skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
We haven't yet found a decision making process that works better than democracy, and a lot of people have tried. At some point, someone has to evaluate how good or bad the decisions being made by the political apparatus are. Either that person is the average voter, or it is a minority group. If it is a minority group, they are in a position of extreme moral hazard to funnel societies resources to their benefit and lock out change.

It is worth reflecting that, although a lot of people complain that people are 'voting for a slogan' or similar, there is evidence (mainly the outrageous success of democracies vs. non-democracies) that the average voter does actually have some idea what is going on.

It is also a subtle and interesting fact that if a large group of people are voting essentially randomly, then they will cancel out. In this way, a person voting with no thought for policy will probably cancel out another person voting with little thought. A 52-48 type margin can mean that 96% of the population had no idea, and the 4% that knew what was going on voted unanimously in favour. The point being that a vote can be sliced up theoretically so that ignorant voters have less influence than might be expected - and again, the practice of democracies suggests this tends to happen more often than intuition suggests.

Democracies throw out some cruel decisions, but that usually means the interests of the voters are being served rather than democracy failing.
Section 8 companies – Benefits and Requirements
The graph is far out of date. It appears to end in August, I suspect Trump has dropped considerably since then...
would something like jekyll + git and some extra export script work?
On apt-based systems, you can pin it oblivion. This will prevent systemd, or any software which depends on it, from being installed.

There are some cases of non-systemd-specific packages which are affected, though in my experience, anything brain-dead enough to rely exclusively on systemd is best avoided (GNOME seems most affected).

There are several alternative init systems.

Debian and Ubuntu can be treated in this way, along with derivatives. Slack and Gentoo as well as I recall. I've given consideration to BSDs, but much prefer GNU userland (and yes, I know that's an option).

I'm hoping Red Hat collapses and/or Linux generally comes to its collective senses.
I don't have a problem. I've watched his videos for a long time and it is fairly clear that he was ignoring the key element of primitive life: hunting. And in his shrimp trap video, he finally broached it. Now, if he brought the whole thing to completion, he would hunt something properly.

Alabama has legal spear hunting, and it would probably be the likeliest place to host stone-tipped spear hunting with a film crew.
You have touched the point that made this project more than just another curated list of themes website built on wordpress and required a full team of top engineers and designers.

From one side we have users that want to find the right theme for their new website or client, and are devastated by shear amount of new themes everyday so they tend to pick up from "the top 100 themes" all the time.

From the other point, we have theme authors that are, to our feeling, pushing their limits of getting new users onboard (e.g. TF channel saturation), and also struggle with giving users the impression of how great their themes are on these marketplaces. Discovery is a challenge.

The technical challenge of this project has been always how to manage 20000+ links, have their screenshot taken for different screen-sizes, understand what is inside, store the very large amount of image content on distributed systems, annotate the screenshots and themes, and make it damn easy to search for users. This we have achieved this through large amount of automation on our micro-services, machine-learning and supervision of our team. Today we can add up to 50 themes per day with our current resources (mind you TF adds 80 per day, so we are picky for now). Updating would be the extension of this process, so instead of adding new we reindex the old.

Overall, we are very happy that theme authors like this project as well and feel that it fills a new era of theme distribution. We will definitely empower them with their own content once our traction is enough for them to jump onboard. This is happening quite a bit faster than we thought. Top authors on TF are already contacting us to claim their themes and sending us suggestions how to improve the platform even further. This is a bit scary :)
you got a few missing images on that page (testimonials section)
It never fails logging into a Hacker News thread near election season but to find commenters yearning for literacy tests.
Unfortunately today people are fickle and will change jobs if they're just paid more.

There's loyalty and cash. In Germany they still have control on their wages.
add some more context, this NYT editorial was written a couple days before Abraham Lincoln was sworn into office (March 4th, 1861).

The states had already voted to secede (or not to) earlier in the year. The Confederates had even provisionally elected a president, Jefferson Davis, on February 18th. The secession crisis started after Abraham Lincoln was elected in November of 1860.

The nation really was falling apart, hence the lamentation of the republic being just a collection of states in the editorial.
I'm a little lost on systemd myself. Seems like an attempt to solve the problem of startup complexity by...adding complexity.

Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy. But I have a Linux 2.0 kernel machine that has been running a LAMP stack for over 10 years that boots in one tenth the time my Ubu 16.04 machines - that run the same LAMP stack - do.

Ah for the old and simple days...
Mythbuntu: So Long and Thanks for All the Fish
Good Music Free
There is time and resources spent on improving free and open source software, and then there is time and resources spent improving proprietary software for another business.

Pick one.
Yeah, but the ball of shell script wizardry managed to somehow start apache nicely every single time. Systemd doesn't. So I have to resort to running critical services under runit.
What is supposed to happen after you click on Mega Hot a bunch of times? Is something supposed to happen?
the social nut in VR is going to be the hardest one to crack. It will be big when the solution appears. But we're not close to one yet.

The approach we're taking now is the "avatars and voice" approach, where you interact with other people through VR puppets, essentially. These puppets can mimic your body language and facial expressions and are supposed to increase the depth of human communication through nonverbal cues. The truth is, after experimenting heavily with this, I've found most of it to be pretty gimmicky.

It seems the human mind naturally gravitates to such ideas (e.g. second life), but it never pans out. I'm not sure what the right answer is, or if theres even one.
You're being downvoted but I feel your pain.
It'd be interesting to explore bounds on the entropy of these passwords. It'd be a shame if you could guess the rest of the password from the first 2-3 characters.
Democracy isn't a failure. Capitalism is. Now before you dismiss me, I'm not defending socialist states, they are far far worse than liberal democracies, however liberal democracies are run by money. Politicians are bought and sold, and we see an undemocratic group of very powerful individuals influencing legislation and pushing around politicians and manipulating public opinion. How can we claim to live in a democracy if the people we trust with developing legislation must filter everything they develop through the approval filter of an undemocratic, and unfairly powerful minority?

Fortunately we have options that aren't the failed states of the 20th century, we need a democratic economy and a democratic workforce. Those are the only solutions to this problem, and if you spend enough time looking at the problems and their causes, it becomes readily apparent why this is so.

Democracy is not a failure, if you believe democracy is a failure, you're saying that your ability to control your own life is a failure. The problem is the structure on which modern democracy has been built.
I wanted to get into VR but it's too cost prohibitive right now.

You need a powerful computer. That means either buying a very expensive rig from a brand name seller (Alienware or Razer), or building one on your own.

The former is cost-prohibitive. The latter is skill-prohibitive.

A smartphone, on the other hand, is cheap and requires no technical know how to buy and use
HarfBuzz
We have already the possibility of intervening automated algorithms and adding custom screenshots, so if we allow theme authors to claim their themes they can add those close-ups themselves, which would be an obvious next step.

However, today this is technically challenging problem since the screenshots are not made manually, but with supervised algorithms. I dream about a day that we can pinpoint visually which area of the image are visually interesting/aesthetic to make a close-up, utilizing Neural Networks better. We need Deepmind for themes, the way google has it for their Photos.
>Democracy is not a failure, if you believe democracy is a failure, you're saying that your ability to control your own life is a failure.

Interesting, I would interpret democracy as the ability for others to control my life; the ability for the majority to gang up on a smaller group and impose laws which benefit the majority in lieu of the minority.
> Maybe I'm just getting old and grumpy

Do try out FreeBSD then -- an OS for the old and grumpy. Systemd free. Uses an init system written in sh(1) that just works.
I Want You To Want Me [0]. Some of us just want to love and be loved.

[0]: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbw-PVwBU9k
Democracy is not about having control of your own life. It is about a large group of other people having control over your life.

What you are thinking about would be volunteerism/Non-aggressionism.
For occasional accented characters, the Compose key is pretty good.

€ is Compose, C, =.

Æ is Compose, A, E.

Ë is Compose, ", E.
It's better to substantiate allegations. Causes people to take you more seriously.
Legitimate being the key word.
Fuck You, Debian
I don't think it's a trend. Besides Trump, who else would be part of this trend?
This reply takes advantage of the opportunity of a dialectical opponent, represented by your comment, to address abstract issues alluded to by your words of choice. It is not intended to argue or refute your worldview directly.

> is there anything more important to anyone ... [than the life] of another person

Behind the veil of ignorance which equates all persons, things which might reasonably be considered more important include:

-the lives of more than one other person

-severe changes in the quality of life for many people

-significant environmental degradation, and other systemic alterations of sufficient scale

Allowing for the criteria to include the differences between individuals, the most immediate additions to the above list becomes:

-the life of oneself

-the preservation of the lives and quality of life of one's family members

Further, although our current legal system precludes it, the framework of thought exists for very fine grain gradations in the differing values considered inherent in different people, as expressed by e.g. the German weregild system [0]; under such precepts, allocations of attention would be prioritized following the accepted worth of each object of attention.

> maybe I'm simply being too soft

The perspective assuming a position of ignorance is often considered "soft" and idealistic, in contrast to the "hard", realistic, non-egalitarian stance here epitomized by the system of man-price. I propose that this is the common interpretation. However, I counter that the former is only effectively realizable by a juridical system of great strength and resources, before which all men can be operationally equated because the marginal burden any one case places on the faculties of the law is negligible. Therefore, perhaps you voice your position not from reasoning aligned with softness, but rather that aligned with awesome and as-yet-non-extant might.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Weregild
Isn't that like Reagan?
The same idea can be extended to what you are proposing. The neural net has to be given passwords with high entropy so that it can learn to generate passwords with high entropy only. My post was more of a demo of what can be achieved with neural nets in this regard.

Best Regards.
No Links Found Between Trump and Russian Bank
It's not a failure but democracy is about to be tested like no time before. With the ability for everyone to have a voice via social media single minded groups are easier than ever to create. As we have seen many of these groups are unwilling to compromise their ideas which makes it likely for chaos to erupt over any hot issues. We saw an example with the Arab spring and Occupy Wall Street. They erupted but yet have had no real results. Primarily because there was no real leadership behind it to move it forward. In many ways you can say that the revolution made matters worse.

When everyone is upset and there are many points of view there is no common way to move forward but there are many hot heads that are willing to shoot first and ask questions later. Imagine a million hot heads without a common goal but the willingness to fight and we can see chaos with out results.

People get upset at the "do nothing congress" because they can't get X done but people aren't willing to admit that the reason is that voters have sent individuals with very diverse ideas to try to get things done. Voters are the ones that are pushing them to not compromise any idea or be punished by being voted out. I can see a future where one person that can use social media very well can push people to vote in ways that we consider distasteful now. What will happen then? Groups will erupt with opposing view and many will be ready to fight.

We've heard allegations that the voting system is rigged but that's very unlikely. We have laws and watch dogs that prevent that in any significant way. We don't have the same for social media but we know that it's possible to manipulate it, even by foreign powers, and that's not illegal worse yet it's hard to impossible to prevent. It's hard to even contemplate how that effects a democratic system.

The founding father created a representative government because they knew that rule by majority can be as distasteful as government by a monarchy or emperor. They thought a functioning government needs representatives that can sort out what's needed. With everyone having a voice that's going to get extremely difficult. Social media is about to let the US test out its governmental system, lets hope it can pass the trouble ahead. Can the US stay together as a nation?
Oh this is a fun rabbit hole to go down:

Gauss indeed wrote "methodisches tatonniren"[1], the latter of which is not a common German word, nor does it suggest grouping. I believe it to be an expression used at the time which was borrowed from French "tâtonner", which means "fumble", to describe a step-by-step process, "approaching" a solution. The closest I get in modern German is "herantasten", which in turn does not have an elegant English translation; you will have to take its elements "heran" (onto) and "tasten" (touch/feel/grope) individually to judge how close it is to fumble.

So, methodical groping is not as far off as you might have thought!

[1] https://books.google.com/books?id=3jEDAAAAQAAJ&pg=RA1-PA106&...
This may be a typo—the regular verb form would be "tatonnieren"—then again a lot of German spelling has changed since the time of those letters.
>I would interpret democracy as the ability for others to control my life

Interesting, I'd disagree though. Say you live in a fascist society or a feudalist society, you get absolutely no say. Democracy allows us to make decisions that influence our own life, however we must obviously respect the fact that we live in a society with other people, and they must be respected. Beyond living in a vacuum, we have no real way to ensure absolute individual freedom, however a completely democratic society is one way of reconciling the thirst for individual freedom with the necessity of cooperation with others.

>The ability for the majority to gang up on a smaller group and impose laws which benefit the majority in lieu of the minority.

This is absolutely a valid concern, which is why I believe in a rigid groundset of rules on which all laws and rules must comply (consitutions/bill of rights) which respect the rights and liberties of individuals to ensure they have maximum freedom with respect to other individuals in society. This isn't a groundbreaking idea, but I do believe we need to re-evaluate these approaches in a modern context, as most countries were established in a time before progressivism was dominant.
Sarah Palin
It's not that starting a course is hard, it's deciding which one that is hard.
> Democracy is not about having control of your own life. It is about a large group of other people having control over your life.

Democracy is about balancing individual freedom with the demands of living in society. There is no other system of decision making which even attempts to reconcile these two adversarial relationships (individual vs. society).

>What you are thinking about would be volunteerism/Non-aggressionism.

I fail to see how you could have an undemocratic voluntary society. I'd argue democracy is the backbone of a voluntary society.
> Super cool stuff!

Literally!
پکیج تور تایلند ویژه هتل دو ستاره پوکت ورود ۲۹ نوامبر ۲۰۱۶
I'm a die-hard Mac developer but recently tinkered with a Raspberry Pi for a toy project. Have to say apt on Debian is really very good.
Based on past discussions on HN and I feel google has huge terrible support for it's offerings. May be it will improve with time. But currently I am really concerned with running GCP in production.
Can you elaborate on what you mean by " a democratic economy"?
Yes. Consider that attractive candidates get two and a half times as many votes as unattractive ones. Consider that most voters have very little or no knowledge of most policy and issues. Most voters can't name their representatives even. Most just blindly vote for one party or issue.

It's still better than nondemocratic systems I guess. But that's a terribly low bar to pass. That's not something to be proud of.

Everyone always says that it's the best system of government that has been tried. Well maybe we aren't trying hard enough! There are other systems, and here are a few that are my personal favorites.

My ideal system of government has no politicians. It forms a parliament or congress just like normal, but the representatives are sampled randomly from the population. Ideally they would be filtered for IQ or education, but this is optional. And then they would debate and vote on issues, without having party loyalty, and without having to pander to the general population. It's sort of like direct democracy, but the random sampling lets it scale to much larger populations.

I also really like the model of the supreme court. I have to say that every supreme court decision I've looked into, they seem remarkably rational and competent. They aren't perfect of course, but it seems so much better than congress. Statistics show that even biased judges tend to become much less biased by the time they retire.

I'm not sure how they accomplish this. My guess is the lifetime appointments, and the structure of the court being to debate issues extensively, and for the judges to at least try to weigh them objectively. I would love to try a system of government modelled after something like the Supreme court.

There is futarchy, proposed by Robin Hanson. The idea is to use prediction markets to make predictions about the future, like whether policies will actually work. Then voters can vote on values ('I approve of Brexit, conditional on it being predicted to increase median wages.') But they bet on beliefs.

Another idea I like is the "Ideological Turing Test". In this case representatives can vote on policy just like normal. But they have to pass a test that proves they fully understand the other side's point of view. By writing arguments for the other side of the argument, and blinded reviewers not being able to tell if it's authentic or not. This would be complicated to implement without people gaming the system, but I think it's worth a try.

There is also alternative voting systems. These are just small modifications of regular democracy. They modify the voting system so you can vote for third parties without being punished for splitting the vote.
the author meant "not widely used" and assumed french~=english
Is there a system of government that enjoys the most success? Just curious.
I use KDE, which is probably closest to Windows for the taskbar and "start" menu.

(Or the other way round. KDE had the search interface first.)

e.g. http://www.databook.bz/wp-content/uploads/2009/07/KDE4.2.4-M... (KDE 4, but 5 isn't much different.)
Totally agree. A decade ago when I was planning my switch from Windows, I tried BeOS / yellowTAB which had the Apple-like shortcuts, and it was one of my favorite things about using it. It was significantly more comfortable.

(BeOS actually used Alt+C and Alt+V, but in the days of Model-M keyboards without a Windows button, Alt was very similar to Command in terms of ergonomics.)
'We thought it was going to destroy us' … Herzog and De Meuron's Hamburg miracle
I wonder when we'll be at a point that a small, portable AI (such as the one included with games) is actually competitive with decent humans.
You are surprised to learn that your particular experience is not the norm.

In fact studies have shown devoting vast expanses of land to parking is economically bad. See : Stroup "The high cost of Free parking" and the http://www.strongtowns.org/ .

Also refer to the New York City data about removing parking in order to create a more bike/ped friendly neighborhood.

Most patrons to a business live local to that business. Your example of being willing to drive all the way from San Francisco to Fremont demonstrates this point well. You are not the normal example.

Wrt the business that did not get your business.... they may not have even noticed because they had more than enough local patrons.
"51% of people want spin-up, 49% of people want spin-down, therefore we are going to be a spin-up only society". That right there is the problem with Democracy. Democracy finds controversy, but it does absolutely nothing about it. Since the majority side is always favored, there's no incentive to actually get past the disagreements; there's no incentive to grow. It's just about mindlessly acquiring votes.

Democracy provides useful data: which topics society agrees on, which topics they disagree on. For the ~51/49 (controversial) cases, instead of enlightening ourselves, we just blindly take the majority choice. This is not the way a scientific society should be approaching government.
Emmabuntüs Debian Edition: A Distro for All Seasons