skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
This is the perfect example of what happens when a programmer (or in this case a mathematician) thinks that the law operates like a computer.

It doesn't.

The law is interpreted by humans, based on case law, and attempts to understand the intentions of the law as written.

Many programmers don't like this, but that is how the law operates.

(If the author would like to go down another rabbit hole, perhaps he should consider if encrypted information is actually published at all. After all, well designed encryption renders information quite close to random noise in the absence of a key. Perhaps making encrypted information available isn't actually publishing - maybe it is the act of posting how to decrypt it that is the act of publishing.

Note that here, the law would answer "it depends", and that is fine.)
The water can be nationalized. But the government still needs to put a price on it to prevent overuse. If the price is higher than the operating costs of the water system, then they have profit they can redistribute to the people.
> Axing [...] projects in a market they understand, so that they can spend the money on [...] projects in a market they don't understand.

Minus a couple adjectives, what you're describing is the way that companies grow and learn. If one of Mozilla's projects ends up being the Next Big Thing, then all this experimentation will look really smart in retrospect. Until then, it feels unfocused. That's normal.
I'm not fun-hating, I just get that elsewhere.
As far as I'm aware there are no studies that clearly show that replacing potatoes bread etc with equivalent calories in other forms results in weight loss.
At some level, laws inherently have to be up for interpretation, and operate on some level of abstraction above the intimate details - because virtually everything in life is a spectrum, including the applicability of a given law. In the “fringe zone” in which it's not clear whether a law applies or not, judges have to resort to individual judgement on a case-by-case basis.

This is not something that's new or unique to technology, although technology does a fantastic job of illustrating the difference between a legal problem and a technological problem - as well as the different mindsets you have to approach both with.
> private pharma would unlikely survive today without that core research being done for free

I tend to view private pharma, as it exists today, as a leech on society, at best. Perhaps destroying it and making it pay it's own way entirely would be for the best.

Yes, in the past, private companies did real work and it was beneficial. But, mostly, they seem to invent cures for problems that get blown way out of proportion thru marketing directly to the public (restless leg syndrome? really?).

At a minimum, let doctors become the filter thru which medicine is prescribed, and put a very heavy penalty in place for pay-to-subscribe.
This isn't just a problem with Gimp. It's a problem with Photoshop and basically every discipline where there's a bunch of file formats that have varying levels of support for features.

"Open" would then more correctly called "Import" for most file formats. If you want Open and Save to work with all file formats, you'd then need to restrict the UI to operations that work with the file format you have open. Otherwise, you lose data when saving.

>> IMHO most people want to save in the format they started with and if they want to change it, something other than "save" is warranted.

Most people when they save a file expect everything to be there when they open it later. That's only possible when you save using that applications proprietary file format.
We're talking about cutting out a food category and presumably replacing it with another. I don't know of any convincing evidence this results in weight loss. Open to information of course!
Styles vary between schools and the one called "analytic philosphy" is big.

But in general when I read philosophers disucssing social matters, I feel they are being too rigorous. Trying to cover all bases when the fuzzy nature of the subject is always going to make their abstractions leak.

They have to do this because they compete with other philosophers who will pick the nits.
PHP 7 Data Structures extension is officially stable on PECL
No, you've never been afraid of water shortages because you live in a first world country and earn thousands of dollars per month, plain and simple. If you were living with 2$ a day and rising food costs meant a meal cost 3$ I would like to see you sing a different tune about "food is expensive? just eat less meat and let "the market" figure it out".
I'm going to +1 this hard. Generally same story... when I turned 30 I managed to switch from my very niche career field of designing submarines (working for the navy/government) to doing what I loved (coding/computer stuff). I was a hobbyist for a while before... I took the leap and switched and now I'm happier and enjoy my work. I used to work 15 minutes a day working for the government and hated it (only so much internet you can surf/too bored). Now I work ~50 hour weeks but love what I do and I'm a lot happier doing it.
Life as an impatient programmer
Sure, but unless the guy has a massive stockpile of CP that he was storing on Google's servers, how difficult would it be to let him access his data sans the illicit material? It's not as though a handful of illegal pictures somehow taints every email, blog post, and story he's ever uploaded so as to make them all contraband.
> It doesn't mean the assumptions you made while forming axioms or the rules itself are right.

There's no absolute notion of “right” to begin with. There's just “provable” (in a theory) and “true” (in a model of a theory). Furthermore, a statement that's true in one model might not be true in another.
272 Athletes Approved for Rio – Russia
The Hitchhiker’s Guide to Smart Contracts in Ethereum
Funny that the left all of a sudden cares about security in our elections.

Try to implement the most basic security that is common even in poor foreign countries, such as an ID requirement and the left is up in arms.

The truth is, the left doesn't care about election security, it just cares about the left.
I would imagine they wanted 6 identical modules just for the manufacturing efficiency.

That still leaves the question of why 12 lights instead of 10. I would bet that the separator colons are actually produced by a separate mask+lamp, rather than having different masks for each digit on those two modules. I.e. to show "8:" you light up both the "8" lamp and the ":" lamp at the same time. That gets us up to 11. No theory on the 12th one though.
http://mikesenese.com/DOIT/wp-content/uploads/2011/11/Unders...

^undersea cables are typically made up of a central fiber line, which look like human hairs in a small tube, and a shell of insulation and copper. You need power to send the signal across the ocean floor and, as we do not generate electricity underwater, all of the current needs to be sent from one end to the other to power all of the repeaters along the way.

The fiber optic cable is 17mm, but the cable itself can't be because of the power constraint (unless I'm missing something deep; feel free to correct me if so).
I think I see a way to get the trash cleaned up real quick. Burner phones are cheap there, right?
First of all they usually settle within walking distance to a source of fresh water - some areas in Israel are the great exemption here.

And there is plenty of reason:

* historic: a lot of trade routes for sought-after goods went through deserts

* economic: rich fishing grounds just off the coast - see Western Sahara for an example (Boujdour and Dakhla being the main cities)

* economic: a lot of nomadic farmers live in deserts because they provide just enough food for the livestock

* politics: keep disputed areas occupied (Israel and Western Sahara as examples)

* politics: borders - these things tend keep people from freely moving to more hospitable areas

* nature: some think deserts are beautiful (count me in)

* spiritual: very low population density and a very tight connection to the forces of nature appeal to some people
How can countries avoid the spiral of death with taxing? I hate how google, facebook etc. makes hundreds of millions in my country, but barely pay taxes. While local companies do.
"The OP is a shameful blot on Bruce Schneier's record [imo].
For "evidence" we are directed to The New York Times -- a political organization."

I originally skipped that blog entry but all these anti-Schneier comments make it worth reading. Reading it shows the opposite of the claims I'm seeing on HN. It's in the style of his other reporting on stuff, like Sony situation, where he lists the official position on it in non-committal way (note the "if"), optionally lists alternative theories (apparently has none or doesn't care), focuses on meat of situation (election insecurity), optionally notes prior warnings/work (his and others), and then delivers recommendations to reduce or eliminate the risk. Common pattern on his blog very evident from a guy reading it for about eight years.

Far as personal bias, I've regularly counterpointed him on his own blow & even wrote a character assessment of him based on reading many claims:

https://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/10/can_i_be_trus...

Schneier's moderation style is so permissive we get the thoughtful and trolling alike. Yet, far as political or technical points, he doesn't expect lip service from anybody. Let's the "yay," "nay," and "screw you all" posts all stand. So, I speak for myself noting he's not pushing New York Times, the main theory, anything but the topic of elections security & recommendations to get it on track. Those recommendations also reflect both his own research and tons of discussion on those topics on his blog that came to same conclusions. They're the blog's consensus.
Cause we are!!
> Yes, blacklisting is insufficient in general. But it covers many cases, including the one here. Contextual encoding must be done each and every place you emit user input into HTML, and it's easy to screw this up.

Blacklists are only acceptable if you do it in addition to contextual encoding wherever you emit user controlled data, and even then a much stronger protection would be to whitelist acceptable characters. Either way, contextual encoding whenever you emit user data is the only real protection. --And even then it's not a good fallback protection, a strong Content-Security-Policy should be your fallback protection.

> Unless you're intending for your user to post HTML, or math inequalities, or diff patches - there's no reason to allow angle brackets on a form post.

Form posts are not the only vector for XSS, any HTTP request can be potentially exploited to perform XSS (and any part of an HTTP request), doesn't matter if it's a Form, an AJAX request, an HTTP header value, or a GET parameter, they're all potential attack vectors.
I also use a reusable shopping bag or use my book bag to carry groceries.

I do use plastic bags once a day to clean up my cat's litter.

Does anyone have another idea or a good way of disposing cat litter without using plastic bags?

Maybe I would just pay for a box of small plastic bags.
Thank you very much for this great answer to one of the questions/ideas that I came up with over a decade ago and bother me ever since.
‘Game of Thrones’: HBO Confirms Series Will End with Eighth Season
No, the water there was more acidic than the prior water the system used, causing leaching.
Ask HN: Looking for entrepreneurial product manager/bizdev in SF/Bay area
Looking for entrepreneurial product manager/bizdev in SF/Bay area for new service (pre-launch, big equity, the most broken industry in history).
I upvote every submission that raises a point I'm interested in. As for the comments, I upvote both the ones I really agree with and the ones that contain some interesting information I haven't heard before or interesting arguments. Apart from that, I frequently upvote downvoted comments.
Define "loose".
Edit: Jokes aside, nothing is really "strictly-defined" as we would like it to be since definitions (even the most rudimentary ones) are based on -what we might call- statistical sets of observations. We come to the conclusion that an apple is a round object because we've seen an apple from multiple angles. Math accepts axioms, but those axioms are based on accepting definitions that are rudimentary observations. What is "1"? The idea of "1" can only be understood in terms of experience - hardly "rigorously defined".
Wait, Luxemburg has a software industry?
Photoshop is as easy to pirate as it has ever been. The "SaaS" licensing scheme hasn't changed this one bit.
This is interesting but the 5 euros note does not really represent a bridge but an Aqueduct (looking really like this one https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pont_du_Gard). So you can't really walk on it like they show in their schematic proposal.
>The IRS claims Facebook’s tax adviser Ernst & Young LLP undervalued the company’s property as it was transferred to Facebook Ireland Holdings Ltd. by evaluating pieces of the online platform separately, according to court filings ... “I don’t think Facebook is necessarily hiding anything, but it’s a fight over pricing,” said Stephen Hamilton, a tax lawyer in Philadelphia. “This is what companies do when they transfer their own assets; they try to value them as low as possible and when the issue is litigated, they usually end up somewhere in the middle."

It's kind of sad that a team of E&Y accountants and lawyers have probably added more "value" to Facebook by playing this legal tax evasion game with the IRS than an entire team of developers and product managers adding a big new feature.
The article mentioned one installation was going to channel brine back to the dead sea, so if you've got a super salty body of water nearby, brine problem = solved!
SMS Blocker
There are a huge number of contextual corner cases, this cheat sheet lists just a few:

https://www.owasp.org/index.php/XSS_Filter_Evasion_Cheat_She...
Simply, you expect Open > Save to persist your file format. In the use case they target Save > Open persist what you were editing. Things like Live Text, Smart Objects, alpha layers (for many file formats), etc will stay around. It's a common approach I've seen in other image editors (including Photoshop), 3d tools, and I imagine text editors do this, too.
If we care about foreign influence, shouldn't we be concerned about all the foreign money the Clinton's have taken?

Millions to their foundation (just while she was SoS):

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/foreign-governments-...

Millions in speaking fees outside the US (just while she was Sos):
http://www.washingtonexaminer.com/bill-doubled-speaking-fees...

And it's doubly-ironic how much the left suddenly cares about Email security after getting let off by FBI.
Vik Muniz Painstakingly Reconstructs the Backs of Famous Paintings
A parabolic antenna can create a narrow beam. That beam can be aimed at a satellite. It is only necessary for the antenna but not the submarine to be at the surface.

The long usage history of sonobuoys and underwater decoys in submarine warfare seems reason to suppose that the use of similar sacrificial systems within the realm of possible tactics to further avoid detection of a submarine.
Agreed. This is likely the judge "protesting" what he believes to be unjust law, even though he knows his decision will likely be overturned on appeal. EULAs and forced arbitration provisions have been upheld many times.

And just to follow up, "protesting" isn't really the right word. A lot of times district court judges will write opinions supporting minority positions in the law in an attempt to influence higher judges and to provide a "template" legal reasoning for higher judges should they want to overturn precedent.
Feeday 2.0 coming soon – Instagram widget
Long time back, I wanted to timestamp certain pictures (a couple of hundred). That is, pick up the timestamp from EXIF metadata and put the date on a corner of the photo.

I wasn't able to do it programatically using Adobe tools. FOSS on Linux did that for me.
> You'll do massive economic damage that harms the poor if you price control or subsidise any commodity, including water.

That depends on how it is done, Venezuela showed how not to do it. I think a good option is to also provide commodities by non-profit companies run by the state and then use their costs plus a profit margin as a cap for commercial competition. If water, electricity and basic foods become too expensive people suffer and one finally will face revolts - which pure commercial entities are not necessarily incentivized to prevent (just pulling out of a market when the suffering becomes too great might be more cost efficient for them).
Hoogle[1] is also a pretty awesome example of this. It doesn't track the values themselves, but in Haskell there are usually only so many (sensible) functions for a given type which mitigates it a bit.

[1]: https://www.haskell.org/hoogle/
The problem is that sugar is literally everywhere leading to an over consommation without realising it, which can lead to health problem.
It reads the exact opposite to me. 'You know how everyone's upset about Russian/Chinese hacking lately? Remember that the US did it first and on a far larger scale than them.'
Right, the detection mechanism is part of the OS, not the browser.

https://developer.android.com/reference/android/net/Connecti...
Seems like he only long term answer is somehow to make global companies beholden to a global tax authority, but no idea how that would work on a planet with sovereign nations.
Care to eloborate?
More on this distinction is available here: "What Colour are your bits?" http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/entry/23
> The "SaaS" licensing scheme ...

It's the "crooked" licensing scheme.
One of the problems of philosophical discourse, imo, is that it seems to be impossible to give mathematically rigorous definitions of concepts like 'good' or 'moral' or even 'knowledge' that somebody won't be able to disagree with by counter example.

What you sometimes see among philosophers is that even definitions that are the result of many iterations are still treated more like rules of thumb than precise definitions. Or they at least acknowledge that their definition is probably flawed, and proceed carefully.

Some proceed as if they are doing math.
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Companies want to pay no taxes, but they want protection from the legal system infrastructure etc. that allows a company to be successful.
I cannot understand the indignation, the system is working exactly as designed- board members have responsibilities to the shareholders to maximise profits, it would be imprudent if they didn't move to reduce tax burden. The miles of column inches written on this topic is being tediuos.

Solutions are simple, anyone telling you otherwise are the same people who hold economists in high regard-

1. Reduce your local tax to compete with the lowest one. Or-

2. Stop the company from trading in your country. Or-

3. Tax profits derived from local business if they are earning them in your country.
Ireland jails three top bankers over 2008 banking meltdown
Steve Blank’s Guide to the Real Silicon Valley
I'm a newbie so pls excuse my ignorance .. Cypress has these had these things for a bit .. they call them PSOC. Basically, an ARM core plus some programmable logic. Is the difference here that the processor and PLD are both beefier? I'm generally confused about the difference between PLD vs FPGA vs CPLD. It seems there is no precise definition and it changes based on who is talking.
One of the problems with RSS is that it's very one-sided. Facebook capitalized on user interaction, not just a news feed. Diaspora is like a boring Twitter feed. We already have Twitter. Browsers also put no emphasis on making RSS experience any better. They could have devoted a section to feed following. But no. I have to use Liferea for a decent RSS experience.
I haven't been able to dig terribly deep into this, but I find this fascinating. I've been learning Mandarin and Japanese on and off over the years, and this is always the sort of thing that I wished I had.

The other was word for word translations of popular TV shows along with cultural notes. I remember watching a show called My Own Swordsman (武林外传) pretty regularly while living in Shanghai, and while I could follow the gist of some conversations, so much of what made it funny were cultural puns that I just couldn't grep.

Still enjoyed watching it though.
Exactly. With a sufficiently powerful telescope, I can read an SSN printed on paper through the window bounced off the reflection from your watch from a mile away. But we wouldn't call that publishing.
It would be additional global tax from capital. If you are interested more read "Capital in the Twenty-First Century" by Thomas Piketty.
That bar at the top of the webpage is really terrible. It fills up the screen when you zoom in mobile to look at the graphs.
Purpose: The Heart of the Builder
"Don't we already allow anonymous tips? "

We allow anonymous tips that can get police's attention on something. Our rights then apply to restrict their behavior to what's sensible. Parallel construction is them violating our rights, producing (forging?) evidence, lying about the methods that produced it, then faking/finding a new route to convict us, and then we're convicted on weight of that and/or secret evidence. This poses extra risk due to (a) damage from parallel construction activities themselves, (b) ability to target dissenting/unpopular groups as FBI has long history of doing with permissive powers, and (c) inability to challenge the quality or effectiveness of their selection & evidence gathering process vs more open processes.

" The only thing I am addressing is how society should treat the discovery of random bits of information put into the public domain by thieves."

What's you've done is force the situation to be an extremely narrow case that doesn't represent how parallel construction is used at all. It's normally LEO's focusing on specific groups with surveillance, subversion, and informants. What they focus on vs what harms society most has a disconnect that reveals more political than protective reasons. One of reasons we have accountability measures in the first place. Analysis stemming from thieves breaking into a house & dumping evidence is a very, uncommon case.

Let's look at it anyway. Regular process usually involves searches that you would know about so you can make sure nobody plants evidence. Thief breaks into your house, leaves child porn there, delivers anonymous tip to authorities that you possess child porn, they search you, they find it, and you're convicted. Still trust public safety via thieves method?

Alternatively, a politician wants to be insanely powerful. All he has is parallel construction, police authority, and some surveillance tech. Starts using it selectively on key members of Congress, judges, media people, and so on. Finds dirt on them, but doesn't act on it: extorts them for appropriations, expanded legal powers, hushing on bad stories, and so on. Might be able to pull this stuff off for a long time with untold damage. Wait, why speculate: I'm talking about how J Edgar Hoover amassed power for him and his FBI. Process could be repeating with NSA's surveillance power & Congress constantly ignoring their corruption but we won't know because all of that is secret. ;)

Shifting power to executive branch for secret accusations against people with less and less protections only results in predatory behavior. Both U.S. and foreign history are pretty clear that this is what usually happens. So, it shouldn't be allowed. Our prior system worked well enough. Too well given number of wrongful convictions and false confessions. Reforming it is a better idea.
Ah, that would explain it! Was not aware Oberth effect was thing, thanks!