skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
You're showing the same kind of insubstantive pattern-matching I've come to see and expect from supposed legal experts. Here, you see an "extreme" argument and assume, purely on that basis, that there must be something wrong with it, and the truth is in some kind of "middle". But let's trace back what the actual exchange was.

1) I said (trying to start from a more general, uncontroversial figure of merit) that one sign of a bad legal system is that it fails to let people know, with (imperfect) confidence, and without "experts", whether they're breaking the law. This means breaking any law: remember, it's not praiseworthy that people can be certain about one particular law. What matters is whether they're certain they're not breaking any law, because you only need to break some law to be punished, not a particular one. It's little consolation that my interpretation of the murder laws was correct if they string me up on bizarre endangered species ones!

(Already you should see the irrelevance of your invocation of "but you can tell that killing over a parking spot is illegal", but perhaps I go that far given your legal expert self-identification and your contempt for the "geek" view!)

2) I then pointed out that currently, you can have no such confidence. This would be confidence that, "for all people, it is not the case that there exists one law that they are currently breaking (or breaking on a regular basis)". I substantiate this by pointing to the standard recommendation from experts.

3) You claim that it would be unreasonable to expect this of a legal system. (You further ignore the citing of the principle of "ignorance of the law is no excuse".) This would suggest that no society has pulled it off. But obviously, you can't defend such a position, so you substitute it (per the pattern-matching I mention at the beginning of the post) with the weaker standard that there is some uncertainty at some margins. But that was never in dispute!

4) So, it is clear that a) the standard I cited is reasonable, and b) many current legal systems violate it, making them no better at "the law" than the geeks whose legal expertise you ridicule,

At this point I should add that geeks already have set up existing systems for "how to do it right". Rather than, say, expect that everyone should closely follow libraries of laws and cases, they have the RFC system, which provides a public, since point of reference that is constantly, pro-actively reconciled with conflicting notions, rather than waiting years for the supreme court to have someone go through the dance to get a case before them and give them an excuse to talk about it.

No, it's not perfect, but it satisfies the basic requirements one ought to expect, in that it allows people to actually learn how to stay clear of conflict with a reasonable amount of effort and time.
Working Group assembling to discuss HTTP/2.0
Meh. The government also has the power to drop nuclear bombs and has done it twice before. Shockingly, we're all still alive and procrastinating on the Internet.

The the typical libertarian appeal to fear of tyranny IMO sheds more heat than light.
A huge part of campaigning is either driving your own turnout (field operations) or suppressing the other guys' turnout (negative ads). Additionally, there's a philosophy of "suppress turnout in general and it will probably help me", which statistically is a good move for Republicans, most of the time.

The argument is that compulsory voting would disincentivize these activities in favor of issues-based campaigning. I agree although I'm not sure I agree strongly enough to favor compulsory voting.
I'm sticking with Solarized.
Python library & command-line utility which interacts with the Minus.com
The CEO of Motorola recently suggested that phone companies pursue this strategy because of wireless phone carriers: http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/10/2697939/motorolas-sanjay-j...
Language learning is ripe for disruption. Rosetta Stone sucks. Pimsleur is just okay but can be improved.
Correct, and I'd like to add to your thought. Another problem is consistency. "Business (sector) X" has an income stream, a lobbying budget, and a handful of focused and related political goals. Politicians know this. Also, lobbying is an investment with an implied ROI. This is not the case for "everyone that is not X," who will likely not repeatedly throw money at an issue for many years to come.
This seems useful for exploring menu options when you don't know where things are, but not as useful for executing frequently used menu options. For exploring, it's great to be able to type "pref" and have all menu options for preferences show up. But if I know that the preferences I'm looking for are under Edit - Preferences, I'll just hit ALT-E, P and be done with it in less than a second.
As a Permanent Resident of the United States, I can assure you that "no taxation without representation" has been dead a looong while.
I remember Consumer Reports doing a battery test. The big winners were Costco's Kirkland brand, as they fell only slightly behind the big name brands in longevity, but at a substantially lower cost.

It would have been very interesting to see where the Kirkland batteries fell in this test.
Everything has been done in emacs, then forgotten.
As some people have pointed out lobbying isn't all bad - the problem is the disproportionate influence of organisations with lots of money and corruption.

How about this for a solution: regulate lobbying like sex. Anyone can do it but you can't pay a professional to do it for you.
I know it's dumb but this is my favorite idea: The user goes to MegaUpload. It says “HTTP Error 460” (this doesn’t exist—you would be making it up): “Seized by the FBI”.

Seriously, they should have an alt-text for that image. In fact, I'm quite certain that "Section 508" legally requires the FBI to have an alt-text for that image.
I think it's great to see Ubuntu innovating.

However, I don't see search as the future of application interfaces.

I've been using autocomplete in Quickbooks long enough to know that typing "Next P" to execute <next page> rather than <next layer> is just going to suck.
Ask PG: Why did Politician Market Disappear from the homepage
A few minutes ago my Politician Market submission was the top item on HN. Now it's on page 2.

Is there a mistake in the ranking algorithm?

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3504434
Something that's easy to parse, and ideally adheres to the relational model. I'm not certain if the latter can be done in a performant manner, so I'd probably settle for a few compromises if they were well argued.

For example, a natural join between two tables could be represented as an S-expression:

(join a b)

The actual format is probably irrelevant. You could represent it as JSON or XML or some binary protocol. What would matter is that you were transferring a standard structure (i.e. a list consisting of 'join', 'a' and 'b').

Compare this to SQL where you'd actually send a raw string:

SELECT * FROM a NATURAL JOIN b

Although because SQL doesn't follow the relational model particularly closely, usually you'd write something more like:

SELECT * FROM a JOIN b ON a.id = b.a_id

Both of these statements are much harder to parse than a S-expression represented by some known format.

As well as being harder to parse, it's also harder to combine SQL. For example, perhaps I want to add a selection to limit the join:

(select (join a b) (= x 1))

Combining expressions in a S-expression is trivial, but in SQL it's more complex. You can't just wrap one expression in another - you'd want to extend an existing statement with a "WHERE":

SELECT * FROM a JOIN b ON a.id = b.a_id WHERE x = 1

More complex expressions become a mess of subqueries, and very hard to parse. Man ORMs actually represent queries as ASTs internally and only convert them into SQL at the last moment. If we could sent relational queries directly to the database we'd save a lot of work.
Psychology is complicated. As another example, a lot of Hackers are probably at least somewhat aware that learning some marketing and self-promotion skills would massively improve their quality of life, yet will make endless excuses as to why they can't/won't.
Actually... some ceramic capacitors are piezoelectric [1] and thus could (conceivably) be used as low-fidelity audio sensors. Better rip out all the capacitors too -- just in case. ;-)

That would be one crazy covert communications channel. Wonder if there are any security papers exploring that...?

[1] http://www.kemet.com/kemet/web/homepage/kfbk3.nsf/vaFeedback...
Actually, my first thought was "This reminds me of Enso", Enso being the predecessor to Ubiquity(by the same people before they were hired by Mozilla), but integrated into the desktop as a whole rather than the browser.

Unfortunately, my main complaint with Enso and Ubiquity was that both were unfortunately rather buggy. And given Ubuntu's track record with Unity, I suspect that it will be just as buggy.
With regard to your edit: so that they know where you are, essentially. There's a social aspect ("when are you getting to the bar?") as well as a safety one (travelling late at night, someone will always know where you are).

There's also some interesting benefits from my POV- it's effectively returning live data on the average mph on every street in the city. Relies on getting a decent number of users before being useful of course, but still.

Gratuitous plug for the site with more info: http://www.taxono.my/
Only if you cut the microphone off, of course. :)
Sayonara, muscle memory!
I've read a few books on data warehousing, and maybe you can confirm my suspicion:

Isn't ETL just an acronym that means "I wrote this Perl script to populate the database"?

How on earth is that even an industry?
I doubt it was to the degree Microsoft tested the ribbon:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tl9kD693ie4
Show HN: Semantic programmatic search for computable data
Does copyright apply to physical object? I understand a sports jersey has to be licensed because it has a copyrighted logo on it, but if there is no trademark or logo on a physical object I don't think you can copyright it.

Of course patent laws apply and there is such thing as a design patent:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Design_patent

I would think unless an object is covered by a patent, design or functional, it is fair game to print out
INCREDIBLY REALISTIC SCULPTURES
Equity is only useful when combined with some measure of control, and you can't run a successful company by employee consensus.
Board games are at an interesting cross. On the one hand they don't usually require tight tolerances for their parts so 3D printers seem a perfect fit for printing board games. On the other hand you have board games moving to the digital devices like tablets. How will things play out?
I'm actually one of the printrbot backers and will definitely be doing some kind of write up on it once i get it in my hands and actually ready to use it.
That's not quite correct, actually. Citizens United overturned a part of a law that prohibited corporations and unions from spending their money on "electioneering communications" (generally defined as communications advocating for or against a specific candidate) within 30 days of a primary or 60 days of a general election. The decision is not about PACs or limitations on their ability to raise funds, though PACs certainly benefited from the ruling.
Some people I think could read up, at least on some aspects, but I don't think it's equally easy for everyone to learn all topics. If we woke up in a world tomorrow where technical skills were not highly in demand, but, say, the two main growth sectors involved writing and music, how many of today's Google employees would be able to successfully retrain as novelists, journalists, violinists, poets, historians, and editors? My guess is some would and some wouldn't; and a number would need significant time to do so, and/or would end up as only mediocre employees in their new occupation.

That's how I feel with computers, anyway, that I've in effect pulled a lucky straw: I've been interested in and good at computers since I was like 8, and it turns out they pay. If the money was elsewhere, I'm not sure how easily I'd be able to switch. Likewise, I'm not sure how easy it'd be for an adult who was never fascinated with and adept at technology to go the other way, and "become a techie" through self-study, purely because they think it's important/lucrative, as opposed to because they have the sort of interest/drive/skill that most techies have.

Or put differently, I don't think everyone is the same or perfectly malleable; not necessarily due to genetics, but at least by the time they reach adulthood people have different skills/proclivities and are more or less adept at learning certain things. Since the universe isn't aligned in some cosmically fair manner, some people's skills/interests align with what's currently in demand, and other people's don't, which puts the people out of alignment in a more difficult place, like me in an age where being court poet, painter, or musician was the main path for middle-class kids to advance, and engineering was seen as a more working-class endeavor.
Rome's been around a while and it has had several significantly different forms of government. Which period have you in mind?
I'm all for donations from outside of the US, I'm also for voting to have fewer than 7 out of 10 of the Wikipedia board be from the US. I think this is important for the neutrality of Wikipedia, perceived and real.
Packaging, markup and logistics are a big factor. Compare the Duracell "Pro" range which only come in bulk to commercial customers with the exact same cell in a different case (the familiar copper-top cell). I'd be interested in seeing if the "lithium" branded cells (which clearly aren't LiIon chemistry as the voltage is still 1.5ish volts) are worth the extra cash though.
The fact that these Anti-SOPA people had enough respect for experts to seek their advice means more to me than the words they used.

Some people really aren't offended by the term `nerd` or `geek` or even, apparently, `l0ser`.
Mobile operator offers free Wikipedia in Africa and the Middle East
I imagine we'll hear about it. It's nice to get an inside look at the challenges of another company.
IntelliJ IDEA has this feature for years now. (Command-Shift-A) It shows a list of all commands and you can fuzzy-find through them.

It is very useful and often faster than digging through the menus to find the right command. It also shows the shortcut for the command, which is useful for learning commands that you use often.
Resetter &amp; Tools
Hopefully getting purchased by Google will have that effect...
HAProxy design choices
Dear Comcast, I'm leaving you because...
Hackers Breached Railway Network, Disrupted Service
It's been in use for a while. In home repair, polyfills are used to fill in gaps and level out uneven surfaces. The term was adopted by web developers to refer to code that implements standard features in browsers that don't support them yet.
3D modeling software such as Rhinoceros (http://www.rhino3d.com/) uses this model with great success and I'm sure there are others. The program has a GUI that is very modular and customizable but the command-line interface is the primary interface. It takes a short while to get used to but after you do it scales very well as your experience grows. I have thought for a while that Photoshop/Illustrator would do well with a CLI but this is a compelling case for a contextual but system-wide implementation of this concept. The closest we have is Quicksilver or Alfred and while they are indispensable, making this part of the OS would open up some interesting possibilities.
Producteev Drops New Apps; Now Lets You Crowdsource Your Tasks On TaskRabbit
Inspired by some of the things bdg said, I'm thinking, could you find a niche a service that allows only US-only freelancers?

There's got to be a market for people who are willing to pay more simply to not have to deal with overseas developers.
Help I am a Developer with no clue about Design (ebook)
It kills me inside when people talk about democracy as though that's how the United States always was and want to "restore the democracy"

Please watch this video before you decide to toss around the word democracy. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KFXuGIpsdE0
Lobbying is constitutionally protected, and rightfully so. Without such a protection, the government is under no obligation to open a dialog with citizens. When people organized against SOPA, that was lobbying. That ability to talk with your representatives and leaders should not be removed.
Not sure if you're correct - look at the specs page [1]... it does support the Apple headset with combo microphone/headphones port.

[1] http://www.apple.com/macbookair/specs.html
Very nice looking
Should You Retire FTP for Security?
Exactly. I don't think models, math, and simulations in the area of economics are evaluated by their predictive power or their fidelity to the real word.

I'd say that they are generally exploratory models and pedagogical models. That's why the critic by the original poster is off-target: it hardly addresses the commonly used/accepted metric for economic insight.
We as voters are at fault for money in Congress
that was unintentional. my apologies. the submission system should be smarter.
If you can print car parts that means that you mastered nanotechnology. and assemblying it would be no problem, it would probably assemble itself. by printing car factory first.
Let me get this straight.

We propose a society where scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all physical items can be copied at will, where the idea of "owning" a physical thing is as pointless as the idea of "owning" an idea is, where (as a natural consequence) world hunger is probably a thing of the past, as are poverty, industrial labour, and many other things we take for granted...

And your first question is "How does Ferrari stay in business?"

Worth noting that this is more or less the same thing as what's happening with art at the moment. I could paraphrase it as:

"We propose a society where information scarcity is a thing that only exists in fiction and history books, where all information (sound, video, text, etc) can be copied at will and instantly all around the world, where the idea of "owning" a bunch of bytes is as pointless as the idea of owning the shape of a cloud in the sky, where (as a natural consequence) education, art, civilisation and all those things that make mankind worthy of existence are infinitely more powerful than before because of their ubiquity and availability to all, and your first question is... How does Sony Music stay in business?"
The interesting part is the 'long tail,' to borrow for the previous decade.

If you can print cars, you can print open source clothes, homes, appliances, solar panels, greenhouses, robots and more printers. Everyone who currently works a full/part-time job to pay the bills while their real passion lies in painting, or programming, or partying, or golf can stop working. Even the people who want to stay up on the latest DRMed fashion trends without breaking the law will have a hard time finding work to pay for it.

That said, there will still be people with power who can lure others into helping them, by offering in exchange the opportunity at a cut of that power - because you can't print power ... or, well ... with printable smarter than human AIs, can you?
The Replicator is the next gen product from Makerbot, and it improves on previous models mostly by near-doubling the footprint of the potential object size. This version will print objects roughly the size of a loaf of bread. It also sells pre-assembled, which is kind of a plus for those of us who don't have soldering stations laying around.

It's tempting to begin thinking entrepreneurially about the capacities of this device. Sadly, it looks like one quality metric of this version hasn't improved over the last: the greatest print resolution available is .02 inches. Which means that all printed objects come out with noticeable ridges indicating the rough granular nature of the printed layers. Although I've read some articles about how it's possible to smooth this over with an acetate bath.

I don't know, I'm tempted to buy this puppy. It just gets me thinking, what various forms of plastic would people buy en masse?
LiIon is for rechargeable batteries. The 1.5V Energizers are almost certainly "lithium-iron", a.k.a. "voltage-compatible" lithium cells.
a great percentage of the brain is not used in a human's lifetime..I think Alzheimer's disease is a condition when connections between brain cells are impaired but the cell itself still contains the memory..
Online Gambling possibly coming back to America
>I can conclude nothing else from your stance but the fact you are either a troll or a paid shill.

Typical response from the "everything is a conspiracy" crowd that dominates these discussions so much.

Sure, people also used the service for legitimate purposes. If you think for one second that those people comprised more than 5% of the userbase (and that's being generous) or that Megaupload and similar services were setup to profit from those legitimate users and not from the pirates then you are simply being delusional. And there is no need for internal emails to reach that conclusion some experience and common sense will suffice.
Node.js modules you should know about: procstreams
The Stanford online CS101 class will be taught by the same teacher as these Google lectures. [1] I enjoyed him very much when I was just starting with Python.

[1]: http://www.cs101-class.org/
What a worthless article. One study cited, with patronizing language like "cuddly". Then a torrent of anecdotes and speculation to rubbish the idea.

We learn that it's not the solution to everything (what is?); that some firms that use this model have failed (as opposed to traditional firms, which last forever?), and then it degenerates into mere speculation, raising the spectre of Bolshevism.

Maybe the Economist has forgotten this, but incentives matter. Anyone who wants to argue against the principle of employee ownership is also arguing against executive bonuses and stock options. Who's the Bolshevik now?
The Rise of the Front End Developers
INoobs: How to Write a Blog – Organization
I recently wrote about the importance of adding good content to your website or blog. This post will discuss the importance of good organization in your blog writing.
If you're the sort of person who has read the Jargon File, understands algorithmic complexity, and finds beauty in Hofstadter, you probably know everything in Gleick's book. I kept waiting for a punchline, but there wasn't one.
Croatia to Join Debt Stricken European Union: Poll Results
Stripe, a Payment Service by Developers for Developers
As a CL newbie, what would you suggest be used instead? Also, why would you not use nested defuns?
The OS X Help menu combines the two approaches. You type the command name, and it opens and highlights the appropriate menu for the result — complete with a big animated arrow next to the item you're choosing — so then you know where to find the menu item next time.
I was thinking the same, and found it particularly amusing that "design" types are only now finally realising the virtues of the command line. What'll the next Ubuntu UI revolution be? No X11, just a 'screen' session in a tty? (I'd actually use that, were it not for the fact that (a) too much of the Web is overly graphical to be browsed effectively in text mode and (b) screen sucks)

Moving to a different distro (and perhaps WM) is a good idea. I recently moved to Debian with Xfce and am enjoying the lack of gnomes.
> Edit: If this exists already, we're living in the future.

Try the OS X System Preferences search field. It's there since 10.4ish?
Nice... feels a bit like the Gremlin shell. What's the tech behind this website?
Meet YC's Kicksend