skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This article makes the mistake of assuming that things like the national debate of encryption and privacy sparked by e.g. the San Bernadino iPhone ordeal are actually about the moral themes they are characterized by.

They are not about those moral themes. They are just status and in-group vs. out-group games like everything else. We don't use data-driven approaches to them for the same reason why people continue to hire underperforming assest managers or why they hire over-priced management consultants.

With encryption, immigration, climate change, finance reform, etc. etc., you pick a side of the debate and that identifies Who You Are and What Team You Are On for purposes of letting other people know that you're either their implicit ally or implicit enemy, that you would submit to them or resist them, that you intrinsically respect their credential or that you treat their credential with skepticism.

I was hoping this article might be about scope insensitivity and would speak about how we have to intelligently use legislation and law enforcement to protect human rights because, even for the best of us, it's not cognitively feasible to feel the morality you would wish upon others.

Instead it seems like a meandering groan that we aren't more data driven -- but of course we aren't!

And even when we are "data driven" it's generally just an excuse to use politically manipulated notions of data-based reasoning to only enhance the degree of coalition politics, not to defeat it.

Take software for example. We claim that systematic hiring via commoditized task examinations (like IKM or HackerRank), or the use of dumb shit process management like Agile/Scrum, are supposed to represent a shift into "objective" and "data-driven" evaluation. But it's unequivocally not. These are just ways of letting middle management and political gatekeepers engineer whatever subjective metrics they prefer, while being shielded from complaints that they are not being objective.

If we can't even get this right for something as small as project management or software hiring, it's beyond realistic hope that we could actually develop a moral calculus at a national level and use data-driven principles to actually inform the national debate over privacy vs. safety.
It does sound like a "throw the baby out with the bath water" scenario.

In theory, GMOs could be more healthy than not GMO.

In practice, this has not happened. The objectives instead have been to increase crop yield. The side effects have been to make the plants more toxic in very subtle ways that are hard to track and take decades for people to show symptoms.

Maybe in a few more decades we'll see "good" GMOs.

It should also be noted that many of the problems with GMOs are shared by crops that have simply been selectively bred for a long time... which is most crops that we eat a lot of...
I am not a tax expert but I have heard that as long you put the appreciation money back into a house purchase, you can keep all the appreciation upto 500K tax free.
White House Source Code Policy a Big Win for Open Government
Some of the images I recovered actually contained directory structures like that, which included some of the oldest files I was able to recover. This approach can work out if the filesystem eventually gets preserved!
> Sure, though Paris may have better transit than SF.

Density and better public transportation kind of go hand in hand. One before the other probably doesn't work very well.
am i the only one thinking of wireless protected access?
Because in America, the balance of rights is heavily tilted in favor of landlords, and if you're a renter, you are constantly in danger of losing your home with little to no legal or social consequences for your landlord.
It was created this way by design. I'm not saying it's good, but there's always been skew in representation. Big cities can have their power checked by smaller cities.

I'll take the counter argument. It's generally the ideologies in the most populated cities that drive Senate seats. Do you think that the vast agricultural population of California is represented by Dianne Feinstein?

In fact, it's becoming an issue even among similar cities. For example, Senator's Feinstein's stance on surveillance is at odds with many of the technorati living around the bay.
This is the top 1% that doesn't use loopholes?
Sorry for the free plug for a guy who comes off as (and in many ways is) a crank, but that's almost verbatim the health policy preferred by Nicholas Taleb (of Black Swan /Anti-fragile fame):

- Be very conservative in what foods/medicines you use, limiting yourself to those with a proven track record.

- Ignore warnings about specific figures (e.g. cholesterol, blood pressure) if you're otherwise healthy and active.

- If you have a terminal condition, take risky treatments since you have little to lose.
And then Microsoft screwed up NT, over Cutler's objections, by putting in crap code from Windows 95 to make it "compatible" with programs that relied on quirks of Windows 95. It took many years to clean up that mess.

(I started with Windows NT 3.51, which was a very nice system. The 16-bit emulation module was entirely optional, and I configured it off. Worked fine, as long as you bought applications certified for NT. In Windows 95, 16-bit mode was an integral part of the system, and kludges such as 16-32 bit thunking were added so that the two modes were not so distinct.)
I think it is a noble cause. You are correct in that it means the price of some of the food groups increases dramatically, so many people are left out of regularly consuming it. I believe that 50/60 years ago, people did not expect to eat meat/fish every night due to the price.

I would like to know why you think farm-to-table is inherently unsustainable? Many farmers in the Highlands of Scotland make a good living selling superior beef to restaurants and butchers in the UK. They do this without regular factory farming methods. Is it less efficient compared to clearing thousands of acres in order to grow a single product which is fed government subsidised corn? Pound for pound, absolutely. Which is why some people decide to eat meat less regularly, but eat the best when they do.
It requires two things:

(1) your mobile service provider needs to actually provide NITZ information (I've encountered a Russian provider that simply failed to do it); and

(2) your phone needs to be configured to use that timezone information (settings → date and time → automatic time zone).
What's there to get around? the gmail proxy fetches the image, which tells GitHub that the email has been opened, which is all they need to know. The proxy does protect against leaking the IP address, cookies and potential code injections, but not against the signal "image requested by user".
Not a lot of cities with expensive housing are in no-tax states though.
Thanks, Obama: TV will never be the same, and consumers will love it
Set-top boxes will be, for at least a brief period of time, the point of integration of streamed television and linear television (the name for regular scheduled cable, satellite and HD over-the-air television). Bluetooth- and Wi-Fi-enabled, supporting TV remotes, smartphones and tablets to search and discover content, the set-top box will become the point of competition for TV content.
The Secret World of Tiny Phones That Go Inside Your Butt
What you're describing is generally called gerrymandering. It consolidates support bases and causes entrenchment.
Facebook Employees Asked If They Should Try to Stop a Donald Trump Presidency
An FTP server is perfectly fine for anonymous logins, assuming it was configured server side to be running as a low permissioned user.

But yes, once you start taking user credentials, you need to move to something like FTPS or SFTP (urgh... double standards).
Smaller states outpunch in the Senate, larger states outpunch in the House. As douche said, it was intended to be this way.

[Edit: Unless by "outpunch" you mean "have higher per-capita representation", in which case they punch equally in the House. But the large states dominate the House: nine states have more than half the votes.)
If I were to base my answer to that on what I've been hearing over the last decade from discussions about immigration, free trade, globalization, etc I'd say something like

"No, how it's supposed to work is that every region must remain open to growth at all costs and from all sources, especially outside sources. And if there's a policy such as a zoning policy or a density goal that stands in the way of outsiders entering a region to settle there and grow the economy, then that policy is discriminatory and ought to be removed. This applies just as much to San Francisco as it does to Arizona. Blah blah blah."

But seriously now, where do we draw this line? I have no idea anymore. The debate has gone in every direction and twisted itself into so many knots I have no idea when a local government should have control over this and when it shouldn't.
Pedantic, but should be "capital cities", instead of "major cities".
Voting in primaries is the single most important thing anyone can do do improve the political situation not just in SF but in the country writ large.

As the article states, there's a large majority of the population in favor of relatively sensible rational policies. And where two sides disagree, there's a large majority in favor of sensible compromise. Only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues are intransigent. And yet only the most hardcore partisans and ideologues vote in primaries. In today's gerrymandered and politically segregated world, primaries are the only elections that matter in many places. Solution: everyone should vote in primaries.

TLDR: Vote in primaries or the crazies win.
One problem with ideas like that is: how viable would such a state be by itself?

What you're proposing is probably a state with less population than Wyoming. We don't need more states like that. In fact, we should be eliminating states like RI and WY, and combining those areas with other regions to form more populous states, so we don't have this problem where we have some states that have enormous populations and some with puny populations; they should be more equal.

Instead, if northern Californians don't want to be part of the same state as the Bay Area, maybe they should push instead to join Oregon.

Edit: Sorry, I thought this was a proposal along the lines of the State of Jefferson, to break off the very northern part of California, in wine country, north of the Bay Area.
Tokyo metropolis density: 6,200/km^2

San Francisco density: 7,100/km^2

Per wikipedia.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tokyo

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco
According to this paper, they dropped the O(1) scheduler a few years ago for a CFS scheduler that's O(log n) but exhibits nicer behaviors in other ways.
From the article:

For 40,000-some Florida restaurants, 191 inspectors from the state’s Department of Business and Professional Regulation oversee them all for safety, sanitation and — occasionally — lies. By comparison, Georgia, with about half the population, has 300 inspectors. Ohio has 637 for about 22,000 restaurants.

In the past two years, Florida inspectors found roughly 750 food misrepresentation violations. Of them, 123 restaurants were fined, with an average fine for first-time offenders between $150 and $300.

The state could beef up the number of inspectors and the fines. Should they? I'm not sure. Certainly I don't support lying to consumers, but it isn't exactly the crime of the century. I'd be much more concerned about safety and sanitation, though some mislabeling has safety implications (e.g. whether nuts are used).

There's a concept in false advertising law called "puffery" under which obviously exaggerated representations are not considered false advertising. Think "best chicken in the world". This isn't exactly that, but you really should know that your $11 Caesar salad with shrimp isn't using local, sustainable caught shrimp that goes for around ~$1/shrimp wholesale.
You've got to respect those living dinosaurs, both for their taste and their mendacity.
What's amazing about that is that they brought back the 8^2 curse of extinction.

In 1993, Squaresoft used to send out ads to people on their mailing lists (I was one of those people). One of their little mailings included a comment about a curse in Final Fantasy II for the SNES: if you do an action 64 times, it will trigger a reboot of your game, and your save file will be lost. They never told what the action was, but they were admant on the number of times it needs to be done.

t haven't found this info anywhere. If I'm the only one that knows it, it makes me sad. Hopefully, more find it.
same thought came to my mind, thought it would be a strange article to be on theatlantic.. WPA3!
I had no idea. Why isn't this well more well known? Is there some known quirks/limitations why this isn't more widely used for very simple needs?

Passing basic messages around like this is a perfect job for LISTEN/NOTIFY because we can solve the job of message passing without the operational overhead of setting up an additional queuing system.

I am a big fan of using as little pieces of tech as possible for a project to keep the overall complexity down and this could be very useful for simple needs.
If you want to add this to your Rails app with basically no configuration check out the Ahoy gem.
The "poem" was insulting - and Germany has that law. And with respect to that it will be a German court which decides upon whether a punishment is needed. I think that is fine.
I loved AbiWord's file format. It was literally a basic html file, so I could confidently store anything in it and know I could read it later, much easier than any ODF.
I think you'd have to renegotiate representation with states as if they were sovereign entities.
"Very popular" for the one case of installing things via package manager.
In this case, the problem is that there's a huge difference between public perception and reality. For instance, you talk about herbicides: A modern GMO actually lets you use LESS herbicides and insecticides, and often far less dangerous ones than many that are OK for labeled organic crops, and happen to be far more toxic.

As far as updates on the field producing toxins, GMOs are actually more controlled, genetically speaking, than something that doesn't come from big agribusiness. I can irradiate my seeds to create mutations to use then on traditional breeding, and call myself organic afterwards!

As far as growing well in an area or not, that's why there is testing. Selling a seed that yields poorly to a region would lead to a major economic damage to whichever company is selling those seeds, so everything we can find at a seed store from a major manufacturer, whether GMO or not, will have more than enough agronomic information to make a farmer's decision easy. And besides, I don't know how many farmers you've talked to, but they tend to be a pretty conservative bunch, as far as making sure that they don't bet a lot of hectares on tech that they haven't tested first in a smaller part of their fields, and only plant everywhere if they expect a significant profit. When yields are already very good, and grain is cheap, expensive seeds just sell less across the board.

You don't get much opposition to GMOs among farmers: they just go with what is more profitable for them. Same thing for industrial companies that use the GMOs products to feed cattle or make biodiesel. It all comes down to people that are afraid of what they don't understand, and just choose to be afraid in ways that work well with their political affiliations.

If we were REALLY afraid of food being dangerous, and with untested genetics, we'd actually ban the organics, because there's a lot more genetic variation that is unaccounted for in traditional farming products than in something that comes from agribusiness.
If you haven't tried VR you should. It's nothing like what you'd imagine.
Obama Gets Game of Thrones Screeners, So I Filed an FOIA
Has any map provider, like Google Maps, changed Crimea to be part of Russia?
California split in half at the Monterey-SLO border? Seems awfully natural if you're going to split CA into northern and southern halves (with the boundary continuing east- I don't know the geography very well out there). That's hardly gerrymandering.
Isn't investing the definitive way to use money to create wealth? The companies they're investing in have obviously been able to use that money to grow, right? And growing usually means providing more jobs and creating wealth.
daily reminder that h1b depresses wages and is the only reason SV pretends to support wide scale immigration.
As much as I agree with you, it is really naive to expect everyone to behave ethically. We wouldn't need security if the world was as such.
It's possible that this is a little crass for HN but I decided to submit anyway. I never even knew these phones existed, let alone their purpose in prison.

I find the interview with Adam, a tiny phone seller on eBay, to be particularly interesting. When asked about the illicit use of the phones he sells:

"If that's what they want to do, they can, but we've never tested the phones to see if they set off those scanners; some of them are mainly plastic, but they're not going to be 100 percent plastic—they still need to have a circuit board."

But what if they did? These phones seem to be perfect for the prison task. I wonder what would be different if they were specifically optimized for the "hide in butt" use case. Could they be smaller? A different shape? etc etc...
A lot of people north of that agree that Northern California would be a lot nicer if it were a separate state, but want the border at the Golden Gate.
Amazon does, for one.
Wait, CA north of the Monterey SLO border has less population than Wyoming? The Bay Area and Sacramento? edit: this isn't viable and has Wyoming levels of population? http://imgur.com/fF5SZYJ
Possible answers:

#1) Why wouldn't it be?

#2) as far as we know, it is a lot less empty than it seems to be. We're missing about 85% of the mass in the universe (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_matter), and about 95% of its mass-energy.

So, the best theory we have is, in some sense, awfully inaccurate, at least until we invent some way to see the missing stuff.

Tangentially related: why is the night sky black? (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Olbers'_paradox)
Tangentially to the article's point, Colin Woodward has an excellent book called American Nations, in which he identifies and tracks forward 11 distinct cultures formed by the way they colonized. His map: http://emerald.tufts.edu/alumni/magazine/fall2013/images/fea...

It's a great read.
We should go back in the other direction and repeal the 17th amendment.

The argument goes that if we do that the Senate appointments will be highly politicized and so on, but uh, that's the way the elections are.

Having the Senate represent the interests of the state governments was a useful check on centralization of government at the federal level.
On his plan to make virtual reality great again.
Do you have something I could read for that claim regarding toxicity? I'm not super up on the debate surrounding GMOs, but I have a few friends who have scientific backgrounds and are interested, and I've never heard anything quite like what you're saying.
It wasn't just designed that way to allow small cities/states to check the power of big cities/states. Additionally, the federal government was designed to be both a government of the people and a government of the states. The House represented the interests of the people, and the senate represented the interests of the states. This idea (that the Senate represented the states and not necessarily the people) was pretty much wrecked by the 17th amendment, but it was nonetheless part of the original design.
All right. Refusing to implement a useful feature for anyone because it's deemed too confusing for novices isn't any better than removing a useful feature because etc., though.

(The recent addition of a special hotkey to paste-with-delete is not much of an improvement, since it still obfuscates the actual, expected behavior (of Ctrl-X) in favor of a different, more obscure, but notionally "friendlier" alternative.)
also for reasons I don't understand, when I search google, the links to "images, maps, shopping" etc. are in a completely random order. They will literally switch between searches. WHY?
The real divide in California is not between north and south, but between coastal and inland. SF and LA have a lot more in common with each other, culturally, politically, and economically, than either of them has with Bakersfield or Fresno.
Do large cities really out perform more sparsely populated areas in terms of representatives?
Plants don't feel their environment. They react to stimuli as all life does.

Sentience is defined as the capacity to feel, perceive, or experience subjectively. Since we have very little understanding of how consciousness works and how to test discern whether an entity is conscious or not, I realize this is a sticking point for a lot of people. But I think you'll agree that there's a very real difference between killing a plant and killing a member of your family. And that distinction applies to many animals as well.