skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
True, but in fairness, the US is also a rather litigious society, and improper termination is one of the things people are inclined to sue over. That's why mature companies tend to put some procedural obstacles in place to keep managers from firing people at the drop of a hat. Typically the manager has to show a long series of specific deficiencies in the employee's work and attempts at counselling and remediation before they are allowed to fire someone.

Things are sometimes done more quickly at smaller places, but even then it's fairly common for employers to offer termination agreements, typically for a few months salary, to avoid even the possibility of litigation.
Does Google think they can do a better job?
My biggest problem with google maps is that it doesn't respect the font size settings of my device. A four point font is not ideal for my eyes in the best of conditions, much less when travelling and navigating.
Yes, with the deceleration of Moore's law, small players probably have a card to play. When the spec sheet doubles every 6-18 months, only the big players can follow and update their product lines. Small businesses and startups now have access to hardware that is good enough for viable products.
That's not exactly what I meant by "skin in the game". What I'd like to offer to any would be reformer and rehabilitator:

1. You will pick an inmate who you think has maximum chance of reform. He must be someone facing 5 years or more imprisonment. He must consent to the experiment.

2. He will be released into your custody and live in your apartment/house.

3. You will receive a check for the estimated total savings you created by housing this inmate. Typically 6 figures.

4. You are responsible for his good behavior for his lifetime. If he commits any offense, you will pay the same penalty as the offender. In addition you will be financially liable for restitution if any, and the costs of imprisoning him.
Agency as having their own interests and following their own agenda, it has nothing to do with charity.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Agency_(sociology)

For example the view professed here by you and the GP, that Arabs should have quietly suffered in their dictatorship without right to dissent, is denying the agency.
You think these organizations can agree upon anything deeply technical?
I don't really have a pony in this race, but logically, there is a difference. There are strict government laws in place to protect SSN information, such laws do not exist (apparently) in India regarding Aadhar. I don't think the argument is (mostly) about having a national ID, but about the lack of privacy of that information. Of course biometrics are bad in another way... If one needed to, you could change an ID number, you can't change your fingerprints
Words of wisdom! That's very true that repos are good way to know if someone is doing anything or not. Also I like the idea that the result counts, not only hours spent itself. I'm afraid that most of the companies in Finland are too conservative for this new way of thinking..
That is aint's all that gol danged importunt?
It is amusing that in the example of replacing "Prior to the implementation of the financial enhancement.” by “Before we fixed our money problems.” the bad Latin words are replaced by other Latin words. ("fixed", "money", "problem" all have Latin roots.) Even the list of Anglo-Saxon words has a decidedly non-Anglo-Saxon word ("chair", via French from Latin).

What matters is not the origin of a word, but its modern usage. When you consider alternative ways to express a concept, use the words that a. convey the intended meaning with the necessary precision (Clarity), b. are commonly used (Simplicity) and c. result in short sentences (Brevity).

So I agree with the principles the author recommends, but I disagree with the examples. I find all three principles broken throughout the text, and although that might have been deliberate, it certainly doesn't feel like it.
> In 50 years, when a couple hundred million Indians aren't having trouble getting enough to eat because their government subsidies were stolen, then maybe it's worth having this conversation

And how having bio-metric ID solves problem of stolen subsidies? Every time a subsidy is stolen, aaddhar card will shoot an arrow into corrupt bureaucrats.

Our poor does not have access to Education and Law so they don't really know where to seek justice.
Facebook is a CIA front. It's been integrated since the beginning.

He is a company man. Wouldn't be the first company man to become president. Although afaik he would be the first jooish president.
Industry average doesn't really apply. What the Silicon Valley local market is does apply, and if there are places that pay better, they'd go there. Why stay at a place where you're underpaid relative to your peers when another place down the street offers more money? I wouldn't.

Besides, I've read that there's a lot of job hopping going on in SV for better pay, and that includes googlers. It's hard to see how one could make systematically underpaying a group of people work.
> How are you going to recreate the main selling point of facebook, i.e. the Newsfeed ?

When you post, the content is sent as an encrypted message that can only be decrypted by people who should be able to see it (either all of your friends or just a subset of them). The client automatically takes care of key management and is responsible for keeping track of sent & received posts, comments, etc; it renders a news-feed-like UI on top of that data. The end result is a familiar UX on the surface, but the underlying mechanism for transmitting data between users is far more secure than the traditional approach of using a monolithic database that contains everyone's data in plaintext.

> If things are encrypted, how are you going to determine relevance, etc.

The client is solely responsible for that. For now the "news feed" is strictly chronological, but I plan to augment it later by prioritizing posts that might be particularly interesting to the user. There are plenty of ways to make those decisions locally.
They're rendered on OSMAnd by the way. I was wondering how to turn them off the other day.
From a related Economist article [0]:

"Oregon, which insists that programmes to reform felons are measured for effectiveness, has a recidivism rate less than half as high as California’s."

Assuming it's not a statistical blip, I wonder why Oregon is so different to California. Seems to me that a politician who promises to reduce the recidivism rate and thereby save taxpayer dollars would get more votes.

[0] http://www.economist.com/news/leaders/21722642-lot-known-abo...
>The Indian ID drive has ensured that benefits make it to the people who need them without 80% of it being skimmed by corrupt bureaucrats.

Before the Aadhar, when the Govt. started distributing PIN enabled smartcards to villagers (for food/cash transfers/employment), corrupt officials just started forcing villagers to give up their PIN and give up part of their balance if they wanted to see their food/cash/jobs.

A similar thing is going to happen / probably already happening with Aadhaar where local officials are going to force folks to give up part of their cash/jobs/rations if they want to see any of it, even after these people use their fingerprints/whatever to access whatever they are entitled to.

One of the reasons this biometric ID project was launched was purportedly to get rid of duplicate/fake IDs. (We already have a zillion ID systems - PAN, Driver's licence, Passports, Voter Id, Ration cards, NREGA Id, etc). However by 2013 itself, the govt. said it had detected 34,000 duplicate/fake Aadhaar IDs already. The real number is probably much higher and growing. There are several instances of biometric Aadhaar ID cards successfully registered for dogs as well!

Several Govt. organizations have already leaked (most accessible via a Google search) ~135 million Aadhar numbers along with names, addresses, photos [1]. The incompetent officials simply do not give a fuck about privacy/security.

The problem isn't ID/biometrics but lack of law enforcement which is going to be a problem regardless of Aadhaar. The current leadership vehemently opposed Aadhar due to privacy concerns before the elections, and immediately changed tune.

The danger with hogwash projects such as Aadhar (other than surveilance/loss of privacy/centralizing of power) is that they masquerade as solutions to problem which they never solve in the first place. The poor and hungry will still fucked in the end, but the new surveilance/censorship regime will be here to stay.

If serving the poor is the cause, why is a biometric ID needed (Adhaar is being made compulsory for:) for air travel, rail travel, getting a cellular connection, appearing for high school/university board exams! The Govt. now has a central kill switch to end a dissenting person's life simply by cancelling/blocking their ID! If not by malice then definitely by incompetence at the very least is going to get the lives of scores of people ruined. This project is a disaster and Mozilla is being polite in it's criticism.

[1]http://www.livemint.com/Politics/oj7ky556p6vdljXpRw8gPP/135-...
The whole point of the criminal legal system is not about individual justice. It's a crime against the state. You are thinking civil law.
The ability to use knowledge does not come out of thin air. It is unlikely to find someone who knows how to program C++ extremely well, or solve problems in Quantum Field theory, but does not remember most of the language constructs or mathematical equations.

Continuous practice involves putting in the hours at practicing an art or a science, which by itself builds muscle memory about the language syntax/equations etc. It is unlikely that one can remember one but not the other.
> Norway and Singapore each have ~5M people. Singapore has 130 rapes a year, Norway has 1,000. How do you justify leaving the Norway justice system in place to the additional 800 rape victims in Norway, when a better system for reducing crime has been invented?

I feel obligated to point out that you are assuming that the rate of reporting (and being believed by the authorities making these statistics!) (EDIT: as well as the strictness of the legal definition thereof) is equal in both countries. I have my doubts about that.
The level of national discourse in India has reached such a low point that questioning or raising doubts about any of the government's policies/actions leads to one being labelled a traitor to the country.

It is depressing to see such knee jerk reactions to healthy discussion, short on facts and long on emotions.
They don't care because Apples batteries degrade much more slowly than others because of that conditioning software. And eventually you always have to replace a battery. Removable makes that a little easier, and a little cheaper, but the tradeoffs (lower capacity, more frequent replacement, worse build quality and packaging) aren't worth it for something an iPhine only need to do every 3 years in normal use.
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All people criticising Aadhar for being insecure frankly don't have a real solution in place. Being an Indian citizen I know and have experienced benefit owing to Aadhar. I get subsidies from the government, one uniform identity that I can use to get important things.

Coming to the security part, which centralised biometric DB doesn't have risks. Social Security Number in the US is pretty similar. No one gets security right the first time and nothing is secure forever.

Mozilla being such a nice organisation with so many good initiatives. Why don't it come forward and dedicate some of its resources in helping out the Indian Government? Wouldn't that be better than just criticising without knowing any ground reality of how things operate in India?
Spot on! But for some reason no one is asking those questions when speaking about work done in the office. Weird isn't it?
Yep. PIN enabled smartcards for cash transfers/rural employement schemes were already proven to be useless when officials simply forced villagers to give up their PIN and thus give up part of their entitled income if they wanted to see any of their own money. Another ID, biometric or not, is not going to solve the problems of the poor
> Finally any Indian in USA simply has no right to criticize Aadhar since the US Visa process requires biometrics from all visitors.

I find the "no right to criticize" theory confusing.

I understand if your point is that one might be hypocritical in endorsing one government's biometric collection but not another. But I (a non-Indian) have criticized both US-VISIT and Aadhar. I don't want the U.S. government to have a database of visitors' (or citizens') biometric data, nor do I want the Indian government to have a database of citizens' (or visitors') biometric data. There need not be any hypocrisy or logical contradiction in that.

Edit: it looks from elsewhere in the thread like your point is that Indians in the U.S., in particular, must have acquiesced in giving their biometric data to the US-VISIT program (otherwise they would not have been admitted). I think there is some force to that argument, but it also seems to suggest that people who accept any government's preconditions for doing anything that they did not absolutely have to do are then giving up their right to criticize the government for imposing that requirement. For example, some people in the U.S. have criticized local government for requiring a government cosmetology license in order to practice eyebrow threading. I assume that some of those critics have nonetheless signed up for such licenses. Did they completely surrender their right to criticize that requirement when they did so?
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Right. It seems awfully silly to show a chart of "prisoners per 100k people" without a chart of "violent crimes per 100,000 people".

Sure, the US has 10x the incarceration rate of Norway, but we also have 6.5x the murder rate.

You can say our prisons aren't effective at reducing crime, but when a country has way more crime, you'd expect them to have way more prisoners. It's not an argument of "over-incarceration" (as is often heard).
Why is Aadhar being made compulsory for rail/air travel or for getting cellular connections? What problem is biometrics in these areas going to solve?
I always find this introduction (including a "live demonstration") by Anders Brownworth very illustrative: https://anders.com/blockchain/
In general, hospitals extensively use metal surfaces since the release of most metal ions into the bacteria/surrounding microbiome is toxic. Silver and copper are definitely the best in this regard.
> I would not work for Facebook and Google even if I was offered a million dollars.

I would. Where do I sign up?
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It is working great!

The snakeoil comment was about the MIMO functionality which I can only really test via my iPhone7 at the moment with the 2x2 MIMO client to the 4x4 MIMO AP (UAP-AC-HD). Once I get the MacBook Pro I'll have a 3x3 MIMO client.

I bought primarily because if this animation explaining the benefits of MIMO. https://unifi-hd.ubnt.com/

The marketing worked on me!
Unlike SSN number which lack associated biometric data, Aadhaar numbers lack utility without biometrics. A bunch of people read about SSN numbers "leaking" assume disclosure of Aadhar number is equally severe. Which is NOT AT ALL the case.

>> for air travel, rail travel,

Security

>> getting a cellular connection

Security

>> appearing for high school/university board exams

Prevent cheating
True, and Scala is exactly the same. It uses Java APIs.
Why are colleges so hostile to fantasy writers?
ST is quite likely the most cautious product I've ever seen. Most products have a development cycle like this:

[beta][stable release][active development][extended support][eol]

ST seems to call the entire period through active development "beta".. and then when they've finished developing the entire thing and hit what would normally be the extended support period (bug fixes only), they call it stable.

It's certainly costing them money. And reducing the value of licenses (since its "stable" for a shorter period of time)

If I were them, I would wait a couple of weeks (so that they get the entire benefit from their announcement today of this new build), and then re-release their software as stable -- even if no changes were made to it during that period.

This thing has been in beta since 2013. It's been tested enough. It's ready.

(And to ST: if you want free advice on your release process, you're more than welcome to email me. Or at least talk/consult with someone with product management experience.. your software is great, but this release process needs to be fixed.)
I feel like a lot of attempts to recreate ggplot2 end up being superficial because they don't recognize / duplicate the power of the underlying Grid graphics that ggplot2 uses.

I know that web technologies are all the rage these days, but at least for static, publication-ready graphics, Grid is really nice substrate, with well thought out lower-level abstractions.

EDIT: I should also add that it's documented within an inch of its life should anyone feel that it's worth recreating: https://stat.ethz.ch/R-manual/R-devel/library/grid/html/grid...
Yes, I tried to point that out in my [5] above. But Singapore seems better in basically all crime metrics, including murder and crimes that are perhaps better defined and reported.

Still leaves questions as to how much is cultural and how much is because of the justice system. But it's tough for me to imagine a world where caning doesn't decrease the amount of graffiti, auto thefts, bank robberies, etc.

-How many would start doing crimes of opportunity (graffiti, auto thefts, bank robberies, etc) because caning was implemented? (an absurd question)

-How many who currently do those crimes would not do those crimes if there is the possibility of significant unwanted punishment?

The fact that recidivism is so high suggests this is not a problem of catching and sentencing criminals (recidivism is only those who are caught/charged!). This is a problem of the punishment not being enough to deter the actions.
Interestingly, it looks like the distance for this contest was shortened from a standard marathon to make it "more competitive". I wonder if anyone's explored the results at different distances? Perhaps the human would have a bigger advantage at longer distances. I'm not sure why they'd shorten the distance for the humans - a marathon is a standard distance that at least hundreds of thousands of people all over the world run just for fun. There even seems to be a pretty big community of ultra-marathoners that compete at distances several times greater than marathons, and over rough terrain too.
I really liked going 112 km/h with that 200D, but I also had faster cars. 200 km/h is my personal speed limit: the car might be able to go faster, but I can't.

It's the responsibility of the fast driver to make sure they don't crash into anything. And if the road (autobahn) has a curve in it and I can't see far enough, I have to slow down.

So when I'm the slow guy, it's my responsibility to look in the rear mirror to see if there is a car coming from behind, and if there is, of course I don't switch to the left lane.

I would also avoid switching to the left lane just behind a curve. But there is also great responsibility on the fast driver to make sure that they are able to stop.

As far as I know, not that many accidents on the autobahn where the fast driver rear-ends the slow one.
One thing I think Google has going for is it "Guides" program. Where user get "points" for correcting mistakes, adding new places, and publishing pictures. I have been in it for a few months and it feels good to contribute.
You have divided society into two: the criminal and the innocent. I do not detect an iota of empathy for the criminal in your analysis.

Our imperfect justice system often allocates individuals into "criminal" and "innocent" buckets unfairly. Don't assume that you and those you love are immune.

Prisoners have rights. Prisoners should be treated humanely. Prisoners are human.
Being able to effectively communicate ideas via written word is crucial in technical fields. It's not even about blog posts or tweeting -although that's perfectly valid. We work in thoughts and ideas and they don't exist if we can't accurately describe them.

If anyone is interested in writing better non fiction I recommend "On Writing Well" by William Zinsser. It's compact and full of easy wins that one can translate quickly into their day to day written correspondence etc.
Norway also exports prisoners to the Netherlands to serve time as they are at capacity in some facilities. Renting a foreign countries' prison is not mentioned by the media over here touting the Norwegian system.

My source is primarily from anecdotes of friends I knew arrested in Oslo who spent long periods of isolation during pretrial and were told by other prisoners which jails to avoid getting transfered to, all of which are the new prisons because they are extreme in isolation. There's some other anecdotes here comparing old style jails to Bergen "luxury" prison https://youtu.be/iA1L2kg3wRw and here https://youtu.be/iWhdzIJMEmQ talking about Norway's most hated man Anders Breivik who like everybody else assumed life in a Norwegian prison would be easy until they experienced the reality of solitary confinement. Even worse, because Breivik sued and won a lawsuit against the prison for isolation an appeals court was forced to overturn that decision because he is Breivik and a terrorist monster so there was political pressure to do so, and this means the top court in Norway has officially ruled that solitary confinement does not violate the prisoner's human rights.

There's also papers in journals around about disabled minimum security prisoners in Norway being forced into isolation in these new prisons as the trustee camps and old jails can't accommodate them, of which I can't find immediately.
I might be projecting my views onto other HN readers' here, but I don't know that you can garner that much support with this audience for the idea that people shouldn't be able to buy cell service anonymously.
Snakes hunt in packs, study finds
This reminds me of Iain Banks' Culture series, where society is ruled by super-intelligent AIs and drones with intelligence roughly equivalent to people. It isn't really a theme of the stories, more of an undercurrent, but there is an element of humans trying to figure out what their place and purpose is in a society where machines can do literally everything much better than they can.
In that specific case it was contract work. I'm unaware of others there.

I have 3 to 4 companies lined up now for a position that prefer remote work. One is a government contractor company as well so clearly they find that as an acceptable option. These opportunities were made possible by employees of the companies at the charity programming event being there to recruit more employees.
Creosote? Railroad ties are coated in it and for a long time it was one of the main wood preservatives used. It's tar-based, nasty stuff and you'd definitely want to use gloves when working with it.
Yup, it is still prescribed. They gave it to me after I had surgery on ingrown toenails on both sides of both big toes [1]. My Podiatrist used acid to burn away part of the nail matrix to prevent the outer quarter of each toenail from growing, reducing my toenail to half width. That prevented the problem from happening again [2]. Silvadine kept my toes from getting infected further and they healed rather painlessly. All in all good medicine.

[1] Genetics and apparently bad grooming habits for the win!
[2] A smashing success for ten years and counting. About 1/8 of each side grew back but it's not physically possible for me to get ingrown toenails unless I intentionally try to induce them.
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