving access to our VPN within our company. Our process is mostly manual and might have a lot of room to be improved on. We use open VPN. When a new person wants to connect, we create a new user, give them a username and password and then let them create their connection file from that. They can then use tunnelblick to connect.

We were wondering if there was a better way to automate this process and manage it. From adding new users, to removing old ones, to creating temporary access ones. So I thought to ask the HN community what their best practices were (and what gotchas to avoid). Pointing to good reading material is also super appreciated!

Thanks in advance :)
The Controversial State of JavaScript Tooling
> Part of the charm with ms is that they are not as calculating and ruthlessly capitalist as apple and google.

I would have agreed prior to the release of Windows 10.
This debate will be an interesting one. I imagine life insurance companies demanding their money back if the once deceased person is alive again. Also, how would inheritance work if heirs can spawn multiple instances of themselves that may not act as a single collective (and inheriting copyright may fit here).

It'll be fun.
First, this is very exaggerated. Criminals don't walk free. If you have an afternoon to spend, I recommend you go to a courthouse and see by yourself. You'll get a better sample than what some politicians may tell you.

Second, France isn't a war zone and most of us live pretty safely and happy over here.

More importantly, do you know for sure that the situation would be better with harsher prison sentences?
Well. the Yeti/Mountain Ape stories have existed for centuries.

It's just hard to prove.
The Next Closet (Amsterdam) Is Looking for a Ruby on Rails Developer
For our growing team we are looking for a part-time or full-time Developer in Ruby on Rails

You will be responsible for:

• Building and maintaining an online e-commerce platform: thenextcloset.com (Lead Developer)
• Hands-on coding and product development
• Integrating with third party APIs (e.a. Exact Online, shipping software)
• Choosing the right technologies and techniques required to support the platform

Requirements:
• Hands-on experience with Ruby and Ruby on Rails coding
• Software engineering fundamentals (e.g. CSS, HTML, GIT)
• Strong Analytical Skills, understanding of databases/SQL
• Based in The Netherlands (non-remote)
• Enthusiast team player (you’ll work in a team with an experienced Ruby Developer, CPO & Art Director)
• Part-time, but preferably full-time, available (flexible working hours, office in city center of Amsterdam)
• Fluency in Dutch or English

Contact: lieke@thenextcloset.com
Hal Berenson wrote what is probably the best series of articles explaining WinFS: What it was, how it would have worked, and why it failed.

http://www.metafilter.com/134799/WinFS-what-it-could-have-be...
I used to do the same, I remember adding labels saying "Processing" inside a while and then adding a dot for every loop, just to make it look like a "real" program. Good old times.
Cardiovascular Diseases cause Erectile Dysfunction – Find out if it is True?
He also wrote a few product reviews http://www.amazon.com/gp/pdp/profile/A3145L3LF7U7F5/ref=cm_c... ;)
As someone who cooks for a 17 year old who trains for and plays rugby quite seriously the sheer amount of food an active teenager can consume is quite staggering.
Do you mean "Eat, Fast and Live Longer"(https://vimeo.com/103656060)? If so, it was great. Totally changed my view on fasting (I now-a-days do 16h fast/day).
Doesn't help the fact that Google repeatedly shut down services that are in use. It is getting harder and harder to use Google services in business because it has become a liability.
Blue Origin vs. SpaceX
What's happening here is the following phenomenon. Suppose the establishment lies to you about something. But that something keeps growing, and eventually you see through the lie. Now someone comes along and actually tells you you've been lied to, and reveals this truth to you.

The general reaction to this situation is to trust this newcomer more than the establishment, since he had the guts to reveal the big lie. (This is a logical fallacy, but emotionally it's awesome.)

The establishment left in Europe, from what I can see, is lying about the problems of Muslim immigrants and crime/other social problems. Witness the attempts by various politicians to sweep Cologne under the rug, for example, or removing ethnicity from crime statistics in Sweden. It's hard to keep a problem like this completely under wraps; eventually something like Cologne will hit the internets and eventually the media won't be able to ignore it.

If you want a left wing solution to the problem of Muslim immigrants failing to assimilate, robbing and raping people, the left will actually need to acknowledge the problem and propose a solution. If the left continues ignoring the issue, then folks will naturally turn to the racist right wing folks who seem to be proposing solutions rather than lying about the problem.

(Note: don't interpret my criticism of the European left as support for the racist right. And if you think I'm factually wrong, I'd love to see crime stats demonstrating this. Obviously not from Sweden...)
Or a bad player buys them and over night removes all traces of certain projects. I still remember how e.g. MaxDB (former open source database) vanished.
CIA is there to support the country overseas. To actively promote a major TV Series which will lead to jobs, money coming into the company, potentially increased goodwill to the country is exactly their mission.

One thing to remember with spying these days is that the nation spy agencies these day spy for corporations, because if the companies do well then the country does well.
Paying in cash involves turning up in person with cash. That's definitely not anonymous.
A better title might be "our understanding and contextualisation of the calorie was broken but is getting better."
The Light Phone
Five years is a long time in tech. I think it's more likely that we will see same thing happen with Sourceforge and Google Code - a better thing comes along and people move to it.

This is something which is seen over and over again. Its not that loved active services and sites get turned off, it's that the userbase moves somewhere else first.
I commend fryguy for trying.

People with PhD's in computer science have trouble figuring out how Zcash works. It seems to require a very strong mathematics background and it's an order of magnitude more complicated than Bitcoin. I don't think that you're going to get a good ELI5 for it for a while.

Zcash is based on Zerocash. In case you ever want to feel like a simpleton:
http://zerocash-project.org/media/pdf/zerocash-extended-2014...
Doesn't seem aegist at all, the fragmentation issues Android has is pretty much common knowledge (at least within tech).
The only point this raises is : are they serious ? This looks quite akin to the Solar Impulse project. It makes us dream of something that looks like a very bad way to treat the actual problem.

This guy's energy would be better spend at tackling the economical and political problems we have to solve to actually improve the situation... And we need more than a dream...
Was it published? I'd be very interested to read it.
Sony is merging PlayStation and Networks Services under one Roof
"it" being "The idea they might shut down a free service with only 10 months notice".

If your company relies on Google to this extent, and does not have the staff to fix the issues inside 10 months then you need to reconsider your business plan.
How people reacted to John Logie Baird's creation 90 years ago
Did you foresee what happened to SourceForge?
This is how i often work with things. I break them down into things that i know how to work with. I search my knowledge for elements that most closely represents the problems and then combine them.

For example, rather than remembering 12 * 6 = 72, i recall that 10 * 6 = 60 and 2 * 6 = 12, hence 60 + 12 = 72. I don't need to remember as many things and for me i can do that much faster than trying to recall it.

My memory has never been very good, so perhaps this is why i take such an approach, as i find it overall easier.
Privacy Badger can answer some of those questions:

https://www.eff.org/privacybadger
I don't know, but I found this to be the interesting bit:

> Depressed and anxious people might simply be too good at learning about bad outcomes

> Over the past few decades, researchers have been discussing that mental health issues such as depression and anxiety might fundamentally be disorders of learning, rather than outcomes of a ‘chemical imbalance’ that requires correction by a serotonin boost. Specifically, certain individuals which have atypical function of the serotonin system (which might be caused by genetic factors or stressful lives) may be at risk of developing depression or anxiety because they are too good at learning about negative outcomes, and thus are more likely to feel that the world is a bad place if they experience negative life events. One of the most talked-about studies in the psychiatric literature supports this possibility (6). It found that individuals with a particular genotype affecting the serotonin system were more likely than others to develop depression or anxiety only if they had experienced stressful life events, such as child abuse, unemployment, or loss of a loved one. Clearly, having an atypical serotonin system alone wasn’t enough – it had to be combined with negative experiences.
Not been able to fish or make fire in a place like Tasmania if you are living a hunter gather lifestyle is quite a loss.

We know from the archaeological record that the Tasmanian aboriginal population was able to fish for thousands of years after the sea level rose and cutoff Tasmanian from mainland Australia. No one really know why, but after thousands of years of fishing they somehow lost the knowledge of how to catch fish. If something as useful as fishing is lost (the seas around Tasmania teem with fish) then how likely is it that a folk tale would be passed down for 10,000 years by oral tradition.
I meant that in the US you could do this through an app and never even have to meet the people doing your chores. In a developing nation, you would have to interview this person and you would definitely have to oversee their work.
Review of ‘The Rise and Fall of American Growth’
The correct method might be the method that scales better. Counting on your fingers for example is a pretty decent method to add until you reach bigger numbers. If you don't use the more complicated methods, you'll never improved past some point.
Ah, that AMOS screenshot brings back memories.
There's an excellent chapter about it in http://www.glassner.com/portfolio/morphs-mallards-and-montag...
> Vendoring external dependencies adds a lot of noise to your git history.

This is my concern as well. Is it possible to use git submodules in vendor directory? Looks like it is possible [1].

[1]: https://github.com/golang/go/issues/12573
Capitalism will eat democracy – unless we speak up
>> increase the number of parallel connections.
> I believe that trick is to save bandwidth by not sending the (large) cookies that would normally be sent to the normal domain.

No, Internet Explorer (and other browsers) used to only allow a small number of connections per domain. Long running COMET requests ate up these connections, so if you wanted to simultaneously download multiple resources from a single domain, and reduce time to page ready, then you had to use multiple domains.
Working out how to open up the Register to Vote code
I don't think the US had any desire to accurately measure the threat from the Soviets as reality would have contradicted what politicians needed - the curse of all intelligence activities.
While I was a student at MIT, I heard a rumor that Prof. Minsky in the 1960's thought computer vision was such an easy problem that he assigned it to a first year undergrad.

I asked him if it was true, and he said that it wasn't true that he thought the problem was easy, but it is true that he had a first year undergrad student that he decided to put in charge of his grad students working on the problem. The first year student was Gerald Sussman.
Locolo – service for sharing things
VCs have pumped up the value of the “unicorn” startups.Now IPOs are in trouble
Who invented the television?
That's just anthropic bias/survivor bias. There have probably been a lot of Earth like planets that have been annihilated. Perhaps the only reason we exist is because we are lucky enough to have friendly neighbors, or perhaps no neighbors.

Well I do wonder how friendly they are, given that they haven't intervened at all in Earth's history. I find that very unlikely. Moral aliens would probably want to help us, amoral ones kill us like you said. But the probability of aliens existing yet being indifferent seems unlikely.
Well, something similar shouldn't happen in people because eugenics is considered to not be a particularly good idea.
Thousand times yes for this.

There are many science studies that once you become a prisoner, instead of actually improving yourself, you degrade to the point that you become better criminal.

The world goes to reducing punishments and this is the way to go. Usually there is a "healthy" amount of criminals in every nation, but you will never solve the problem by increasing the sentences, this actually makes it worse.
Use S3 as a Private Git Repository with Jgit
I disagree with their rationale in changing the padlock used to indicate a DV certificate from grey to green (and thus mirroring EV certs) to a point: Yes, the connection is secure, but given the numerous free and automated options to obtain DV certificates, phishing sites are going to increasingly use TLS, and mostly do so using DV certificates.

I guess this boils down to me actually favouring a clear divide between EV and DV. My EV connection to bankofamerica.com should be as visually different from the DV connection to the phishing site bank0famer1ca.com as possible. As it is, the Firefox UI improves visibility of encryption while I think it might be more appropriate to improve the differentiation between encryption and authentication.

As for all the other states: good work. The new iconography seems more streamlined and clear to me.
By Widget I mean any object which is a QWidget and is bound by some other widget (so I do not count plain QObjects) that you need for your UI.

ListViews are optimized for display of lists, obviously, so they generally instantiate only visible elements in the view, and delegates do not even undergo geometry negotiation so they're a bit lighter than a regular widget.

Still, if you do visualization or animation, the UI must respond within 1ms in order not to be noticeable, and that's very hard to attain with Qt5.

I doubt people using QML on mobile devices really understand the issue either, since when mobile developers speak of "animations" they generally mean some random transition of the UI itself. Often, the operation is not even performed in the background, but rather simply sequenced (so that the animation appears to be smooth, but the actual delay is completely absorbed by the user). In these scenarios, times up to 250ms/300ms might still be felt "instantaneous" as they're shorter than the transition. For me, it's outrageous.
Windows Commands Abused by Attackers
* is a special character on HN you want to have spaces between 12 * 6 or it can look like: 126 106.

Note: it works in pairs so the final 2*6 shows up.
This is so true.

I still remember the debate about Guantanamo Bay detention camp and how he wanted to completely close it, but nothing actually happened. [1] I don't know which one is worse : Holding prisoners without a charge for decades or holding criminals in solitary confinement.

1 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guantanamo_Bay_detention_camp#...
New DbForge Data Generator for SQL Server, v3.9 with a Number of Improvements
> Depends where you are and on your circle of friends.

chess.com

> I always found the fancy carved sets harder to play with than a basic one

Me also.

> That seems a bizarre thing to base your choice of game on.

It was a response to a criticism, not basis for choosing to play Chess.
Show HN: A Python toolkit for processing tabular data
Meet New Version of DbForge SQL Decryptor with Numerous Improvements
That was a nice trip down memory lane...

I had to save for a whole year to get my Amiga 500, I bought it for 1 reason and one reason only - Falcon. I loved that game, and soon got into Stealth Fighter F-19. I still have fond memories of me and my best friend playing F-19 together - one pilot, one navigator. I swear to god, mission planning was more fun than actually flying the mission.

I kind of miss the days when you needed a keyboard overlay to play a game, ( http://oagd.net/file/8358c6a052c1734431c0f16cb4fa8efd41daf37... )- and the later Falcon games had one of the biggest manuals I've ever seen.

Makes me think I should take a look at the current state of combat flight sims.

Any good recommendations that would work on a linux system? (it's a decent laptop, 16GB RAM and Nvidia card with 2GB)
That's how I felt about math for a long time. The so-called good laziness. You don't bother doing the hard way, you search for tricks. Symmetries, difference from simple cases as the girl did.

Instead of memorizing algorithms, kids should be shown this. It's free gamification and, after some years, I believe it's a core idea of what is, and why math can be pleasing.
He's an engineer, not a politician. You don't get to vote on what he works on or decide what is important to him.

Sintering is an emerging 3D printing tech now that the patent has expired. We can't predict what all the potential applications are or what impact it will have on society.
"
This child imagined ‘Math’ to be a continuous string of mechanical tasks—an unending prospect of practice and drill. It was hard to convince him that there would not be any more tables in subsequent years"

Well, I enjoy maths, but for me my entire mathematical education was always about memorizing tables. It was made worse by the fact that during Polish exams you cannot use advanced calculators(only ones that can do addition/multiplication) so for the final exams at the age of 19 I had to remember loads of different formulas, trigonometric values for common angles etc etc.

I'm not saying he was wrong, but in a lot of educational systems maths is 90% about remembering stuff.
Or a bad player buys them and puts some nasty code in those libraries...
Performance Review from Hell: 10 Sad Facts About the Process
I don't think the distinction is as strong as you make out. Node and browsers both implement the same language standard. They offer different "standard libraries", but in that sense any program that embeds Lua is offering a different "lua platform".
Working around browsers' maximum concurrent connections settings is a major reason to use multiple hosts. This table of browser [0] is somewhat dated but these limitations have been have always been present since the first browsers, I doubt they've radically changed in the last few years.

[0] http://sgdev-blog.blogspot.com/2014/01/maximum-concurrent-co...
WhatsApp sharing account information with Facebook
We could make all sorts of assumptions and appeals to common sense, but we would be wasting our time because we have statistics.

The US has the highest incarceration rate in the world, the largest prison population in the world and a much higher violent crime rate than the vast majority of western countries. Objectively, the justice system in the US is inferior to the European system. This is not a matter of opinion or ideology, there is strong empirical evidence.
Unfortunately to my eyes the comment that dang thanked looked like it was a rather passive aggressive put down. Especially in the context that the OP was not being petty but was raising an important point in a measured way.

EDIT
Civility is important but it should not be confused for everyone having the same point of view on a topic. And censorship by "civility" causes people to not join discussions. When I come to HN I want a intelligent but lively discussion. However, some issues have reached such a consensus such that even well thought out opposing views put politely get heavily downvoted.
Dutch edtech startup ProctorExam raises € 500K in funding and launches in the UK
What is your opinion on Fair AdBlock (by STANDS)?
I agree generally, although Subresource Integrity[0] and Content Security Policy[1] somewhat solve the problem. Not that any of this will ever be deployed[2], because they're two of the most invasive defence measures and fragile wrt updates.

[0] https://www.w3.org/TR/SRI/

[1] https://scotthelme.co.uk/content-security-policy-an-introduc...

[2] https://scotthelme.co.uk/how-widely-used-are-security-based-...
The limit is per host, not per domain. Before using CDNs became commonplace, it was not unusual for a site to use multiple hostnames of their own to spread out their content and have more parallel connections for a single page load; example.com img1.example.com, img2.example.com, etc.
Reading the comments here, I would have loved to meet the guy. I'm in my 30s and I've met and spoken to precious few of "the greats" of our generation. I feel like there are two phenomena going on:

1) We don't always know who is one of "the greats" of today's generation, until much later.

2) Today, content generation is so democratized (eg wikipedia, soundcloud) that there are less individual superstars like Pushkin, etc.

3) Even intellectuals who were once highly regarded would today have tons of comments on their blog nitpicking and debating every detail of what they said, with many of the comments being low quality. See eg Sam Harris vs Noam Chomsky debates.

It seems like a world in which it's harder to be great like Alan Turing or Claude Shannon or Richard Feynman or Marvin Minsky. At the same time, maybe there are more great people than ever, and we just don't always know who they are until much later.
There is a guy that is in solitary confinement since 1983 [1]. I was shocked when I read about him. It's a fascinating story, nevertheless so shameful for the society.

23 hours a day in a room for more than 30 years. :(

1 : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Silverstein
2 : https://thomassilverstein.wordpress.com/
True up to a point, but I'd expect Tokyo to be bottom of the list for an investor, after all of the cheaper large cities in developed countries.
The situation wasn't much different in the U.S. a few decades ago. The average state prisoner served a third of their sentence. During the crime waves of the 1970's and 1980's, people voted to virtually eliminate that practice.
Too complicated...
Solution: For the students, answer "Why should I learn this?" and, then, give good intuitive explanations for basically how it all works from algebra, geometry, trigonometry, and calculus to probability, statistics, functional analysis, and more. For the intuition, do include pictures.
The square roots rule is very handy, and comes from the Poisson distribution.