skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Eugenics means curing the disease by killing the patient-- sometimes literally. That's the opposite of improving the human condition. It's also terribly totalitarian, and posits that some committee has the ability (let alone the right) to dictate what constitutes fitness or improvement. Committees of bureaucrats are demonstrably unable to centrally plan economies, so why should they be able to centrally plan a species? Even if eugenics were moral and desirable, doing it well would involve answering questions a lot harder than "how many light bulbs should be manufactured in July?" and states like the USSR failed consistently at that.

I don't advocate eugenics at all. We shouldn't get rid of "inferior" people. We should empower them to improve themselves in the manner of their choosing. Actually we already do this. If I have no legs I can get a wheelchair. So all I advocate really is going further... a whole hell of a lot further. Radical transhumanism is really nothing more than the radical advocacy of medicine, so much so that I doubt the need for a new term.

Guaranteed minimum income might actually be a stepping stone here, since it would empower those whose abilities are no longer economically valuable with both money and time. Some will waste it playing Halo and watching TV and drinking beer, sure, but some won't. What will they do with their free time? When interesting things are discovered by a few pioneers they spread virally through populations. It will also prevent the collapse of the modern economy due to collapsing monetary velocity. The Hunger Games is an almost accurate portrayal of a post-labor world that still clings to the Puritan work ethic, but for one detail: I doubt such a society could maintain high technology for long.

I do wonder sometimes if our periodic freak-outs about "decline" (e.g. Naziism) aren't at some level psychotic reactions to un-shielded glimpses of the true reality of our condition. Coping mechanisms exist for a reason. When they break down at an individual level, things like suicide and psychotic breaks sometimes result. Historically humanity was utterly powerless to alter its condition, and when you're powerless coping is all you can do. The eugenics fervor of the early 20th century happened as religion started to break down and as we started to comprehend the nature of our "alien god": http://lesswrong.com/lw/kr/an_alien_god/

(Not a total fan of Less Wrong but that article is brilliant.)

Another great film in the genre of Dark City is Life is Beautiful, which is an excellent allegory for the role of religion in human existence. We all live in a death camp called nature, and we have people like priests and philosophers who tell us it's all just a game and if we do real well we'll win a tank... or a trip to heaven. I believe humanity has historically used "gnostic" themed fiction like this as a safe way to examine its condition without truly "seeing" it.
How we converted photos to Emojis
I don't believe for one second that the people running the dispensaries never 'partook'. It takes a fan of the merchandise to run these things and communicate with the clientele. They just weren't caught. Why not? I suspect it still works like this:

Some 10-odd years ago, I had a (white) colleague who really enjoyed smoking mary-j. He lived on the 48th floor of a deluxe high-rise in Manhattan. He, like his wealthy neighbors, didn't have to get their fix off the street. Instead, they called 1-800-greenhouse and ordered two "theatre tickets". Within 30 mins, a bike messenger (African-American) came over to deliver 2 ounces of stuff to his front door. He never left the house. Last I heard, he got a job with the government…

He still has the right to vote too.
heh - I was just told by a friend that an OPs guy at apple was "really unhappy there" -- and I said "I am hiring - give me his info", his response was "OH, no - he's not leaving! Just really unhappy"
What are mailing lists and forums missing for you? What killer features do you think that the Slackware team need to implement beyond what they currently have? I ask in all sincerity because you haven't mentioned it in your post.
Encryption During Deployments: Why aren't you doing it?
It depends on the conference or journal they submit to. I typically request that authors release data and code in the review and the same is requested of me when I submit a paper for review. I don't know, maybe CHI doesn't have that sort of culture. Or maybe they do and these students just don't have the time right now and plan to do it right before the conference in May.
Buy them and shut them down.
Fair from what perspective? I'm a conservative who hates drugs, homosexuality, feminism, and a whole host of other ills that now plague this once-great nation. We are now awash as a nation in sea of immorality, relativism, and moral corruptness. We have no moral compass. I've said it before and I say it again, America was at her best in the 1950s. Since then, we've lost our conservative moorings to immoral behavior, lifestyles, cheapened sexuality, illicit drugs, what not.

You say "market" like selling dope could be a good thing. If it's a harmless plant, as you say, why have any regulations concerning it. Tea is a "harmless" plant, and as such, I can send my children into Walmart and purchase it without so much as a by-your-leave from the cashier. Harmless plants don't need sensible regulations because harmless things don't need regulating. Morality again, gone astray. I miss my old-school America where Americans were conservatives.
Weekly Top 10: Continuous Improvement, Collaboration and Innovation
I disagree. You're not offering a better alternative. That's the difference between a real political argument and rhetorical noise.

Let's say you ran for office on the platform of eliminating Black History Month. How far do you think you'd get? Do you think your message that Black History Month is racist would resonate with the people you're trying to help?
BinDiff now available for free
What Does “Away” Mode Mean in a Security System?
In the headlong rush towards exploiting the easy and trivial gains one can pilfer from the cost reductions achieved through automation I fear many of you fine HN folk may have forgotten other applications of technology in the workplace that can both uplift the human spirit and create super-fulfilling jobs.

Come on hacker folk… you can (and have!) reach higher than this.

Oh… and before you hit that vote or reply button… take a deep breath and read through some of Papert's earlier works.

It's easy to take an intellectual position on your reading of the (assumed) flaws in a critics commentary but, as most smart kids learn sooner or later, once the tide turns against you it becomes a lot harder to win people's trust.
ProtonMail has launched worldwide
The reason all of those incompatible chat protocols pop up is that all of the popular federated protocols lack features like inline image transfer, a usable backlog, persistence, live previews or gimmicks like code formatting and editing and third party integrations.

People want those, and value them enough to give up federation.

My personal favorite is Zulip, by the way: https://zulip.org/

Its threaded conversation model really helps with ignoring discussion about topics you're not interested in. When I get back to an IRC/Slack/whatever channel, I spend quite a while catching up. 99% of the conversation does not concern me, yet I have to read it. Zulip's threading is a great solution to this.
Might be a chance that someone could go next to an airport and jam all of the frequencies. It's not very likely scenario and this wouldn't even prevent them from doing that. But that's I could think of.

The headline has Europe in it because they are now making similar rules as those that FCC made.
How much every videogame console would cost today
How do you build a wifi router without a radio? And there is no problem that has to be solved. This restriction is completely useless and hurts everyone except big companies.
BART's Righteous Tweetstorm Reminds Us Its Problems Are Our Fault
Consider that BI has been agreed to be a good idea by a variety of well regarded intelligent people on both sides of the political spectrum. If anything, offhand dismissal is the lazy attitude here.

> After feedback, BI will just raise rents a corresponding amount

Basic Income is inherently redistributive. The prices of goods are inherently based on the distribution of income. It is pretty reasonable to expect the balance of prices to adjust given the income redistribution.

> And income always comes with strings attached

The point of BI is income without strings, so could you explain how this is impossible?

> Restore sane monetary policy

Could you explain what you regard as sane monetary policy?
I second the sshfs recommendation. Most of my remote development is using a combination of tmux (as an IDE for remote CLI tools) and sshfs (for GUI IDEs).
You're right -- this has always been true. The only people bummed out by it are the people trying to recreate Facebook's core value proposition (maintaining a digital representation of our meatspace relationships) themselves. But the reality is that the available market space for "social" is very small because Facebook occupies so much of it with a very general purpose product.

This has always been the case in the startup world too: you always look at markets over $10B with caution, because that's big enough to interest AGAF (Apple/Google/Amazon/Facebook) if they're already in an adjacent market. Your only hope is to target a less-profitable sub-sector of that market, develop expertise and hope that AGAF didn't bring their A game to that market (in which case, your company makes an excellent acquisition target at crazy valuations as AGAF bid against each other!)
Sublime Text Build 3109 (built-in Rust Support)
> You can't elevate people.

If you're not bound by morals and all that crap, there are some ways:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anton_Makarenko
There was certainly a lot of neat military-related innovation, and a lot of it had great civilian applicability (e.g. the Internet), but I'm minded of the Mr. Eisenhower's speech: 'Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final
sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.' Every one of those dollars, had they been spent on the market's priorities rather than on the State's, would have done more to satisfy basic human needs.

That doesn't mean that we shouldn't have fought and won the Cold War — indeed, the fall of Communism was perhaps the only good thing to come out of the benighted, bloody, blinkered, blunderous 20th century — simply that it was costly. War is necessary for survival, but war is also a mis-investment, but the best investment in the world doesn't matter if one fails to survive. It's a tragic paradox.
Anyone is entitled to feel guilt if they want - Catholics are famous for it. I'm also entitled to mock an article expressing catholic guilt if it showed up here.

Josh Green is entitled to feel guilty not because he's white, but because he's a member of a group that unjustly voted itself privileges in the area of housing, to the detriment of non-members of that group.

He was definitively not a member of white people in Georgia during the 50's and 60's. He wasn't even born at the time this group lost their special privileges, as noted in the article ("your one-sixth-acre slice of Atlanta had actually belonged to the family next door for longer than you’ve been alive").

Now it might be right for him to feel guilty about not doing enough. But he should certainly feel less guilty than most of us; he's done something, I've done nothing. Never even been to Atlanta. I have many friends who've never been to the US. Should they also feel guilty?

In any case, that's not Copenhagen. Copenhagen says that Josh Green should feel guilty since he observed the situation, but Igor Muscovite (a Russian who never left Moscow) doesn't need to feel guilty since he's didn't make the observation. I guess the best way to avoid guilt is to bury our heads in the sand?
Would you also permit hazardous chemical refineries to be built alongside or within residential communities? Are there any freedoms of self-government that you would like to see preserved?
Why not let people figure out how to spend their time themselves?

Millions of retirees do this succesfully every year, when they transition out of the workforce.

Saying that UBI is bad because people would a priori become restless, and that we therefore need to preserve a bullshit busywork corporate culture, is as much of an von-oben argument that UBI is bad because people would be lazy and sit on their asses all day.
A Java Card PKI Applet Aiming to Be ISO 7816 Compliant
Of course Uber drivers make way more than cabbies in 80% of circumstances, but yes - let's attack the only free-market company in he mix.

Two issues about the ownership: 1) They're being paid in transferable tokens which are redeemable for stock (ie, money) if they desire. 2) Uber isn't worth its valuation so they're better off with money.
TLS.
The hardest part of the LED project for me was finding the right components (especially MOSFETs). Send me an email at hi at stavros dot io if you want to talk about it, I can also send you my KiCad files for the controller PCB (which I'll blog about after I get the fabricated PCBs).
Hmm, I'll have to try it out tonight. I have some 4-year-old v0.6 and v0.8 hardware in a drawer somewhere.
Signaling an autistic disregard for morality and compassion as everyone else knows them doesn't exactly do your ideology any favors.
| Also wondering why the guy in Colorado can't apply for a pardon if it was only for teenage possession

Because that would dilute the click-baity narrative that Buzzfeed is trying to drive home. We wouldn't want their efforts in conflating cause and effect to go to waste now, would we?
Great questions, all. I would add one more: how on earth did moving to SSDs help Reddit avoid the Postgres autovacuum failure mode?!
> Crack is highly physically addictive. People aren't out robbing houses to get their next acid fix.

Powder cocaine is literally the same drug as crack cocaine, yet the sentencing disparities since the 1980s have been completely out of sync. They've slightly converged in the last ~5 years (crack cocaine sentences have been reduced), but let's not pretend that the sentencing laws[0] have not been radically influenced by perceptions of associations of drugs with race.

> People aren't out robbing houses to get their next _____ fix

LSD is not physically addictive, but in general, I'll encourage you to question this line of thinking. Looking at whether people are "out robbing houses" glosses over the question of why people would commit robbery in order to purchase drugs, and the racial and socioeconomic issues that are inextricably linked to that.

Put another way: who's not committing robbery in order to purchase the drugs that they use, and why aren't they? Is it because their drug (e.g. powdered cocaine) is fundamentally less addictive? Or is it because they are already in a position in society that allows them other opportunities to finance their drug use? Is it a statement about the drug itself, or simply a statement about the social structures that already exist?

[0] If you want a really wonderful example of this, look at the reason that possession of <27g of marijuana was the only drug that was exempted from the Rockefeller drug laws' mandatory minimum sentencing. It was, quite literally, that kids in predominantly white and wealthy suburbs were being sentenced to prison time, and the parents wanted the judges to have discretionary power when sentencing them.
Also, don't safes purposefully leave soft spots to make it possible to get in without the code (i.e. for when a person forgets the code)? If so, aren't those analogous to the backdoors we're concerned about for phones?
Home assistant looks great, I had installed it a while ago but didn't have time to really configure it. I should go back and devote some more time, thanks for the mention.
Btw didn't he build the suits himself and just share it with his less able cop friend?

I'd agree, it feels like it invalidates the claim about getting credit for 'being a thinker'.
If I bend a paperclip, it's going to stay bent. Until someone unbends it, it's state will be attributable to my bending it, no matter how long ago that happened.

I'm not saying "those neighborhoods were poor 50 years ago because they were segregated, that's so unfair!" I'm saying "those neighborhoods are still poor because they were segregated 50 years ago, and nobody has undone the effects of segregation and put those people back in the position they would have been but for segregation."
I was literally talking about this yesterday with a friend in the context of military robotics and their control systems. He said those C&C systems would be a huge IW/EW target and my counter was that DARPA was already addressing that through things like the Spectrum Challenge.
I guess I'm still just enough of a jerk that I would like to see the recipient's contribute positively to society, such as the examples mentioned above (child / elder care, park ranger, etc). There is plenty to be done - why don't we set people on that (roads, utilities, parks, forests, care, fire, police,... ), then see where we stand?
> About halfway through he makes a good point about Uber drivers not making much money from the job. He mentions hypothetically giving drivers equity in the company.

Which, if you think about it, clearly doesn't work. The driver already gets the large majority of the fare. It's just that the driver gets most of one fare whereas Uber gets a small slice of every fare so the driver makes $8 once and Uber makes $2 times a billion. Even if you gave every single share of the company to the drivers and left nothing for any other investors, they would only get the small remaining slice of the fare after whatever administrative overhead the company has. In other words they would get the equivalent of like a 10% raise. It doesn't fix anything. The fundamental problem is that the market is highly competitive so it drives down fares/wages. If you want to get paid more, you have to do some other kind of work.

> Personally it got me thinking about ways I could change services I've built to pay both myself and users creating content on it. Think about if you could make money by posting great photos on Instagram.

Which is exactly the same problem. When you post a picture on Instagram, Instagram on average makes a few cents. They're a billion dollar company because it's a few cents times a billion people. If you gave all the money to the people posting pictures they would still be making far less than minimum wage.
I HATE the word Gentrification and it is a meaningless word.

Right now in my city over 50% of the children change schools before the school year is over. They start in September and half the students are new students in June! That is not a community that is just a transient zone of bad homes and bad landlords. Also the homes are gorgeous and are certainly better made then most homes today. So neighborhoods do change but when an area with no established families turns into a community lets not throw out the word gentrification it is establishing a community and property values go up because it becomes a place people want to move into.
DEF CON Radio: Music for Hacking [Audio]
yeah, I thought about this too and will take out the history feature. I originally put it there so the auto recommender wouldn't get stuck in loops, but kind of unnecessary with the new search.

thanks for using it! I want to add one more feature (user ability to lock a room so only they can submit and skip), and fix some stability problems, and then it will be "feature complete" in my mind. need to find the time, been busy...
Assuming Apple refused, the government would draft an emergency law requiring them to do it, or possibly the President could issue an executive order. Job done.

The question at hand is, does the law as it stands now require Apple to comply with this request, and if not will a law be passed that does require them to do so.
Don't tabs preserve cursor position and collapse/expand state in a long (potentially multi-screen) document in a way that saved searches cannot?
>Would you also permit hazardous chemical refineries to be built alongside or within residential communities?

Probably not, but I'd have their site planned at the regional/state/province level rather than allowing each individual municipality to say "NIMBY!" to everything. Because most NIMBY measures aren't about chemical refineries, they're about the working class, about sites of housing and employment for ordinary people.
At 160 knots: "we weren’t really flying, but were falling in a slight bank"

That's 184 mph! Nearly the top speed of the only plane I've ever flown (Cessna 172). We never got near that speed, and I still thought we were going crazy fast.

Great story! Thanks for posting that link.
One Weird Trick to Keep Female Employees Happy
There is a very real problem here, and you don't have to search hard for it. An entire sub-population of this country was disproportionately sentenced to felony convictions. If we don't recognize that for what it was, we are condemning a generation of black people to just "suck it up, because we're thinking about the future now". That is a mistake because these people are part of the future, and they deserve a fair chance in it. Laws preventing felony offenders from finding work in their field only make sense if the felony conviction actually made sense. Preventing non-violent drug offenders from finding work in the burgeoning drug industry is as nonsensical as the offense they were charged with.

You can't just hit a reset button on racism and say all our mistakes our behind us, now we're all on the same level. Especially not when those mistakes were felony charges with lifelong consequences.
I've actually tried a couple of times to make a graphical settings manager package for Sublime, but the second problem of not having an interface beyond text buffers has made it a bit of a non-starter.