skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
There's one single paragraph in this entire article that addresses the root of the problem:

> In 1970 the proportion of Americans behind bars was below one in 400, compared with today’s one in 100. Since then, the voters, alarmed at a surge in violent crime, have demanded fiercer sentences. Politicians have obliged. New laws have removed from judges much of their discretion to set a sentence that takes full account of the circumstances of the offence. Since no politician wants to be tarred as soft on crime, such laws, mandating minimum sentences, are seldom softened. On the contrary, they tend to get harder.

On top of that, you also have an entrenched set of special interests who benefit from the status quo (police unions, prison guard unions, private prisons, etc.), so the pressure on politicians is from two sides.

So how do you "solve" a problem that special interests, along with a sizable majority of the voting population, have no interest whatsoever in solving?

Without a massive culture shift, you don't.
This is one of the problems with how TLS/SSL (as implemented in web browsers) conflates the seperate issues of authentication/trust and encryption.
Actually, continuous deployment does not necessarily need to be automated. In my experience, it's possible to get going with it in a totally incremental way. One easy way to get started is with this post:
http://radar.oreilly.com/2009/03/continuous-deployment-5-eas...
What about the user acceptance testing stage? The way the process was described in the article, looks like the process is code -> run unit tests -> run automated tests -> code review -> deploy. I may be missing something, but at which point are the features actually in front of the eyes of the business users who requested them?

Unless programmers are business users themselves (which in Digg's case, I think is highly unlikely), it's very risky for business users who requested the features to first see them in production. Even with all the tools that they have, the chance of simple misunderstanding and "No-no, that's not what I meant!" is always there. That's why I think there should always be a user acceptance stage, where users get to play around with the release (ideally, with data as close to production one as possible), and 'ok' the release for production from there.

Also they didn't mention QA at all. Unless QA are the ones that are writing Selenium tests at the same time devs are coding the feature.
auto killer
What are you talking about? HTTP-to-HTTPS post is perfectly fine w/r/t sending info securely. It's especially useful for performance if your login is on a page where less than 10% of your users are expected to login.
If a glaven is a new type of unit not related to any of the ordinary metric units, you can add it thusly:

glaven =!= awesomeness

Which makes it the fundamental unit of awesomeness. Then you can write things like

100 kiloglaven / second

to express the rate of increase of your awesomeness.
Don't worry, it's just a setup to make VAT look good by comparison.
Also available as a free Kindle book on Amazon. I must say I'm enjoying reading it as much for the images it conjures up in my mind as for the advice:

"(for nowhere can one more perfectly immerse one's self in one's self than in a compartment full of silent, withdrawn, smoking males)"
supposed

Emphasis mine.
This seems a little 'too much' for me. Though I wouldn't mind having a tab-candy type manager that automatically groups all tabs of the same domain into one group.

This way I could close all pages of a particular site at once and clean up the Bazillion tabs I have open in my browser right now.
IMVU has done continuous deployment for many years (way before it was cool). For details, I think this presentation is probably the best:
http://www.slideshare.net/bgdurrett/sds-2010-continuous-depl...

I've also contributed a chapter on it to the new O'Reilly Web Operations book: http://bit.ly/WebOperations
Well that was a fun way to crash my browser.
That mantra may also be a product of survivorship bias. We hear successful investors like Peter Lynch advocate it a lot, but I wonder how many people have lost money buying what they know but just don't bother warning everyone 'be careful buying what you know'.
India unveils prototype for $35 touch-screen computer
I don't watch TV and I don't have time. Day job just makes me immensely tired. I do read a lot of HN, but only because I am frequently too tired for anything else.

I see my only hope in quitting the day job. How others manage to do significant things outside of the job is beyond me.
The best investment I ever made was education. In the form of quitting school and learning on my own. Classroom learning never worked for me. My only regret is not being able to do it earlier in life.
Thank's for bringing this out - it really gets to the heart of who is getting paid off and the results of lobbying in creating artificial barriers through regulation.

Ostensible justification is likely along the lines that the IRS can already track credit & debit card purchases far more easily than purchase orders, checks and cash. Regardless, this would be a major boon for the credit card industry if it in fact goes forward as planned.
Yeah seriously would love to hear about the project. What kind of code generator was it?
Years ago I heard a study where people over the age of 95 were ask a simple question.

"If you had life to live over again, what would you do differently?"

There were 3 answers that dominated all other responses:

- Risk More

- Reflect More

- Do more things that would live on after you were dead

If you can't learn from old folks who've already spent their lives, you can't learn from anyone at all.
It took it about two years to come back up, and another 6 to get me where I am now.

I didn't feel I was letting myself down, but then it helped that I hated the job I had at the time, and because of that I wasn't very good at it :->
eh, I think the real problem isn't wall street... the real problem is that we subsidize investing to sell over investing to hold through lower capital gains tax rates... If I sell my company, I pay less than half as much taxes than if I continue to hold the company and just pay out profits to myself.

this encourages short-term thinking.

If we still want to give preferential tax treatment to investing vs. working, you can do that without forcing people to sell by removing the double taxation on dividends... simply allow corporations to write off dividends as they would wages, and charge owners the existing capital gains taxes. this would allow owners to extract value at the lower capital gains rate.
When it takes 2 banks of mine about a week to decrement a number in one bank's database and increment a number by the same amount in the other bank's database, there's something horribly wrong somewhere.
I have 2 hours commute time per day.

That would be a huge problem, for me at least. I've had commutes like that before, and I had absolutely no energy left after the job and commute. Is there any way you can fix this?
I think technical debt is a much better metaphor than the unhedged call option one. That's unnecessarily complex and worse, it's less accurate.
The downside isn't unlimited as he suggests, there is a well defined limit, 0 sales.
If you start considering active man-in-the-middle attacks, someone can modify the HTTP page that hosts the login form to, for example, also send the password somewhere else.

For defending against passive MITM, you're right (as far as I know) that HTTP-to-HTTPS is okay.
yeah, try to network and work for free to build your portfolio. try some local non-profits that need help
Sacrifice in what way, though? To have less money to spend on the family? Not sure what is more important, being able to buy the latest toys, or showing how to be successful in live and try to achieve your dreams.

What does my kid grow up for? To also end up with a mind numbing office drone job so that he can feed his family and raise more office drones?
Arduino, your easy path into microcontroller hacking
If you have not seen the Arduino yet and you are the least bit curious about hacking microcontrollers or playing with hardware, you should have a look at it.
The whole point of continuous deployment is to separate code deployment from feature release. A typical way to orchestrate actual feature releases is to deploy the code ahead of time and later "flip a switch" to enable the feature. If you need to run it by test users, selectively enable the feature for just those users - there's your QA procedure.
He lost me when he mentioned dislike of big government in close proximity to wishing to simplify society without even hinting how they are connected. Or am I supposed to assume that it's impossible for complicated systems to exist without being run by the government?
The nice thing is that riak has an http api. If you need security you can add a proxy in front of it to do basic auth, digest, ssl... You name it.
the problem with following your dreams is that you can end up with a nightmare. Learning to be cautious is a good skill for life.
With Visual Studio for example, it's not only about merging files, but installing various DLLs (for the runtime - vcredist*.exe), COM objects, .NET stuff, etc. Also creating (if possible) proper uninstalls.

VS2008 runs some SQLserver, PDBserver, and who knows what else (run ProcExp and see)
Unconditionally loving people for who they are, not who I want them to be.
As far as I'm concerned, IMVU made continuous deployment cool.
Browser tabs are quite a hard problem actually that many have tried to tackle - and many failed.

In my firefox days I have tried just about every tab-addon there is, from coloring (with or without aging), over multi-row, to tree-sidebar. None of them did improve the situation enough. In summary the multi-row variant helped the most, but the tab-ordering would still get messed up constantly with unrelated tabs slipping into places where they don't belong (the dreaded "spontaneous google search").

And one thing is for sure, the firefox default of scroll-arrows on the tab bar is probably the worst from all worlds. The chrome-way of squeezing it all into whatever width available beats that hands down, but still leaves a lot to be desired.

So, as someone who routinely has 30+ Tabs open in supposedly distinct groups ("Work", "Procrastination", "Research" etc.) - this looks very promising to me.

Ideally I'd want this in a slideout side-panel. And in chrome, ofcourse. ;-)
MapQuest comes out swinging with new Maps API
The web site looks nice, though I would have liked a few more screenshots.

The app looks like it would be useful, though it all depends on how many businesses you get to partner with. (Since it's only for San Diego, I haven't actually downloaded it. If it comes to my city I'll give it a try.)

I assume you have lots of competition in this space (location-based deals and events). Do you know who the big players are and what your "niche" or main advantage over them is?
Key words: supposed to.

nix has a million different options and no clear winner. OSX and Win have static ones that can't really be customized and are only upgraded at a glacially slow pace compared to browser development.
seems like an opportunity for automation. I bet you could do something where you slurp down a csv of your credit card transactions (most banks let you do this) and then go through the merchant IDs to figure out who to send the 1099 to. Now, sure, going from the merchant ID to a tax id and address for a 1099 would be quite a lot of work, but that's where the central service comes in. You could either sell the credit card id-> tax id database, or you could 'crowdsource' it- (though you would have to solve a major trust problem) when one user of your service figured out the tax id mapping they would share it with the others.
It does much more.

It integrates distributed MapReduce and has a sort of graph api on top of it. You can link objects together and walk the graph.
F5: Extreme Remote Connectivity for a Great Cause
The trouble with rules that remain on the books despite not usually being enforced is that they create opportunities for selective enforcement when they decide to crack down on you for other reasons, such as your political views.
What kind of licensing does this have?

It would be interesting to see if this could make it in Python 3.2 (It's supposed to include the Unladen Swallow stuff, so might as well take more awesomeness from Google.)
I am still not decided that I want to keep the job (only doing it the second month), in the long run I would want to move. Meanwhile, I try to go by bicycle most of the time, so that at least the commute time can count as exercise. But granted, the 2 hours are probably severely missing from my time. Also, while I love the cycling, it's probably more tiring than other forms of travel.
Animation with RaphaëlJS 
Animating Vector Graphics with RaphaelJS and Adobe Illustrator.
We're realists. Yes totally - UK investors wouldn't plough millions into twitter but IMHO that's a very good thing.

I dread to imagine how dull the modern Web would be if America hadn't gotten on board. Britain's contributions to the social Web have been paltry (taking the population difference into account), and even leading lights like Last.fm and Nick Denton buggered off to the US. Anyone I know who was doing good work and got the opportunity to go to the US, did.

The hype and endless over enthusiasm is a little sickly after a while. And at the end of the day, why do you need that sort of thing? It's absolutely no help whatsoever to be told you're awesome and that your idea is great all the time. I'd much prefer to be told that it sucks and won't work, but perhaps that is a difference in culture.

It's entirely a cultural difference. It's the good old British "tall poppy syndrome" - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tall_poppy_syndrome

I'll err on the side of preferring over-enthusiasm and undeserved hype to British under-enthusiasm and undeserved snarking and putting other people down any day of the week.
Typically I open a new browser window for these sort of groups (work, fun, etc). If a tab needs to move between these ad-hoc groups then with chrome you can of course just drag it between the windows. Since I have a 3 monitor setup this is a no-brainer. The tab-candy setup would be less efficient in this regard because I have to open a third state to arrange tabs. However, if I was forced to work on a laptop this might be a better option than my current setup.
The 3-clause BSD license...

http://github.com/axiak/pyre2/blob/master/LICENSE
We should do that to migrant labor.
I got it confused on Gorodish -- it offered Jean Valjean, which is a good approximation, and afterwards Quasimodo, which isn't really. But afterwards it got all correct.
BSD (as does the google RE2 C++ module)
Hmm, I guess that would work, but it seems like an incredible amount of overhead to me. So you'd need to code that "switch" for every bugfix/feature? And even if there are libraries to do that, you'd still need to add custom code for every one.

Also, in this scenario you'd need to test every single combination, because what if you test A,B,C together, but then business wants to hold off on B, and if you enable A and C, that would break things?

And then enabling them for specific users only.. oy. What if it's a db schema change? Run db scripts to alter tables in production, every time we 'flip the switch'?
Evented async Ruby web servers booklet from first principles
CSS Logos
If you're not familiar with re2, you may be familiar with a couple of other little projects that the author, Russ Cox, is involved with: Go (http://golang.org/) and Plan 9 (http://swtch.com/plan9port/).

Also, here's a great bit of technical history behind Russ' re2 implementation, and why pyre2 will never be completely compatible with Python's re (without fallback):

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp1.html

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp2.html

http://swtch.com/~rsc/regexp/regexp3.html
As a person with essentially libertarian views, this is a very interesting article. I may be too quick to applaud this article because it supports my own views, but I think it raises a number of legitimate concerns. In particular, I was struck by this point: In many criminal cases, the common-law requirement that a defendant must have a mens rea (ie, he must or should know that he is doing wrong) has been weakened or erased.
This is a slope that we have been sliding down for some time. While ignorance of the law has generally been excluded as a defense in criminal cases, our system of laws is becoming so convoluted that it is almost impossible to know and understand the applicable law. Thus we are all at risk. It feels like we keep inching closer to a society where everyone is either a dependent of the state, or at risk of becoming one through regulation and/or prosecution.
I wish someone would create a browser extension that would warn the user if a password field is submitted unencrypted and ask if they want to proceed.
Another major part of the problem is that we no longer institutionalize most of the mentally ill (also a phenomenon starting around 1960-70). Many of them become homeless, and a few commit crimes.
Sorry but I don't like the title, the number of laws is not correlated to the number of prisoners. So I would prefer a title that try to explain why there are so many people behind bars.
note it depends upon cython: i suppose it's more likely it will make it into cython rather than python 3.2.
He successfully defeats his straw man. But aside from greenpeace it's not a correct characterization.

Generally trying to pare down the size of the state, given it's own natural processes cause it to increase, would seem necessary simply to achieve homeostasis. In the last century the long term tread has been strongly on the side of increase but it can't always be or eventually the tax burden would reach unity.

The political side of this is very transparently Scottish left wing. "... among the UK's conservatives we see an almost masochistic addiction to cuts in public spending" the phrase "masochistic addiction" is a current Labour talking point. The actual cuts amount to 2.2% of GDP by 2014-15 added to the the 4.1% Labour had already set.
Birds on the wires [video]
Ask HN:  What are all the  Try 
I have recently seen try Haskell , and others, but I have never seen a complete list. Why don't we compile one here?
Yes, the reason I was saying that is that many of influential bloggers and companies are in the states and meeting them in person is best way to get their attention. In Europe, since there are so many different languages it seems many people read the English language blogs. I would say the natural other market for U.K. companies would be the U.S. to similar the culture and language.

However, that's not for everyone if you are targeting Asian markets you need to at least visit there.
Like the libxml module which uses Cython, the compiled CPP module is distributed along with it, so you don't actually need Cython to install it or compile it. But you would need Cython to do any development on it.
I would prefer a conference about emerging features in languages, since many languages only differs in superficial aspects. Is better to located what new features are needed.
Israel Extends Negotiations on Conversion Law
Watch a professional basketball payer shoot freethrows and you see an attempt to replicate initial conditions. It’s actually fairly normal when someone is trying to be precise, ex: Darts, billiards, tennis etc.
Man Arrested For Breaking Into Bar, Selling Drinks
There should be dense books with very high level in which you are suppose to know the fundamentals and it can explain the core at depth.
My Unencrypted Password Warning extension for Chrome does exactly that. https://chrome.google.com/extensions/detail/mjpinemnkjlppmem...

SSLPasswdWarning for Firefox is similar. https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/11894/
The first results of total solar eclipse expedition - solar corona in detail
Good Overview: http://paulmakowski.wordpress.com/2009/07/20/http-post-https...
Obviously, this answer depends on what you're interested in.

As for myself, I'm quite interested in LISP and making compliators/interpreters for it. Therefore On Lisp and Lisp in Small Pieces are books I'd recommend.

(No, I'm not going to tell you that LISP is going to change your life.)
How would you implement encryption without authentication? What would stop an attacker from sending confidential information to them, if you allow them to intercept the traffic and supply their own encryption keys?

You may be interested in the TLS DH_anon cipher suites and the numerous debates surrounding them.
Moving complexity around isn't eliminating it.

Social Security is vastly simpler than the various schemes proposed to privatize it, for example.
In a comment he mentions that government needs to manage externalities, but this is still a somewhat tenuous connection in my mind. What is the relationship between complexity of civilization and the complexity of the resulting externalities? One might guess that more of one creates more of the other, but I have no evidence.
I wish you could do all this with regular windows.

Its also much more specialized for the type of stuff people do on the internet.
OCaml as a scripting language
I know this is a really alarming issue, but there's no way this will ever happen. Business lobbies are far too powerful to allow something like this to slip by without a serious fight, and we've got 2 years.

Solution: write your congress person. Sign petitions etc and make a whole lot of stinkin noise..

But I'm sure every Fortune 500 corp will be making even more noise about this than small business owners. I can't imagine Walmart likes this anymore than Joe's Hardware
I'm 38 and I now see a marked increase in my mood and energy level if I exercise. I was running pretty much everyday this winter and spring but I feel out of it for the last couple of months. On Monday of this week I was in a really bad mood right at lunch and as I caught myself reaching for a bad of chips I stopped, went to my bedroom and dusted off my running shoes (I work at home). I've run every day this week since and my mood and energy are 500% better 4 days later.
I group my tabs in separate windows and let my window manager take care of managing them. Maybe this is good in some Chrome OS style netbook?

Sure, the contextual search (or whatever it was) seemed cool but elementary tasks like organizing my tabs/windows should be simple. Soon I'll have to switch my mental mode just to get my head to this fancy tab-organize mode.
Everyone has to be registered... It is a function of Government they don't want people here that that they don't know about including newborns :) So all must be registered.
maybe? the problem is that if I pay you under the table, I'm paying you out of /post tax/ money. this is to say, paying people under the table costs me about 50% more than reporting it. I don't think 1099s jack up the cost /that/ much.
you didn't name a single tech start up. why not if there are so many?

there are many small businesses in the UK:
http://www.bytestart.co.uk/content/news/statistics/small-bus...
but i cannot find any statistics on the area of business.
Great video. FF learns yet another thing from Chrome.

(In Chrome you can drag and drop tabs into distinct windows easily. It's actually easier to do this in Chrome than in Tab Candy.)
Time To Face Facts: Broadband Caps Are Really About Protecting Video Revenue
JavaScript 3D Engine: three.js
Wait - a "major problem" is that a "few commit crimes"?

I think the real issue is that the US has some socio-economic issues that we've as yet let unresolved: drugs (as mentioned), policing strategy, judicial/legislative strategy, welfare, education, etc. I don't think institutionalization is a major contributor.
building jails is a great business in America :(
what sort of neuroevolution stuff do you do, i'm a phd in that area right now