skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ok, let me share my reasoning and assumptions which might make my position clearer.

"First, the system technically functions based solely on votes, but these votes can be changed by gerrymandering, hacking voting machines, rigging elections, etc. Don't pretend like your vote is some assured method of sending an impulse (however small) to the system. Note also that once candidates are in office, the system responds to their whims, and in turn many whims can be affected by extortion, blackmail, bribery, corruption, or whatever else."

So let us separate out the difference between 'vote fraud' (aka the illegal manipulation of the vote) and voting legal voting changes (districts, rank-choice, open primary, etc etc).

While there are notable cases of voting fraud (the most famous perhaps being the Chicago elections) there is no evidence that such systems persist today. Conspiracy theories aside, I assume that most voting is legit in the US.

Now that leaves manipulation of the voting pool through either redistricting or voter polls manipulation (preventing undesirable voters from signing up or signing up more desirable voters). In a contest where voter turnout is < 60% and the winning margin is < 5%, getting half the people who don't vote at all to come in and vote intelligently (which is to say responsibly) will cause the correct outcome to occur.

To your second point:
"Second, you assert that you still vote when the incumbent isn't working out--you just vote against them. This is wrong, because the information you want to convey--'The candidate in office is not one I want'--is now altered to something else--'I want this particular candidate in office'. You've given away the ability to say 'None of these candidates are worth a damn, give us new ones'."

The effect of eliminating the current incumbent is achieved. One of the ways people demonstrate that evolution works, rather than just a 'theory' as ID folks would suggest, is by creating a population where births and deaths are controlled by a simple fitness function, the simplest possible examples evolves to support the fitness function in a remarkably small number of generations. In our case 'death' is 'not re-elected' and birth is 'elected.' Without any other influence we can show mathematically that because candidates want to be elected the fitness function will drive them to doing what this population of voters considers a 'good job' and away from what they consider a 'bad job'.

Now you and I may not agree with a district's definition of what that is, but the system will insure that the district gets what they want.
"Booth babes" at CES keep sexism alive and well
It is reasonable, and testing can't catch everything, but it does say something about them, though I don't think it's anything they wouldn't say about themselves - their top priority is not assuring quality, but assuring that quality lapses can be, and are, quickly rectified. That's fine, but it's not for every application or every team.
There are two truths I try to keep in mind whenever I start feeling either extreme:

1. There are people who are so much better at programming than me, that I could work my entire life and never be as good as they are right now.

2. There are people who are so much worse at programming than me, that they could work their entire lives and never be as good as I am right now.

Its a continuum, a hill. Feel the gradient, walk uphill.
Depending on how effective his foundation is, and if/how those who benefited remember him, he could have many many people love him.
In Japan many local businesses and delivery people, mums on bikes and so on have a "tiger mask" eyes sticker on their vehicle or side of their shop for just this reason. He's a well known crime fighting character.. And it's very distinctive. It also carries what I assume is his catch phrase - "I won't let crime pass me by"

http://blogimg.goo.ne.jp/user_image/06/11/9f4a169cfc44d712c8...
I thought "startup" was a PHASE of business in which it STILL doesn't generate revenue and/or is trying a business model...
> after a certain point in increasing your budget for paying software developers, you are limited by your ability to find good people, not by your ability to pay them

Put another way, if 100 people can build a bridge in 3 months, that doesn't mean 1 million people can build a bridge in 13 minutes. Those of us who do science for a living are keenly aware that there's a sweet spot for sample size in any experiment. You want a sample size large enough to give you enough statistical power to validate your hypothesis (if it's true), but beyond that you're wasting money on more mice, or human subjects, or whatever.

For any problem, a certain amount of money / resources will optimize results.
Good point, perhaps Hopper should email the user with the file.... basically make an easier entry point to the email --- even if the email basically serves as a reminder. Hopper could even allow you to input when you want the email to come, if it's something you want to use later on
Premature abstractions can have similar issues: unless you have more than 2 cases you don't necessarily know what your abstraction should look like. As the cases pile up you find yourself increasingly shoehorning implementations into abstractions that don't quite abstract correctly.
and what happens to the children that don't learn that lesson because they don't understand the implications of gambling addiction?

It's not fair to compare a NES game to one which has been designed with gambling psychology at it's core - one that surpasses even the slot machines available to adults.

I guarantee you didn't need to delay gratification for 4 hours while waiting for additional coins. Nor did you have the option to spend real dollars (with zero chance of winning; now the house has 100% chance to win! you know they're loving that!) to get that gratification in an instant instead.

Would you rather your son or daughter be coked up in order to learn about the perils of drug use or is that different and something that makes sense to teach through observation?

I have no issue with these games being made to available to adults and I'd even support real money wagering but Apple need to reclassify these games as adult only and not as a "card game" which is "suitable for ages 12 and up".
"In one fourth-grade classroom I visited in New York City, students engaged in group work were forbidden to ask a question unless every member of the group had the very same question."

I'm going to guess that the idea here is that if someone in the group has a question, and another member of the group knows the answer, then they can resolve it within the group. Funny how the same thing can be framed so differently isn't it?
Discount Nike Air II Griffey Midnight Navy White Chlorine Blue Sale
Game sales sales drop 21%. Are consoles dead?
It was very popular. Fully automated. We needed a bank of 6 fax modems to keep up. Most of the merchants had existing paper catalog businesses and most of those orders arrived by fax, so it was easiest for them to handle it the same way. They needed a paper copy anyway to walk around the warehouse with.
Nice post, I was in the same position about a year ago. It feels really good when you get to the stage when you can launch a project, which doesn't take very long with Django.

After a few months of working with Python/Django I realized how much else there is to learn and how shitty my first attempts really were. I keep going back over my old scripts every time I learn something new to see if I can improve the code. It's sometimes depressing thinking about how much there is to learn, but the power to create whatever you want is totally worth it!
GOG.com Joins Opposition to SOPA & PIPA
Apple Suppliers 2011
It should be trivial technically (but not sure about the biz model) to allow for itemized and tagged export to a designated email address. If they do that, I will consider using them.
A first approximation might just taking the simple permutation's such as

You can X Y <-> Y X you

and find the probability that it is an english sentence
30-story building built in 15 days (video)
In June of 1998 I was working at IBM, and wondering if I should buy myself some Apple stock since it was only about $25/share. I didn't, and I kick myself now.

I remember the web in 1998. It stunk. And every TV commercial said "visit us at blah.com, or America Online keyword 'blah'".

Ah, the good ol' days.
Where's Waldo - Text style
good question, terrible person
Thing is, conmen wouldn't target Kenya (except for Kenyan conmen and I doubt Kenyan conmen would spend money to hire a large team in India...) they'd go for where the bigger money is. Only mega-companies are working hard everywhere, including the developing countries.
Why is this downvoted? His point is valid, even if you disagree with it.
Biggest problem here is that the majority of the code I write is not open source, and OSS code I write is very very different than the code I write professionally (so that my employer has no claim on it), so the github version of me is nothing like the real version of me.
"killall -STOP iTunes" works well enough too.
If only there were some way to... how do you phrase it... manufacture a fake ID? If only that were possible, then this could be done anywhere!

It's too bad, though, about how impossible it is to make a fake ID.
Hey, we did respond and refunded your order. Sorry for the delay in that response we were still getting our operations up and running.

Feel free to use the free code if you would be willing to give us another try. We are sorry it wasn't an ideal experience.
The largest share of aid money is not used for treatments or activities in field - in other words does not arrive with those in need. It disappears by wasteful use of resources, massive overheads, corruption and inefficiencies of the participants along the road the money travels from donors to e.g. AIDS patients in country.

The proliferation of such waste has by now reached levels that even former president Bill Clinton and Bill Gates independently in their speeches at the 2010 AIDS conference in Vienna called to focus on efficiency and for reducing excessive bureaucracy, meetings, trips and reports.

On top of that comes dramatic mismanagement and not too few cases of profiteering by those entrusted by the donors with distributing the funds.

You are right that since a few years military assistance e.a. are now also included within so-called Official Development Aid (ODA) budgets to make the overall amounts look better.

Currently large parts of that "business" are as opaque as the international drugs or arms trade. In general the whole thing is full of special interest groups from geo-politics to business to power to organized crime. As a result from US$1,000 tax payers' funds often only US$100-200 arrive with the (officially) intended use.

What really is needed in that "industry" is transparency, accountability, proper management and donors like Bill Gates that go to quite some efforts to assure that the monies actually arrive with those in need.
I am all over bootstrap. My both sites http://www.mockuptiger.com and https://www.wireframes.org are done with bootstrap

I will be converting my other sites all to bootstrap. But with slight color changes it can provide a difference but consistency
Great story! A little bit of common sense can go a long way.
Jekyll Bootstrap - quicker way to build a Jekyll powered website
There are some odd things in the Terms and Conditions:

"Pasting any of the following is forbidden and a violation of our terms of service: ... copyrighted works or links to copyrighted works that you do not own" Virtually everything on the internet is under copyright, so this forbids links, a primary purpose of the site.

"Permission is granted to temporarily download one copy of the materials (information or software) on Hopper's web site for personal, non-commercial transitory viewing only." I don't know if I'm reading that right, but it sounds like you can't get your stuff off the site :-/
Please don't do dates and times like this
Uber car impounded, driver ticketed in city sting
An interview with Adrian Holovaty
Every time I see the term, I can't help but imagine Mike Myers, on the verge of being verklempt suggesting that its neither "intellectual", nor "property" and then instructing us to talk amongst ourselves.
Or use dropbox
I think that the languages and platforms used shape the way one thinks about programming more than anything and that being exposed to different ecosystems is important. For example, working in a team of experienced developers that uses Java will probably rid one of most "cowboy coder" tendencies and instill a tendency for reflection on architectural patterns, etc, however it can also lead to over-engineering, "architectural astronauts", etc so then going to a more dynamic platform like Ruby on Rails (or at least using their methodologies in projects) helps balance this out. Programming is constantly evolving and it can be hard to figure out which patterns and processes to follow but one thing I feel is important is working in teams as it provides a good way to gauge yourself against others and help expose your own weaknesses.
It's in the first sentence of Tom Jones, Axiak. I thought you knew that.

An author ought to consider himself not as a gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary treat, but rather as one who keeps a public ordinary at which all persons are welcome for their money.

YCNews is sort of a public ordinary if you stretch things a bit.
Actually that model works phenomenally well. Let's say you wanted to greatly reduce the amount of irresponsible gambling in legal casinos:

1) You require all gamblers to furnish proof of insurance against large losses

Problem solved! Private insurance companies will only insure those that are unlikely to make poor bets, will engage in deductibles and caps to limit their losses on the few that will be irresponsible.

The cost is that all people will have to fund the first-time offences of the irresponsible, but for driving that's an inefficiency that is probably worth it.
There should be like a "close" option in github once you create a repository, a project that anyone can fork but can't follow and it means that the project is not ready for prime time.
Besides the money he had given to the apparatchiks and money wasters of the Global Fund to fight AIDS, TB & Malaria (GFATM) where - as it became public latest last year - up to 2/3 disappeared with mismanagement, corruption and other abuse of funds (administrative fees not included) - I guess nobody is perfect
edit: Just because I'm stating this fact, doesn't mean that I endorse it. Please, just because you agree that the world unfortunately is this way, don't downvote me as if I'm the cause of the current state of affairs. I'm not old enough or powerful enough to be so.

Is the author a constitutional lawyer? Because if not, I really can't trust any of this.

The reason that constitutional lawyers exist is because this short document is deceptively sophisticated and every interpretation of every stanza has seen its day in court almost every generation since its authorship.

Just reading something and assuming that the legal ramifications are clear and apparent without knowing the extensive history of the actual legal ramifications belongs more in the world of political opinion than anything remotely approximate to legal standing.

It's almost as if a corpus of court proceedings a 100 meters long should be affixed to every word in order to gain an appreciation for what is legally pursuant via the constitution.
I think the parent is referring to this: Google pays $.5B to settle w/ DOJ over illegal drug ads [1]

[1] http://money.cnn.com/2011/08/24/technology/google_settlement...
Grubwithus and the future of social eating
Anybody have linux fonts patched? I can't deal with these OTFs.
Imperialist Tendencies
On the one hand, this is cool... on the other hand, I'll never use it (sorry).

I email stuff to myself on gmail because I can have thousands of things in there that I can instantly find via powerful search. And I'm fairly confident that 5 years from now they'll still be in there and just as easily discoverable.

While Hopper's UI is certainly better than email attachments in gmail currently are, I suspect Google will rectify that on their side much faster than Hopper will rectify my previously mentioned primary two concerns about the data I'm storing.

As others have already mentioned, seamless integration into email would go a long way toward getting me to use this at all. Augment instead of trying to replace is a much better strategy here.
Kinsella, a legal professional in the area of IP in the US, covers the legal and historical context surrounding IP and comes to similar conclusions. In short, he concludes, you cannot have Intellectual Property rights without restricting someone else's Physical Property rights; IP is fundamentally at odds with Physical Property rights.

True to form, his book is available for free in digital formats: http://mises.org/resources/3582/Against-Intellectual-Propert...

And audio: http://blog.mises.org/11717/against-intellectual-property-au...

EDIT: clarified that Kinsella is a lawyer and knows this subject well
it is called the functional threshold
Hypothetical: If an employee in McDonald's overcharges all the customers do you think that McDonald's/the franchisee is completely devoid of responsibility because it was "just an employee"?

That's a good example. But there's a difference between harming your customers and harming your competitors. In the case of McDonalds' hypothetical actions, the solution is to give your customers their money back and a few free burgers. But what can Google do to make up for their mistake here? Go back in time and not hire the individuals that fucked up?
I like to think that payments like this go to relatives or business partners at a different company. I only like to think that because the alternative is actually harder for me to comprehend.
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>So the first hit is free, but you as a farmer is stuck buying seed for eternity.

The heroin analogy is idiotic. Nothing is stopping the farmers from switching back to conventional crops if they don't find GMO's more profitable then what they were doing before
Google, David Kreps, and the Dread Pirate Roberts Strategy
Highmark Advance Blue Individual Health Insurance Plan
> If we could tell our 1998 selves about the modern "personal branding" craze our old selves would never believe it.

I think this is a fascinating comment. I was using my real name on the Internet in 1998, and now I mainly stick to pseudonyms. Occasionally I Google up what I was talking about on usenet 10+ years ago when I was a geeky teenager and cringe. Let's hope Google never puts together a comprehensive IRC log the way they were able to with usenet.
What exactly do "product guys" and "non technical" co-founders have to off to early-stage startups? That's the real mystery to me.
To summarize what we know, think we know and the open questions are:

What we know:

1: Google employees or contractors or partners did this (called Mocality listed businesses, said they were from Google/Mocality and sold websites etc.)

2: Apparently they were a rogue person/team/unit inside of Google

3: But there seemed to be a lot of callers involved

4: They moved the calling unit to India

5: Google HQ now knows about this

Speculation

1: Nobody in Google HQ knew about this at the time

2: The person or people involved in Google Kenya were quite high up to be able to motivate that many people

3: The India team was not part of Google's team. (or perhaps they were). They got involved because the heat was on in Kenya.

4: Mocality suffered a loss here (e.g. use of data to be used to solicit businesses against their terms and conditions), the people doing so were at Google and representing Google and thus Google has opened themselves up for a considerable legal mess.

5: The Nigerian courts and legal system are too hard/expensive/slow for Mocality and Google to navigate, so Mocality have turned to PR to motivate Google to change.

6: That approach is working, and it should be working. Google needs to do something urgently to fix this.

7: Getting rid of the partners is insufficient remedy for Mocality. There needs to be some compensation involved for the solicitation of a considerable percentage of Mocality's listings.

8: Ultimately the best way for Google to handle this is to purchase Mocality.

Questions

1:Was the India team a Google team one or outsourced to some rascals there?

2: What will Google do to compensate Mocality of this scam?

3: Has Mocality retained a lawyer in Nigeria, have they formally asked Google to Cease and Desist and requested compensation?

4: Why has Google not approached Mocality wrt purchase of their data?

5: Who has the relationship with any businesses that did sign up to the scammers? What will happen to that relationship and to the money paid?
Tell HN: Today's lesson in how NOT to get a technical co-founder
Have your friends blast their friends with a job description that includes the following:

"What You Need For This Position:

• BS in Computer Science from an elite university preferred; graduating near the top of your class a HUGE plus.

• Front-end skills in HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript.

• Back-end skills in PHP, Python, or Ruby (you can choose!).

• Skills in NoSQL or PostgreSQL a HUGE plus.

• Must be entrepreneurial and highly ambitious!

• Must be aware of inner workings of marketplace sites and know how to optimally scale."

If this individual can do all the following, why the hell would he work with you?!
Trying to retrofit an abstraction to a piece of code is almost always a horrible experience frought with mess and compromise.

Yes, and unless the problem is trivial or your experience in the domain is such that your foresight borders on the clairvoyant, this is guaranteed to happen. No matter how much (or little) design you do up front.

The key is to recognize the right time to stop and refactor, so as to keep the pain that comes with learning the problem space to a minimum.
//Sub/Corpus Blog: Wataniya: Please fix your mobile Internet ...
I paid my way through my first college degree with a site where I repackaged another company's services at a markup. People were willing to pay much more than they were asking if only the service were marketed differently, and this company was happy to have the business with me doing the advertising work. My markup was almost 40% and I was pulling in 20-30 customers a day from Google AdWords alone.

Growing my web apps to the same income level as that site was much harder and took much longer.
I'm not sure I can agree with everything you're saying. Was the Constitution written with the expectation that later generations would consider it "deceptively sophisticated" and that only "constitutional lawyers" should be able to make sense of it? Was it purposefully written so that later constitutional lawyers could interpret it in new ways that seem counter-intuitive to everyone else? I don't think so.