skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm 100% in favor of decriminalization for these reasons and more; that's different than full-blown legalization, though. Remember the law of unintended consequences.

Decriminalization is neutered legalization. We should stop coming up with excuses for sending people to prison. Prisons don't create model citizens, they are a breeding ground for suffering and are a waste of human potential. Their existence is symptomatic of a poorly functioning society.

If someone wants to buy marijuana, then it only makes sense for there to be someone who sells it. Otherwise you still have a problem.

Legalization is combined with regulation so that you don't have the problem of major corporations funneling millions of dollars into advertising campaigns targeting children (as we learned with cigarettes).

This is a problem that most programmers should be familiar with. It's a function minimization problem. Minimize suffering(x).

> As the cops stand down, we also need the doctors to stand up.

Yes, if there were a mantra to chant, it might be: legalization, education, and rehabilitation. You have to have all of them to get the best result.
Bruce Schneier - Reconceptualizing Security - TEDxPSU
And likely to end your trip quit quickly & prematurely.
What do you mean no one would?

I would if it would connect with my target group.
Sometimes I think that programmers should keep two versions of their resume, one for recruiters and one for other developers. But that's a totally different topic all together.
http://blog.rishavrastogi.com/?q=node/2
It's called 'security theater' because it does nothing to keep anyone safe. It just moves the security problem from the airplane cabin to the line of hundreds of densely-packed people snaking back and forth outside the TSA checkpoint.
I've had this happen. I always try to get residential deliveries from UPS because they seem to understand this better. Maybe Fedex needs to add an incentive for successful deliveries instead of just completing the shift. Or maybe they don't care because they really focus on business deliveries and residential is just a distraction.
Dammit, I thought the bloodlust was just the stress of upcoming exams.
Tonido welcomes Drop.io users
Does any one have access to the original New York Times Ed Witten article?
>The justifications used in your post are equally applicable to cocaine and to other drugs.

Cocaine was legal before it became illegal. What results il-legalization of cocaine have produced? More crime and more funding for crime organizations - check. What else?
Look at the history of opium as well. And don't even start about LSD - the drug my reading about have discovered it having only positive benefits so far.
The cockpit doors on UA93 were not reinforced.
Maybe we should call it the Digital Rape Machine so that anti-Digital-Restrictions-Management stickers can advocate two causes at once.
How long before child molesters realize what a "great gig" it is?
Do you ever plan on carrying the Netduino?
It's entirely because they must be making a killing off their paid-for app and don't want you to offer a free alternative. How horrid.
Why not just call it what it is? It's a strip search.
Now that the feds have the legal right to grope everyone's testicles and vagina without a warrant, this is a pretty good job for pedophiles and perverts to take. If you are a pedophile or pervert, where else do you have not just the legal right but the obligation to grope the sexual parts of the general public and be called a hero for doing so.
As for the $3, two things come to mind:

First, I'm uneducated as to what I would spend if I were to do this myself. Maybe educate people like me on your website? Something along the lines of "Nice envelopes, stationery, and postage alone will cost you $2.50." Or something like that -- this is just a starting point.

Second, if I understand that $3 is a fair price (or you educate/convince me that it is), it's important that you decide whether $3 is fair for a la carte or fair for bulk pricing, as it can't be fair for both. I say this because you are bound to get customers who will want to send 1 note/month, and some who want to send 1,000/week. And if I were a customer who sent 1,000/week, I would want to know I'm getting a better price than those sending 1/month.

(BTW, I'd be glad to offer a bit of UX advice if you have some specific thoughts or questions. Email in profile.)
The original Ed Witten New York Times article referred to by
Weisbort is here http://www.nytimes.com/1987/10/18/magazine/a-theory-of-every...
Things Economists Agree On
In the history of air travel has anybody ever breached a secured airplane cockpit (of any sort?).

Excluding the events of 9/11, how many times have terrorists hijacked an airplane and flown it into a building? All I'm trying to say here is that the sample size is very small. How do we deal with the risk of unlikely but catastrophic occurrences?

To the extent that we're concerned about the security of cockpits, maybe our efforts are best directed towards better cockpit doors instead of strip-search machines.

I agree with this. I think El Al uses a double-door system, for example.
IANAL either, but I could imagine many structures that would allow for the effect the holding company would want.

Pay a company for distribution and logistics expertise and make that transfer-pricing arrangement profitable for the logistics company.

Then, what profit remains goes to the company owning the patent on the drug (and the liability). The parent company could hold limited partnership stakes, convertible bond and/or options with a fixed term (which might be conveniently the same length as the patent term). If the drug "survives" 17 or 20 years without significant lawsuits, call in the options and claim your equity. If the drug explodes and tanks the discovering company, the parent company holds options, bonds or LP shares that are now worthless. Still, they're in business.
If you are burning $500,000/month, which is not unreasonable, then you get 10 months with $5mm.

If you haven't turned the corner after 5 months, you know you won't get out of the hole before you run out of cash.

Therefore, you sell the company and reduce your burn as much as possible to make a sale happen.

If your sale is all about talent and not the technology there is almost no due diligence required and a deal can happen quickly, in about a month.
I have a suspicion - based purely on speculation - the unspoken thing here is that most of these businesses had awesome products & teams but were hurting so badly financially that they were on their last breath.

I wouldn't be surprised if its more of a case of struggling but very smart startup, about to collapse, turns to facebook as a last resort liquidation move. Handing over to FB or Google and having them pay back some investors and shut down the service looks much better than sending out a solemn "we screwed up" email to all your users & stakeholders...
I said the same thing a few weeks ago. Unfortunately, the story you're commenting on provides context that invalidates that point: the TSA has stepped up the intrusiveness of the "opt-out" pat-downs. According to Jeffrey Goldberg, who is probably not making this up, they are deliberately touching people's crotches in an effort to discourage people from taking the pat-down.
There's no simple reason. Who's to say that the enjoyment wasn't a coping mechanism? Who's to say they didn't think it was necessary to protect their country? I don't think they woke up one day and thought "today I'm going to torture and murder me some Jews", there was a very gradual manipulation process that led them there.

Have you seen the video of US marines airbombing journalists (or civilians? I don't remember). They seem to enjoy it a whole lot... We, of course, know this is nothing like that, but are we sure? In both cases people were doing what they thought was necessary for the good of their country (of course, it's much easier to see how killing people is justified when you think they're about to shoot anti-aircraft missiles at you). It's very easy to demonise people in retrospect, and say "we would never do these things today", but the guards in concentration camps probably said the same thing for other atrocities of the past, while actually doing the same thing themselves.

This is just a lot of speculation on my part, but I find it hard to believe that an entire country just happened to consist of monsters who would enjoy killing people or endorsing that genocide. I'm just saying that these are probably the same principles at play, but we have the benefit of hindsight and should take steps to nip this erosion in the bud.

Of course, that's very hard to do, so we'll probably just shut up and take this too.
Planes have depressurized at altitude and landed safely, see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_Airlines_Flight_811. The plane depressurized and sucked several rows of seats out. Passengers were sucked through the engine. But still, it landed safely and most people on board survived.

Yeah, it would be scary if you were on this flight... but if you want to kill 500 people there are a lot easier ways than sticking explosives up your ass and detonating them on the plane.
The most powerful CA union - prison guards union.
More convicts - more power to the union. Most of the convicts are war on drugs victims, with majority - marijuana related.
I was videoing a checkpoint during a lock-down and was told by the port authority/airport police that I wasn't allowed to point my camera at the 'secured area.' This was at Newark just this last January (when they locked it down because someone ran through the 'secured area' exit).

Missing context:

However… while the TSA does not prohibit photographs at screening locations, local laws, state statutes, or local ordinances might. Your best bet is to call ahead and see what that specific airport’s policy is.
Indeed we do. I don't know if it's the only new security measure that's a good idea, but I do think it's by far the most important one.
I've tried being completely sober. ;o)
Please provide date of birth to continue?
I think there's a valid point: we're not totally free agents. There might be some chemicals that are too addictive. For example, the cigarette companies refined tobacco to make it more addictive, enslaving millions to an addictive carcinogen. Decriminalization of harder drugs might be a better method, since it partially removes profit motive for production and refinement but doesn't incentivize use.
It has nothing to do with jobs programs/corporate welfare. Remember there were security people before the TSA (just not as many) and the TSA was created in the post-9/11 panic.

This, like most aviation security, is just security-theater. The American people were scared and so elected officials, realizing they couldn't realistically secure aviation, come up with a bunch of "procedures" that's supposed to make the general public feel more comfortable. In the end, it's about votes.
How much does Google pay for a talent acquisition?

(while acquirees can't disclose figures, can someone give an idea?)
How could you be anywhere but at one end of the spectrum or the other with java? There's no REPL available so how else would you exercise code?
Marketing may include those things, but isn't limited to them, and much of the marketing money is spent elsewhere. It's easy to tell the drug companies are awash in money dealing with them. Not that I blame them.
Based on the title, was fully expecting top comment to chastise you for child labor. Deeply disappointed.
Your comment is intriguing, but the link is broken.
Thanks for the invite, and good idea reaching out to the community. I'll send email, looking forward to checking it out!
Really? You don't think governments pull PR stunts too?
Jesus, guys, this is supposed to be a startup forum. Just create and sell aluminum underwear, you'll make a killing and what are they going to do? Outlaw underwear, or force you to take it off?
San Francisco gaining computer workers.
Number 2, in America, will get you arrested and/or fined for indecent exposure.
>and money saved on enforcement

For the police union it is "lost" money, not "saved".
And note how little prohibition did to stop the existence of alcoholic parents. They were still around, but you had to deal with Spatz Columbo running around too, shooting up the place.

If you want to fix the alcoholic parent problem, create a society that reacts to them in a compassionate manner instead of throwing people in prison.
> I find it hard to believe that an entire country just happened to
> consist of monsters who would enjoy killing people or endorsing
> that genocide.

A couple of points:

1. The guards at the concentration camps were not 100% of population of Germany.

2. Did the general populus of Germany really know everything that was happening at the concentration camps? Did they know that Jews were being killed at stuck in mass graves or were they (the public) just told that they (the Jews) were being 'sent to camps' to 'keep them separated from the general population?'
9/11: when the terrorists won and we lost our freedoms.
Everybody will have different answers, but when you change even one side of the cost/benefit equation, the answer can change.

For me, the cost of marijuana prohibition is too high and the benefits too low. Based on what I've seen in my life in those around me, I do think smoking marijuana a lot is a bad idea. I can't scientifically determine if it makes you spacey or if spacey people are drawn to it, but it doesn't seem to be a good sign overall. But, there are a lot of other equally dangerous or even more dangerous things that we don't legally prohibit, and while I think it's probably bad for you, it's not that bad for you. Consistent alcohol abuse certainly seems worse.

The other deciding factor for me personally is the addictiveness of a drug. Marijuana may be addictive, but I've seen people successfully quit, even without seeming to exert that much will power. I am much less inclined to legalize the drugs that snare you on the first hit, for two basic reasons: First, the very fact that they do ensnare you, and second, because if we legalize them today, the drugs that could be designed under a legalization regime are even more dangerous. I don't think I want to release the full power of a free-market economy on the task of producing a chemical that makes you feel good (and better yet requires repeated purchases); that's just asking for trouble.

Careful observers may note that tobacco as it stands now pretty much fails my test for legalization. As a practical matter it would have to be grandfathered in, but yes, I actually do think nicotine's demonstrated ability to snare you physiologically on the first hit is actually pretty dangerous and may really be on the wrong side of my personal legalization line.
This past week I started working on a Python 3 port of this, mostly to learn. No EMR unfortunately, but Hadoop should be possible. I just got back from a trip, so it's still not very far along, just runs the "local" version, but it should get a bit farther next week.

I can confirm that it is a great way to learn about MapReduce.

Link: http://github.com/irskep/mrjob/tree/py3k

I will likely totally restart the py3k port now that I know what I am doing a bit better. I've been writing Python 3 for about, oh, two weeks.
With eventlet and gevent you can write asynchronous that looks synchronous. Which is the point of greentornado.

That being said we still use synchronous calls to our databases.
Congrats to Drop.io. In 2007 I presented my start-up at the New York Tech Meetup (http://www.businessinsider.com/2007/11/nytech-meetup-at-iac). It was an odd meetup as only two unknown start-ups presented that evening, mine and a complete unknown, Drop.io who launched at the meetup. Other presenters were established companies presenting new products.
Yes, but it all hinges on when they 'discriminate against someone else'. They are discriminating against EVERYONE, is my point. But oh well.
I don't know what your response is meant to convey. Are you implying that legalizing heroin would be great to stem the tide of meth abuse?
Thanks for showing this to us at CWRU! It has already given me hours of fun. (See my top-level post about a py3k port.)
Sweet! I would LOVE to see the logo mentioned in the F.A.Q.

8) Your logo is upside down: Why is the light source obviously below the image? It looks quite unnatural...

The logo is simply a scan of my hand, from a flatbed scanner converted to black and white. The "back" in the picture is the scanner cover, and the shadows are from the scanner light.
I'm actually curious what people think of my take on this. Does it make sense, am I crazy/deluded, or ... ?
Lars Rasmussen, Father Of Google Maps And Google Wave, Heads To Facebook
Ask HN: Help for a newbie
Hi all,

I've been hanging out here for about a month as I've been learning Python. It's been a great process, and what I've learned is finally being tested by someone other than myself. Today at work (I work for a genomics startup), I faced a problem that likely would have been most elegantly solved through a script. Unfortunately, I was forced to face the Sisyphean task of doing everything manually using (wait for it) Excel. I haven't reviewed enough of the Python Standard Library yet to tackle it alone. If someone on here is just hanging out tonight, and would like to help a newbie, just shoot me an email or IM at the address on my profile. There are two potential reasons you might do this:

(a) It'll probably only take an experienced programmer roughly 15-20 mins, and you'll feel good about yourself for what you did.

(b) Another guy in my office (who works on software) is hacking together a solution this weekend in C. He's an old-school Fortran hacker and lover of all things compiled. I'd love to walk in Monday and compare code length in front of the whole group.

Thanks guys,

matt
If you'd like to try it out, http://openspora.com/ is a public seed.

There's also some useful information at http://diasporatest.com/
It's only an unreasonably short period of time if they stop now ...
0.3 is a rational too, it's just 3/10.

Anyway, mathematicians don't use numbers at all - debasing the equations by performing caculations with them is so.. gauche. Leave that to the physicists, chemists and engineers.
Exactly. Even if you are a complete anti prohibition believer, you will probably take route. In other words, even if you decided to legalise everything, a good strategy would be to start with marijuana, see the effects, add some more drugs to the list, etc.
I'm pretty sure this won't allow you to walk around town smokin' blunts.
Gotcha, that's cool. Sorry, I miss-read your comment.

I just think it's time we start to view C# with a bit more respect/understanding. It's a great language and Anders Hejlsberg doesn't get enough credit for what he's done (and is doing) as C# continues to evolve; ditto Miguel and the Mono team..
Suppose you wake up tomorrow and discover that someone has left a note in an unfamiliar hand on the bed beside you. The note reads "You should put bars on the windows. Something bad might happen." It is not signed. You cursory search of your home reveals nothing obviously amiss. All the windows are shut and locked. You have no idea how someone could have gotten in.

Suppose you leave it be for the day. You've got more important things to do than blindly react to mysterious messages, haven't you? So day slips into night and before long it's morning again. You find another note:"Really wasn't kidding about the bars thing. I won't send another message after this -- it's up to you to take your security seriously." Same as before, nothing obviously missing, all windows and doors closed and locked. You have no idea who this is or why they are doing this. You have no idea if you can trust them.

How do you react?
It is both specific and non-specific depending on what you are trying to achieve.

In the special case of 0.1 + 0.2 != 0.3, this is specific, and using decimal will "fix" it. But decimal, or for that matter any representation will have the exact same issue for other cases. Arbitrary precision means exactly that: arbitrary, as in not infinite precision. How will you represent irrational numbers with decimal ? It is theoretically impossible.

That's why most advices about using decimals instead of IEEE 754 are not appropriate. In the special case of accounting, it is appropriate, but I am somewhat doubtful most people don't need to do occasional computation with their numbers involving transcendental functions (e.g. log, exp, etc...). As soon as you start using this, you will see the issue cropping up, whatever representation you may want to use. And IEEE 754 representation has been conceived by people who really knew what they were doing (e.g. W. Kahan)
An example Backbone application
Well, by that logic, TSA employees are not 100% of the population of the US either. I can't say how much they knew, but that makes it even worse, because the citizens of Germany were unwitting accomplices, whereas everyone knows what's going on in airports and still consents to it.*

* I'm not equating pat-downs to genocide.
No you got what I said wrong. I'd rather pay developers to keep the logic in the application and throw more hardware when I need more webservers, than pay developers to develop a 'database logic' solution and having to get them to rewrite for efficiency when the database starts getting blocked and saturated. It's always a good idea to plan for growth, as long as it doesn't mean delaying the app too much.

So yes I rather keep my databases light and get the app to deal with the processing as much as possible, throwing a new webserver at it when the growth requires it.
The classic response is "nothing".

That being said, getting 4 out of 5 economists to agree on something doesn't mean it's right. Most economists will tell you that public policy works best when you have the capability/political will to iterate on solutions. Not unlike a startup really.
Why Apple’s Distortion Field Works
Okay frankly this is a stupid article. Trivial or unsupported generalizations. The author is in high school and preaching on why parents are more effective startup founders.
I don't see anything about Paul Buchheit on CNN.
^^ I don't get it either. If someone doesn't agree they might as well say so and give reasons to get a discussion going. Instead we get this "Ohh the article said X so you're wrong, I'll downvote and move along" attitude.

I guess people don't appreciate debating anymore.
I mean, what is the simplest way to prevent another 9/11? Steel cockpit doors and a communications shutoff between cockpit and everything outside.

Another 9/11 scenario is going to be near impossible to pull off. Pre-9/11 hijackings often left the passengers with some hope of living through the situation so they would be docile and controllable. Post-9/11 passengers will not be docile and the hijackers will have to effectively control the entire plane with force.

There is still run of the mill blow up the airplane style terrorism to watch out for, but that was around before 9/11 and will be around for long time after.
I find I end up using the two different sites for different things. Stack Overflow for when I need help with a problem, and MSDN as a reference tool for the capabilities of a section of the framework. Integrating the two will be a great help.
Time to checkout Tonido http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1849607
Very interesting read.

I have always liked the art school approach, portfolio to get in and a polished portfolio when you leave.
Name that Ware October 2010