skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Would you invest your money in a pharma company that returned below-the-market risk-adjusted returns?
We have the technology in place to effect large scale democracy, say having referendums electronically via a smartphone app.

Using a smartphone app would mean people who are too poor to afford a smartphone, or physically unable use a smartphone, or who believe a smartphone is too great an invasion of their privacy, etc would be disenfranchised from the democratic process. That means it wouldn't really be democratic.

Pretty much every single solution to direct democracy will leave someone out, so you need several ways to gather people's votes, and then it ends up being incredibly difficult to manage and expensive to run. Maybe in 30 years time when smartphones are truly ubiquitous, old people have grown up with them, they're genuinely secure and respectful of an individual's privacy an app will be a good idea. Until then, it's not going to work.
Just because you think he's terrible doesn't mean others "must be desperate" to support him. That's a pretty fallacious line of thinking there.

Not saying I agree with Trump; I'm simply playing Devil's Advocate.
Something along these lines:

http://matt.might.net/articles/shell-scripts-for-passive-voi...

https://github.com/bnbeckwith/writegood-mode
it comes across as pretty patronising to me... it sounds like all women don't really get any more mature than when they get to something like 13 years old... I can understand why women get steamed up over things like this.
I don’t think direct democracy is a good system, but perhaps that’s an issue with democracy as a whole. Decisions based on the majority’s choice are not always the best and you can easily end up in a situation where propositions are made based on popularity instead of effectiveness. Propose to remove all taxes or give $1m to every citizen and you’ll probably get a significant share of the population with you even if it’s absurd. The problem is uninformed vote: people who’re not informed/serious enough to make a wise decision. You have to either educate people (but in that case, who does that? How do we ensure they’re not biased?) or prevent them from making decisions (but that’s dictatorship: how do you ensure the dictator(s) stay wise and benevolent?).
We already have publicly funded research, which is an altogether more effective way of developing new medicines anyway.
Warehouses selling to retailers here in NL do that a lot!
You get more discount the more you buy or if you make a deal with a salesperson, but I don't think anyone pays the set price with 0% discount because it is around 15-30% more expensive than some online seller.
The best model of direct democracy is where you vote every day for the goods and services you want in your life with your dollars.
in English

http://postandparcel.info/71137/news/swiss-group-reveals-pla...
India vs. Bangladesh T20, Asia Cup 2016 Final
then "Transmission" pushes an update that asks for read/write access to the whole home directory.

There is no such entitlement:

https://developer.apple.com/library/mac/documentation/Miscel...

If you are talking about the 'open directory' dialog. Well, if a user is careless enough to just give a sandboxed app access to their complete home directory - tough luck.

So I think sandboxing is basically useless against these kinds of attacks.

No, it's not, because no entitlement allows blanket access to the user's home directory. Hence, an application cannot just encrypt all of the user's data.
>I'm from Israel, a country about half the population of the Netherlands. And there's a really small amount of blogs worth reading and a small amount of indie newspapers/magazine like sites - so most of the time when i do read in hebrew, i use maybe 2 of the large sites.

Depends on the country I guess. I'm from another small country in the area, comparable to Holland in population, and we have tons of news sites (commercial) and lots of blogs. That said, we also had in the past 3 decades an overabundance of print outlets, so we might not be that typical.
My point was that innovation and financial reward need to be decoupled to ensure valuable knowledge is not locked behind IP.

> Of course, if you simply give away everyone's work, no company is going to stay in business.

To think about a future without ridiculous restrictions on access to knowledge(which IP law promotes implicitly), it is important to stop accepting the status quo in which innovation and financial reward are directly linked.

You seem to accept the reality that innovation has to be linked to financial reward by gaining exclusive rights over the invention using IP laws,which,respectfully,is preposterous.
"I am scared to leave my house because you might shoot me."

Can a person controlling others with their intimidating behaviour? If so, what's the Libertarian response to that?

Libertarianism is the rule of the power of individuals. Which is great if you're strong, skilled, healthy, respected, and/or have access to equipment. For the rest of us, it's a dystopia.
Show HN: Host your status page on GitHub
The UK is currently 50k short of drivers, same as much of Europe. There is a fear in logistics circles of this getting worse with fewer new entrants into driving - even with good pay.
I recently bought a new screen, I went online searched for models in my price range. went over specs etc to find which model I like the most. Then did a final price search on that monitor. I got it 60 cheaper than the price I got on the first search. (in this case I bought for €180 and elsewhere it was listed €240)
This is what I usually do when searching for something, if you look at the specs you don't have to be an expert to find out what is important, and if it is too confusing then read some bad reviews on the product you are searching for.
This is not the advantage that a democracy gives. A democracy makes it impossible to fuck any group that's sufficiently large to either be a majority or able to team up with another minority and make a majority.

You won't realize why this matters until you either study history, or look at how things work in countries like the UAE or China or other dictatorships.

If you don't have an informed vote, perhaps you should simply not vote at all ? (or vote invalid if the ballot is non-optional)
Nuclear was the first kind of energy production without externalized costs (mostly). Solar seems pretty good, but i think the manufacturing is pretty toxic. I guess the same could be said of the concrete in nuclear reactors.

having a plan for dealing with waste and paying for that plan from the start is pretty cool. Even if the plan sucks, it's way way better than our plans for coal and oil. Which, as far as i can tell, is to just not worry about it.

edit

I guess there's no good plan, but it's not like the reactor operators wake up one Tuesday and wonder where their waste went. Unlike me when i drive. Carbon is much more dump it in the air and hope for the best. Nuclear waste is, as far as i know, logged, tracked, audited and generally completely accounted for.
Well if someone threating to shoot you, then yes obviously someone is infringing on your liberty... so yes there would rules against that.
Yes, you are right. Each of these nanoparticles should also radiate heat radiation or heat the environment near it in other way, but it is not clear from the citation.
Plus, things like Desktop Java were ignored, and applets silently killed (even if it was their time, this was caused by years of neglect and security issues, and it screwed up people depending on them).
Its a python module? I'm looking forward to making a Pelican plugin so my mate can start checking his blog for glaring errors before he posts! :)
I don't see how it would be that difficult to manage and run. Smartphones + kiosks + teaching social services workers to help the disabled equals much better participation that with current systems.
Ha ha, slightly related fun snippet I wrote:

http://jugad2.blogspot.in/2015/07/cut-crap-absolutely-essent...
I'd like to point out two-photon absorption, in which two photons incident on something at the same time are absorbed like a single photon with the total energy of both:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_absorption

(Too bad that article doesn't mention thermodynamics.) It has wonderful uses like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Two-photon_excitation_microsco...
In a mathematical context, something is either "unique" or it is not. There is no in-between state.

But you can easily define it to mean something else. And you can even make "uniqueness" comparable.
Ask HN: What tools do you use to diagram micro-service architectures?
Any open source or browser based tools you guys use to document micro-service systems and all the connections and dataflows?
"The reports of Bitcoin's problems are greatly exaggerated".

There is a small group who seem really good at spreading a message of "Bitcoin is about to collapse". They are doing this either because they control a lot of competing currency (Ethereum), or because they think it will help adoption of their Bitcoin fork.

The reality is, 95% of Bitcoiners are very happy with the team working on the protocol, and the market seems happy too (the price has gone up +68% over the last 6 months.)

But you absolutely should not take some random internet person's word for it. You'll have to invest large amounts of time reading bitcointalk, reddit and the like to make a sound decision. Luckily it's pretty fascinating reading. In time when Bitcoin's future is clearer, it will either be worth much more, or nearly nothing. But I think you can get great insight into where it is going by following it closely today.
> they chose him as the lesser of the evils put forward by a political system that they have little if any leverage over.

Bilge! You only need to look at the successes of fringe religious candidates in parts of the USA to see that small groups can wield enormous leverage if exercised correctly.

In most parts of the world, it's trivial to join a party / trade union / action group / stand for election. If you cannot convince a few hundred people to vote for you - perhaps it's you who are wrong, not society.
Decisions based on the minorities choice are not always the best either.

Unfortunately, the sentiment you're expressing here is increasingly common, especially in America. Pew Research have been doing surveys since the 1960's that show that the percentage of people who agree that they have "a good deal of confidence in the wisdom of the American people" has been in steep decline for decades, and people who agree are now in the minority:

http://www.pewresearch.org/daily-number/declining-confidence...

This is IMO leading directly to the popularity of guys like Trump, whose brand of politics is based almost entirely on "don't trust democracy, trust me".

Unfortunately, it's easy to take for granted the stability that democracy brings. Yes, sometimes, bad decisions are made ... or we look back on earlier times and judge their decisions as bad in retrospect (although at the time, lots of people thought it was good, e.g. slavery, oppression of gays etc). But history has shown us what happens when you choose the alternative of decision making by small minorities of self-proclaimed "elites". You get communism and much worse decision making.

By the way, your lack of faith in people is either misplaced, or a purely local phenomenon. For instance in Switzerland there are 16 referendums per year, and people do in fact vote against things that would be trivially good for them in the short term but possibly worse in the long term, like longer holidays.

Switzerland is in fact an excellent example of how the world's most democratic country is also one of its most stable and prosperous.
Xian lift death
Two Person Games
Maths in Science – an interview with Don Knuth (2015)
I meant Unix, but I should have said unlike all Linux distros except Inspur K-UX. I thought there were more but WP doesn't list any and seems comprehensive otherwise.

My point was really that some/most of those complaints about "Unix" don't apply to OS X for most people and sound more like the pain that users running Linux have to deal with, even though it's not typically an official Unix. I hope this was more clear.
Actually, dabbling in virus writing was the most exciting thing I could do on my 4.77Mhz 8086 running MSDOS 3.3 back in the day :).

Patching is possible, but why bother when you can compile the app from sources?

Nice book btw.
Can you provide some concrete examples of the business model, and how it works? Perhaps some new agile startups could disrupt big pharma.

You can't realistically expect people to accept that you have a better plan without offering real evidence that it works.
"Threatening? No, sir! I just like walking down the street open-carrying my AK47. And occasionally test firing it at wood-pigeons."

Incidentally - who makes the rules against threats? Who enforces them? Seems like we would need a group of people to decide on these rules. But how should we choose those people...?
The problem with standups is there's never a good time to schedule them. You can't schedule them for right at 9:00, because then half the team will miss it because they're dragging in, and if you schedule it for a little later on, like 10, 10:30, 11, you're basically destroying flow for the entire morning.

Throw in the fact that they are completely useless. It's like Twitter - if you've only got such limited space to talk, you can't actually say anything worthwhile.

As a general rule of thumb, if a meeting can be replaced by an asynchronous group chat or email, it doesn't need to happen.
What kinds of NLP technique does this system use?

Is it possible to specify new rules in a high-level way?

Can it learn from examples?

Does it work on a sentence-by-sentence basis only, or does it "grasp" complete paragraphs?
Growth Hacking: What Is It and How Can It Improve Your Blog?
"Tatra" or "Panhard", that was the question in 1960. I remember it well.

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/f5/Panhard_...
The Swiss have so many referendums that they are always on very small, focused issues. Examples from the recent past:

• Should we buy new Gripon fighter jets?

• Should we build a new tunnel through the mountains?

• Should we expel criminals if they are non-Swiss?

• Should the central bank be required to buy gold to back a fraction of the money supply?

Because the issues are so much narrower than referendums in the UK tend to be, it's much easier and quicker to develop an opinion on them.

For people who don't care, they either don't vote (turnout is often ~30% though for the recent highly charged expulsion vote it was more like ~60%), or they vote how the government recommends they vote. Trust in government is very high here so that sort of delegation tends to work OK, and in fact the government wins most votes.

W.R.T. other ways people get informed, it's just the usual mechanisms. Leaflets, media coverage, discussion amongst friends and family. Billboard advertising campaigns notify people of upcoming votes and tend to be very simple. Almost invariably a poster that says something like, "More tax for farmers? NEIN" or "Better working conditions for the people? JA". I doubt they change anyone's minds but they are quite eyecatching.
>>I opened w3m, only to discover that it displays images now.

I distinctly remember Links displaying images back in 2011.

Now that I think of it, at the same time I was also reading pdfs and watching movies on the framebuffer... probably. I had a bit of a situation with my hardware, so I had to spend three months in runlevel 3 on Fedora... 12, I think?

Och, aye, there's even visual evidence of such:

http://www.goblinopera.com/mathemagics/?p=308

I still don't know what exactly happened back then but I watched the entire ST:TNG in the terminal. X11 wouldn't start, so that's gotta be the framebuffer, right?
Customize your working atmosphere or cancel out annoying background noises
C++11 Opaque Pointer Idiom
What are you referring to?

Spain has never been a long term example of anarchy. It has been a dictatorship many times though.
> Libertarians definition freedom stops at the point you start infringing on the freedom of others.

Virtually all people identifying as libertarians believe in property rights, which by definition are restrictions on the freedom of others to make use of certain things.
Direct democracy is susceptible to mob rule, but we could certainly try it in some form on a small scale in order to learn more about it's strengths and weaknesses.
No because the market is part of the problem. I would however invest (read as donate) in a non profit pharma with the sole goal of developing drugs and covering their development cost.
Github recently is more offline than my Servers. Not sure if that would really help.
Mr Rubbish Removal Little Ilford
It's About Time We Disrupt the Handymen, Artisan and Repairmen Market
This is a fair concern of style recommenders in general. Yes, we want to shape text. And what follows is merely a partial response, but it should address some of your concerns.

First, much of the advice is that certain word sequences are problematic without suggesting any particular replacement text. There are a few reasons for this (including the computational natures of error-detection vs. solution-recommendation problems). The reason most relevant to your concern is that solution-recommendations are more likely to produce a homogenizing effect because they have a driving effect, wherein using a particular set of words is deemed superior to another set of words. Much in the way that the diversity of life-forms has arisen because of selective pressures, by eliminating the least fit combinations of words, the native variation in writing can flourish all the more readily.

The goal is not to homogenize text for the sake of uniformity, but rather to identify those cases that have been identified by respected authors and usage guides as being specifically problematic. Any text that is sufficiently artful and compelling to have not been specifically addressed by these sources should not be able to be caught by the linter. Novelty will continue to introduce new usages, and some of them will be poor. Authors identified as trustworthy may point these out, but this will only be in retrospect. If you do not trust a guide's point of view, our strongest recommendation would be to turn off the modules associated with that guide. You can see some of the module names and a high-level description here: http://proselint.com/checks/.

Finally, I will modify a quote in the Foreword[^fn2] by Robert Bringhurst in The Elements of Typographic Style (version 3.2, 2004)
> [Language usage] thrives as a shared concern — and there are no paths at all where there are no shared desires and directions. A [language user] determined to forge new routes must move, like other solitary travelers, through uninhabited country and against the grain of the land, crossing common thoroughfares in the silence before dawn. The subject [of proselint] is not [stylistic] solitude, but the old, well-traveled roads at the core of the tradition: paths that each of us is free to follow or not, and to enter and leave when we choose — if only we know the paths are there and have a sense of where the lead. That freedom is denied us if the tradition is concealed or left for dead. Originality is everywhere, but much originality is blocked if the way back to earlier discoveries is cut or overgrown.

[^fn2]: Only because we are on the topic of historical traditions and stylistic guides, it should be mentioned that a foreword – according to book design tradition – would be written by an individual other than the author about the author, the book, and usually the relation between them. In this case, the section in Bringhurst's masterpiece labeled "Foreword" would likely be better described as "Preface" or "Introduction". Given his knowledge of book design, I shall assume that this was a conscious departure from the road of tradition, even if I cannot appreciate the new view that it offers.
It sounds like your discussing your demand curve - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demand_curve
The Gmail Moment – Delight of the Unknown
Everyone would have to have the same number of dollars
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11233580
If you believe the media-derived caricature of any political philosophy, it's a dystopia for most or all.
"Threatening? No, sir! I just like walking down the street open-carrying my AK47. And occasionally test firing it at wood-pigeons." - That an excuse, people try to make excuses with the current system to get away with things. It's not exclusive libertarianism. You would get it under any system.

"Incidentally - who makes the rules against threats? Who enforces them? Seems like we would need a group of people to decide on these rules. But how should we choose those people...? "

There are millions of different versions libertarianism with different solutions. Some with insurance, private police force that work for the insurer.

Can't list them all.

I personally am a classical liberal, I don't advocate no government just that it should be limited to law, order, military etc
> say having referendums electronically via a smartphone app.

That creates the problem of implementing a truly democratic voting system. You have to ensure that:

- voting is secret (i.e. you can't map votes to individuals using just the information available to the public or the vote management)

- voting is free (i.e. you can not influence the votes of individuals by coercion, which is easiest implemented by ensuring that voting is secret)

- voting is equal, i.e. every voter has the same number of votes and votes can be entered only for entitled voters and each voter gets to vote only once per election

- every voter can assert that his/her votes are actually counted in the way they were made

- the counting process is open and accessible to everyone and does not require any a-priori knowledge about the finer details of the voting process in place

Now try to implement THAT electronicsally. Even if the solve the first 4 clauses using the right kind of electronics and/or cryptography, the 5th clause is what puts the nail in the coffin for any electronic or computerized voting system: It excludes everybody from participating in the whole process of the election, who lacks deep knowledge about secure electronics design, cryptography and the implemented voting protocoll.

In short, your idea of a "smartphone voting app" is stillborn, if you aim for a truly democratic election system.
I personally dislike forced login/register but I've seen it work for some businesses.

In particular, the strategy I've seen work was to put registration early (but not too early) in order to get a contact email address and to follow up with people that drop out of the sales flow. Often people just need a reminder.
It is a shame that Thomas Ptacek felt so strong about his "don't roll your own cryptography" manta that he decided to attack people personally over it.

It was pretty clear that cryptocat was a product of an enthusiastic and young developer (Nadim) and that it should be treated as such. For context, Nadim has matured and now is working towards a cryptography Ph.D.

It is concerning that Thomas feels justified in continually attacking Nadim. A professional, particularly a public professional, should treat people with respect.
because people who can take your stuff are also infringing on your freedom...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Revolutionary_Catalonia

It was quickly crushed by all the other global powers together, the Soviet Union, the West, and the Franco Nationalists with the Nazi's. But while it existed, it was very successful. Read Orwell's "Homage to Catalonia" to get an impression of it.
Aren't standups mostly a way for management to say "now the standups are at 9:30 and everyone have to be at work at 9:30" ? :-).

Also it's clearly micromanagement: Why does everyone, including your boss, have to know what you did yesterday ?
Last paragraph refers to it.