skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your replied to "They are seeking the ability to tap anything they want, any time they want" which is unfettered wiretapping with "You really think a world with no law enforcement is a better one?"

I am talking only about the ability of the FBI to conduct court ordered wiretaps.

Yes, you are only talking about court ordered wiretaps, but I'm wary about actual implementation of wiretaps, and for good reason, as I posted about factual historic illegal wiretapping as recently as 2002.

Yes, I certainly did read the article. I take an interest in matters of politics, government vigilance, and rights infringements I wish more Americans would. Don't get me wrong. I'm all for legal law enforcement, and aiding those tasked with doing their job while not trampling civil rights and liberties. I happen to think there are wise and unwise ways to go about it. For example, suspending habeas corpus, the right to due process, as George Bush did by citing national security, and which was reversed by the Supreme Court as unconstitutional, I think is unwise. I also don't think terrorists will stop and think, oh well, they've got their country wiretapped, so there is no way to carry out attacks now...
Is it ok? Yes. Is it helpful? No. I speak from experience as an introvert (turned semi-extrovert, sometimes).

If you want to do well, you need to get along with people. You can do this to a certain extent by just going the extra mile to ask how people are doing, etc.

The way to get over it (mostly) would be something like Toastmasters. I haven't done that, but did take up another role that required me to get up in front of people and take questions, etc. once. I was awful, but I learned that the world won't end if I take a chance. The second best thing that can happen to you is to get let go or fired from a job and then quickly go get another one. After that point, you will have no fear from either crowds/strangers nor will you feel like you must retain your job in order to succeed. Fear is the mindkiller.
Nice paywall. As I can't read the actual article...

Libraries are becoming harder and harder to run. Fewer people have the need or desire to access them. They still serve a useful and necessary purpose in our society, but the old ways of running them will have to change.

Most towns wait until the library is ready to close before handing it off to a private company. You can imagine how the employees and users are treated during this time.

These libraries were handed over while they were still healthy. That means that the company can take them over without drastic measures and slowly rework them to be more profitable and useful.

I think it's a good idea, and I'm glad to see them doing it.
Lesswrong couldn't be more wrong.

Or rather, they missed the point entirely.

This article reminded me of somebody who is pissed because they lost an argument, so they desperately search around for some kind of label or dirt to throw at the people that beat them. I don't know the history here, but it sure feels that way.

To put it simply: people do not take positions simply to counter-signal. Yes, some do, but it's a dangerous game to start labeling huge swaths of your fellow men because of something some may do. They use the example of the old rich and the new rich. The old rich didn't consume, looking down their noses at all the new money folks who spent like banshees.

Well maybe there is a certain type of person who just doesn't spend that much. Sam Walton was a billionaire, had a private jet, but he genuinely liked driving around in his pickup truck and flying his older prop airplane. Lots of folks get rich because they don't spend so dang much.

That's the problem here: people who know what the hell they are talking about and disagree with you might not be counter-signaling, they may actually be providing balance and some important things for you to consider to the discussion. But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off.

This is bullshit. In particular, it's a special form of elitist bullshit that seeks to categorize instead of understand.

I wish the lesswrong guys happiness, health, and success, but at some point -- how do I put this nicely? -- you run out of smart things to say. This however does not prevent you from taking up a lot of bytes saying it. (And I speak for myself as much as anybody else) If you're running a blog, sure, spam us with volume. Spray and pray. But if you're looking to provide some kind of consistent quality like with a branded name and multiple authors and such? More editing and reviewing and less self-serving pontificating. You need to be, well, less wrong. :)
I think unfettered Unix sounds good.
Intel makes chips in many such countries, like costa rica and Malaysia. There are many countries around the world with good standards of living and lower taxes and lower overall regulatory burden.

Plus with Internet businesses and the easy ability to have virtual office with employees living remotely, you can locate your business in a jurisdiction that is more favorable. Intel or Microsoft can't move, but starting a new business off shore can make a lot of sense.
I don't know anyone who is esr persona's fan. There is a large community who are his hackerdom writings fans and there is a small community who are fans of his wingnut writings, but it seems to me he doesn't get a lot of friends IRL.
Google Contacts Beta
Just goes to show there is another side of the story besides the AT&T version.

I've never found a company yet that didn't believe that free market competition was good for everyone else, but that their market was unique and they should be protected from competitors.

The irony here is that at the time of the Kingsbury Commitment, phone networks were spreading across the country like wildfire. AT&T had already built its long distance network - it obviously didn't require a monopoly guarantee in order to do so.

From the article, there were 3,000 phone companies. Surely with that number plenty would do very well in places other than major cities where there weren't 2,999 competitors. Just as obviously, with so many competitors there were not high cost barriers to entry.
Google on track to acquire a new company every 2 weeks
Most AppHole news is just the reporters just patting themselves on the backs for being apple fanboys...enough of this crap you assholes!
"Error establishing a database connection"

Like, now?
Java Barcode API
Could you elaborate on this? Normally I don't care about politics, but this does sound interesting.
> But you can ignore all of that if you put them all in a big bucket called "meta-contrarianism" and write their views off.

I don't see the article doing this, though it could certainly be used that way (http://lesswrong.com/lw/he/knowing_about_biases_can_hurt_peo...), but as warning about a bias you might see in the world or in yourself. I mean, look at the final paragraph:

"If meta-contrarianism is a real tendency in over-intelligent people, it doesn't mean they should immediately abandon their beliefs; that would just be meta-meta-contrarianism. It means that they need to recognize the meta-contrarian tendency within themselves and so be extra suspicious and careful about a desire to believe something contrary to the prevailing contrarian wisdom, especially if they really enjoy doing so."
Ask HN: Help testing out my Rails deployment script
Each time I deployed a Rails app it took hours on a clean install it took hours. Eventually I got fed up and wrote a bash script to automate the process. The script installs and configures:

Enterprise ruby
Rubygems
Rails 2.3.8
Sqlite3 package and gem
mysql package and gem
Passenger
Apache
Git
Capistrano

I wanted to get to a point where the end user can enter in couple basic info (where to install, db name etc) and the script automatically do everything else, which is exactly what the script does.

I've tested on five different vps and it works. Nevertheless I want to test it more. If anyone would like to spare about 30 mins to help me test the script that would be great.

All you need is a vps server and root access. In return I'll provide you with a license code good for 5 installs. I'll probably be writing Rails 3 install script pretty soon and I'd gladly share that with you as well.

Please email me at senthil196@gmail.com to get started.

Thanks guys.
I'm guessing that RFC4880 isn't being used nearly enough?
Certification would more to do with proving an identity, a physical address, a bank account and being connected to real people. It's to make it more difficult for would-be scammers from being able to hide. Thus, a publically accessible website of who's raising money, for what, their photo, and some references who've vouched for this person would (I think and hope) significantly deter scammy behaviour. (of note, this type of information is becoming more accessible anyhow http://blog.programmableweb.com/2010/09/20/watch-out-for-ste... - stealthmodewatch.com)

On the other side of the coin, investors could take a simple multi-choice test on ROI, accounting and finance principles .. whatever.

I'd have to brainstorm further. If an arm has a problem, you don't cut it off, you fix it and make sure it doesn't happen again with creative solutions - because you're not solving any problem by amputating (or rather not applying that solution correctly if there are healthier alternatives), you're just creating more problems.

-- another solution may be to simply cap investments at a certain amount, so people can't invest their life-savings in one go.

-- also, a way to search on these micro investments (and micro investors too) would be great: http://www.google.com/finance/stockscreener http://www.formds.com/filings (hat tip gojomo)
In case I wasn't clear enough: I didn't like the OpenID implementation from HN. The one from StackOverflow worked fine.
I thought this was a place for Hacker News, not recycled hokum trickle down homilies.
I could put that amount in at the end of the period, not the beginning, and accredation requires either a higher salary than i have, or a net worth over a million, which I don't have.

If preventing little old ladies was all that was needed, then it could be accomplished with a wavier.
It seems obvious that both motivations are often present.
This is nonsense. It's technologically impossible to enforce this. Global VPN providers will always provide a link out of the US, and peer-to-peer communications will always be secure, no matter what the government wants. If they push this, it could become a big PR problem for them when it becomes apparent they can't possibly enforce it.

Be a good citizen and get wiretapped. Be a criminal and stay secure. It's like the DRM paradox, and just as resistant to litigation, criminal or otherwise.

Edit: I'm not saying that all p2p is secure, only that it will always be possible to have secure p2p. There are totally-overkill-for-even-normally-outrageous-circumstances encryption schemes that would be even resistant to a quantum computer. By altering the frames it's possible to make your secret traffic look like something totally different to get around filtering. Whatever filters or taps are dreamt up, new schemes will arise to circumvent them.
Haha, you're right, you're not being meta-contrarian. You're being contrarian, like the article says.
Thanks. Checking it out now.
The important figure is net taxes payed. You add all the taxes you pay and subtract all the direct benefits you gain. If someone pays a lot of taxes but gets free high school education for their 4 children and medicare for their sick wife, he is a net winner of the system.

Modern states spend 60-80% of their income for social things. Defense, police, education and infrastructure are only a fraction of the expenses (at least in europe).

Since rich people rarely use social services, every tax cut directly eases their tax-burden. Middle class people end up paying less taxes but also receive less benefits from the goverment.

I am not saying the author is wrong, but you need to compare the net money paid to goverment.
I wonder how many people who read this at the time wrote it off as unrealistic. Although there are several stated goals that have still not been reached, the difference between the goals and reality are small in the scheme of things. (Much like the difference between any original plan and the outcome -- just usually plans are not of this scale!)

You have to hand it to the few that believed, and put in the work to reach critical mass...
Convince your BA to drop out of the Tony Montana School of Business Analysis
Need translations in several languages (For Appstore release). I will try myGengo for now.
What is impossible is this: You can't have secure communication which is inherently insecure by design.

The "backdoor" (a intentional bug) will have to be part of the communication protocols and therefor present in every data stream which makes this protocol less secure. Any such backdoor WILL BE in time be open to any hacker, cracker, foreign spy, and anyone who can run a simple script?
Cisco has acquired ExtendMedia
He was referring to GNU/Hurd, of course..
Douglas Crockford on JavaScript and HTML5
yeah, spam!
Good question, and this is an issue I'm thinking about, though due to the needs of the project was leaning toward option 1. Was thinking about doing it in a way that no text editing was possible, but that users would have a wide variety of controls they can twiddle to customize ten look and layout of ten pages.
Txtexpense -- review my friends app in alpha ver
To be fair, there is a footnote pointing out how dubious that claim is.
You understand, of course, that if I tell you that you are disagreeing with me simply because of counter-signaling, I am using an ad-hominem argument. It's another way of saying that you say has no value because you are the type of person who says such things for frivolous reasons.

It is the worst form of intellectual masturbation -- the putting on of airs to diagnose the reasons that other opinions exist in the world. Please don't let yourself do this. Ever.

Yes I understand that the author tried to dress this up as a self-analysis type of article, especially at the end, but the implication and thrust was pretty clear: we are analyzing the reasons others do and say things, especially things we find "wrong". Oh, and by the way, don't let yourself do this! But if the article was meant as introspection, it would have been written as introspection ("I find myself..." etc)

Sigh.

Please don't quote another article with the same source in a rebuttal. It makes the discussion about the site itself instead of the particular text in question. Its smacks of fanboyism. I know I started this with my closing remarks about the site itself, but the thrust of my point is that the article was plainly suboptimal. I stand by that assessment. I apologize if the remarks I offered on the site overall offended you.

You know you are in for trouble if the article begins with one site author quoting another as if they were a famous person. I knew a guy once that closed his emails by quoting himself. Not a good sign.
Reading Lyrics by Robert Gottlieb and Robert Kimball
Furnish us with the Brand & Model number of your register. We will make the proper interface cable to connect your register to our system.

Terrible website, but these guys know what's really important in a business.
The way news website don't cite the actual papers they are writing about bugs me. It's not hard to dig up the paper. It's not all the journalist's fault though: Most press releases don't cite the actual research properly either.

Also, this article is right to call out the desire of news outlets to create controversy, even when there is none. However, more often they tend to just repeat the gushing, enthusiastic statements of the university or charity PR department, with no conception of when and indeed if the research will actually lead to anything in the real world.
I never affirmed or attacked or recognized your "everything can be simplified to genetic fitness" hypothesis, no clarification needed. If you insist on pursuing this strawman and broadening the debate to new, unrelated philosophical heights, so be it.

I will say now that it is childish argument. You give no explanation for why a "gene" should be considered the base unit of evolution rather than an "idea". Especially when natural selection stopped applying to suburban humans with access to healthcare a long time ago. By all indicators, human evolution is now occurring through technology, not genes. Technology and debate over how to use it is the most likely cause of humans diverging into multiple species, not genetics. Genetic biological reproduction seems to be your God. It is the planner and predeterminer, and can be said to have causative power over all actions.

The gene is arbitrary. The gene is ambiguous. The gene is defined by man. Genes and genetic reproduction is but one method for the continued existence of things through time. Humans have defeated the gene. We don't need to die and reproduce several times to store and communicate survival information to our descendent's. We have invented language and can write it in a book.

You are stuck in genetic determinism, denying any idea of free will. Not to say free will is a suitable answer either. Both are a naive treatment of the subject of causality.
Segway's owner dies in accident after riding one of his Segway off a cliff
He described generic New York Times article about "science." Academic physicists know that a mention in the first page of the New York Times earns them more professional points in the form of fame than the actual article.
The thing I love on TV programmes is when the show you a clip of what they are going to show you, show you it and then go back and recap it for you in case you didn't bother to watch the first half of the programme. I think I would cry if I had written a decent documentary and then seen what the producers do with it. Cookery programmes are terrible for this — you never see people actually doing the bloody cooking.
Unfortunately, that's too logical to be a real koan.
Royal Society - Web Science: A New Frontier (live webcast today)
The software is used to determine target locations,which are then fed to the drones for execution. I'd say it's pretty damm relevant when someone decides to hack something up real quick and says they don't mind using it knowing that it's giving erroneous data with several meter deviations. I bet you wouldn't find it hyperbolic if you were, let's say, 10 meters away from someone being located with that software.
Are you thinking of having a library (or even market) of these designs, or is your goal more to allow each site builder to personalise their site in fine detail?

If you are thinking of the latter, or both, maybe you should consider having a couple of layers of customisability. It would be nice to allow simple customisations (colors, logos, even basic layout) without getting into templates. Perhaps with a GUI, but possibly even just something standard like CSS. Even as a technically minded person, I would balk if I had to learn some custom syntax to achieve things like this.

Then underneath you could have a full templating system. If users want full control, they should understand it will come with a learning curve. Even for this, consider starting from a known base (e.g. Django templates), and just building convenient constructs that fit your site (e.g. custom tags for common tasks).
Emacs as an IDE: Interview with E.Ludlam, CEDEC creator
I've a different pov. Govt intervention aka regulation is needed whenever & wherever there is an exploitation.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Microfinance#Other_criticisms
Top 6 Office Password Recovery Tools to Recover MS Office Password
What kind of Office password recovery tool would you like to recover MS Office password for Word, Excel, and Access etc.? This paper will detail the best 6 toolkit to solve lost Office password problem.
I definitely fall into the generalist category. Just in working on my startup I have to write code in two different languages, write markup, do design (completely different from the code), do marketing/networking type stuff (further different from either the design or the coding) and enter recipes (which means reading and parsing them - further different).

When not working on the startup I get bored if I don't get enough variety from my activities. If I'm doing too much liberal arts type work - such as when I teach, then I crave code. When I was coding all day at my day job, I got home and just wanted to read, cook or garden.

I typically need 9 to 10 hours of sleep a night. I'll take more if I can get it. I can operate on 7 with lots of caffeine. Much less than that and I'm non-functional.

My girlfriend, who only needs 6 hours of sleep a night (sometimes less), often gives me crap for being such a log. Especially when she wakes up a solid 2 hours before I do and spends the morning bored. But now I can give her a reason: I'm a generalist!
I wonder how long it is going to take the fickle and rabidly cynical usual suspects to realize that "Our DRM / lack of DRM / pseudo-DRM / loud opposition to DRM is different" is, in fact, Marketing 101, and that they hate marketing almost as much as they hate paying for software.
Oh, thanks about this one.
And yeah, definitely, I should put somewhere telling what it does.
mea culpa. :(
I still disagree. I think the dynamic amongst the target audience is different (I may be wrong, I used to be the target audience 15 years ago but things have probably changed radically since then, plus I'm on a different continent)

That said... I'm quite sure there isn't a lot of traffic to these pages anyway. The question to ask is - am I going to lose customer by not being available on an iPhone? People will already have decided if they're going to come or not, they don't need the site to convince them. If their friends go or if it has good buzz they will, otherwise they won't. The website is, I think, just an item on a checklist - you have to have it but it doesn't really matter if it's good (or googleable) or not.

For the rest, it's a cost/benefit thing I think. The people who design the flyers (which are an important promotion tool) can easily, quickly and cheaply make a flash website from the flyer design. These things are one-off, they rotate every week, requiring someone who does all the tech frills is expensive and makes the turnaround time longer.

(PS no average iPhone user is going to think 'I'm not welcome here', they'll just think 'hmm it doesn't work, let me try at home tonight').
I used to watch Horizon a lot when I was a kid in the '70s and '80s (I particularly remember the "Painting by Numbers" program where they covered the state of the art in computer graphics).

However, when I have watched it more recently it seems terrible - very "pop science" with lots of annoying repetition. What I don't know is whether the old Horizons were actually any better or whether it is me getting a lot older, or a combination of both!
introvert + http://netmba.com = okay
How do you get on their schedule?