skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I think corruption is loosely tied to wealth inequality. I suspect that large variations in the top 5% have to do with this. Humans have a tendency to compare themselves to those who have more. To whoever is at the next level. We tend to want more and desire what another has. When the variation at the top is not so great as it is in the U.S. and other, equally corrupt, nations then political corruption lessens.

The idea behind the website is a nice one. I hope they are successful. The website itself is quite nicely done.
Congrats for launching!

I remember from thefastlaneforum.com you were developing Fendza, what happened to that project?
My social media blackout
The Rust compiler is written as a library with a small driver, so getting access to parse trees in external tools is easy.

Take a look at rustdoc, for instance:

https://github.com/mozilla/rust/tree/master/src/rustdoc
That's an interesting point, however I doubt that the personal ego of some people is a strong enough reason to impose the grading system on everyone.

And while this more of a philosophical point than anything, I think that this form of competitiveness ("look, I'm better than you") is a major problem of today's society. Education should teach to work together, not against each other.
totally agree with this line of thought.

there is a clear bias towards one-shot-huge-market tech startups, primarily fuelled by the VC industry who needs to generate business for themselves, that is why they "push" so many people for a riskier "now or never" mindset. for investors, the more, the merrier. (note that a we do not "need" VCs to spark innovation. innovation comes from capable and knowledgeable teams, not capital.)

the current tech wave is just another, faster-paced, industrial revolution. many brick and mortar entrepreneurs in the past have created great small, medium and large business without the need of external financing. and this happened during a time when barriers of entry (including capital needs) where much higher. many of these brick and mortar entrepreneurs created for themselves and their families a stable life, technology startups are no different.
MIT Mints a Valuable New Form of Academic Currency
Right -- I'm not sure about the MacBook, but in many cases the webcam led is software-directed, not hardware-directed. So a small change to the driver (or firmware) can make it record without enabling the led.
I don't entirely disagree with what you're implying. However, a motivated student will have just as much access to such things if they happen to live in an urban area. Maybe the cost savings could help the student pay for more social activities, personal coaching, and access to specialized facilities and labs, etc. It could actually work better than the current college system.
I hate when they just pull these numbers out of their ass. I can agree that they lose money (even though I feel it is necessary to force them to innovate), but they are just creating random figures of things that would have never happened. It would be like Michael Bay coming out claiming Transformers lost 250 million dollars because of piracy.
Show HN: Not sure what to read next? Here's a list of most mentioned books on HN
I grew up with computers in the 80s that didn't have Internet connectivity. I didn't get Internet access at home until 2005. Mailing lists confuse the hell out of me.
Send an artwork to my printer in London. (Group show framework experiment)
I don't think you understand. The point is to either eliminate the power, or make it extremely diffuse. That way, there is nothing to purchase.
Meganomics: The Future of "Follow-the-Money" Copyright Enforcement
Because the RFC calls for collecting DHCP responses over several seconds, then choosing the 'best' response.

If you select the 'best' as the fastest, then you can simply take the 1st response and run with it. Then it takes only milliseconds as you observed. That's what we did.
This does not happen with my early 2011 13" mbp.
The latest Economist special report touches on this in Russia, where companies needed to support workers in the middle of nowhere:

A visit to the headquarters of Russian Railways can feel a
bit like a voyage back in time. The guards wear the peaked
hats and gruff manners of the Soviet era. A display shows
the children of railway workers triumphing in chess and
athletics. Vladimir Yakunin, the company’s boss, started
his career with the KGB. He concedes that his company is a
giant of an organisation: it has 1.2m employees, 20,000
stations, 86,000km of track, a network of schools and
health clinics and even an equestrian school.

...

He also points out that some of the oddities of his
company, such as its schools and clinics, have been around
for a century and derive from the difficulties of running a
railway in the middle of nowhere. There is no such thing as
pure capitalism or pure socialism, he argues; only more or
less sensible solutions to practical problems.

http://www.economist.com/node/21542929
"Here's one way to start: remove direct elections of senators. It makes lobbyists having to deal with 50 separate state legislatures rather than 100 individuals."

Lobbyists hear this and think "Oh boy! I get to deal with a set of elections that the average voter cares even less about than Congressional ones!"

Personally, I'd go the other way around, and switch to a Westminster system where you only have one vote for federal office, meaning that plans like Obama's small-donor system would be more feasible for the elections that really matter: legislative ones.
They aren't age verified any further than walking into a video shop and asking for an 18 film, or off license to buy cigarettes or alcohol in the UK requires verification. We take that for granted. It's the same thing really.

The mass censorship infrastructure is already here in the UK EVERYWHERE (Google for IWF.org.uk) yet is surprisingly not mentioned with respect to this. The censorship is independent to the mobile provider's age mandate which has nothing to do with censorship, but is more of a way of protecting mobile providers' arses from getting sued by parents (which will happen). It is not actually LAW.

Now more seriously, you bought something off the shelf. You chose to buy it. If it comes with that restriction, don't buy it. The restriction is documented on the SIM packet. I choose not to buy Apple products on that basis: because I like to replace batteries. It's simple.

You don't have a right to buy something and then complain about how it censors you. Do your research and just don't buy it. You probably don't need it anyway.

To project my comments to an idea is that "social workers need to deal with people like you" is crazy and totally incorrect. That's extremism and a blatant twisting of words.

The premise, which is proven many a time (google it - I can't be arsed to be honest), is that if you expose children to pornography too early, bad things happen. Negative personality traits develop. They don't necessarily turn into rapists as someone says, but they cause problems with other children in schools when appropriate and conventional boundaries are broken. Giving them a readily accessible channel to end up with behaviour is not a positive thing.

Now where I live, it's not uncommon to see 10 year olds riding BMX's down the road with a cigarette in one hand and a can of Strongbow in the other and beating the shit out of people to get a few quid to sustain their highs.

Is that acceptable to you?

Please get it straight:

Nothing is black and white. That applies to censorship too.
Suggesting it is disabled isn't the same as it being disabled.

Reducing the input level to zero suggests it's disabled but evidently this isn't the case.
Amazing time-lapse video of Yosemite
This article is without merit. The author's logic train derails shortly after leaving the station.

Without removing the hardware there is no way to prevent someone with remote root access from recording audio from any input regardless of settings. This is true of any machine that has audio inputs and drivers loaded for those devices.
Well I agree with you. It's a tragedy that the overwhelming majority of good video ever recorded can't be found on video streaming sites because of copyright and can't be found through torrents because torrents are only really good at keeping popular content alive.

What we need to do is popularise something like I2P or GNUnet and make it accessible to regular users. Then it can form the platform for the next generation of culture-sharing websites.
Dwolla might be a good alternative
Democracy in classical sense means participation of the aristocracy, not wide populist participation as practiced in 20th century.

I along with many of people I discuss politics agree that for wellbeing of democracy the civic duties and privileges should be limited and not available to everybody as a universal right.

Ignorance is the worst enemy of democracy. Letting the ignorant majority participate in democratic process on principle alone does nothing for democracy.
This should become a standard (masha.js)
Thanks for sharing your launch story! Would you be willing to share the stats on the 310 emails you collected over the past 7 months? I would be interested in seeing the open & bounce rates specifically.
Well done on launching!
Under how it works I'd suggest numbering the steps.
Say No to Ireland's SOPA
SOPA is the name of a piece of US legislation, the Stop Online Piracy Act.

A similar proposal is about to become law in Ireland. And while 7 million Americans contacted their representatives to say No to SOPA in the US, Irish citizens will not get that chance because the new law in Ireland is not being voted on in the Oireachtas.

Instead, <b>the law is being enacted by ministerial order</b>. This new law will give music and movie companies the legal leverage to force Irish ISPs like UPC, Eircom and mobile networks to block access to sites suspected of having copyrighted material on them. It also means judges can order ISPs to block access to sites like YouTube, Facebook and Twitter where an individual user from anywhere in the world has shared infringing material.
Exactly. Refactoring is the process of changing code without changing behaviour. If that means you change some tests so be it. There is no rule to say that you can't do this, but many devs seem to fear this.
This looks ubercool until you realise that Clojure does this for a living with its seq protocol.

Then it's just neat.
Re the "Don't be the first to state a number" strategy, what happens in the real world when two competent negotiators meet?
I more or less agree, and it's interesting that while it's now seen as a (very) "left" policy proposal, much of its historic support has been from people who are more associated with free-market economics. Various reasons, but they boil down to a mixture of negative and positive ones.

The negative ones are that it's better than the likely alternatives: Milton Friedman thought it was better and less distorting to just hand people one cash payment than deal with the huge mess of welfare, Section 8 housing, food stamps, unemployment benefits, medicaid, etc., etc. that the U.S. currently has. That's sort of the case here, in that just paying people a basic minimum income is probably less distorting than trying to adopt policies to force full employment (France-style policies that make it hard to fire people, protectionist trade tariffs, etc.). Arguably, it makes people more willing to accept major shakeups caused by markets if there's some minimum floor for what happens to people caught in transitions or left out of shifts; otherwise people are more likely to try to push back against the markets. (Actually that last point is why classic Marxists were against these kinds of things, because they thought it had the effect of sugar-coating the markets' effects, thereby making people less willing to revolt against them.)

Positive reasons include promoting entrepreneurship (provides a safety net making people, especially those not from middle-class-or-better families, more likely to take the risk of jumping from a stable job to start a business), and giving people more freedom to choose their associations, as opposed to feeling they need to cling to their ethnic group, religious group, or other such organization for quasi-welfare (e.g. many non-believing Mormons stay in the church because it provides a safety net). F.A. Hayek described that as a necessary part of moving towards a less tribalist/group-centric society: "The assurance of a certain minimum income for everyone, or a sort of floor below which nobody need fall even when he is unable to provide for himself, appears not only to be a wholly legitimate protection against a risk common to all, but a necessary part of the Great Society in which the individual no longer has specific claims on the members of the particular small group into which he was born."
that doesn't solve the real problem, though, which is that some entities are much more powerful than others. by removing the government, which can work as a (limited, imperfect) balance, you give other powerful institutions (ie big corporations) even more power.

it won't be the government searching your laptop, it will be the airline, as part of a conglomerate that includes media companies.

government exists for a reason. you need to fix it, not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
Engineering(,) A Path to Science
How can the children be allowed to ride in non-self-driving cars?
I think one of the big take-aways for me was do more substantial testing before pulling all the tricks out of your hat to get traffic. Imagine if his email list had been 10,000 people, how many would have been turned off by that first impression?
From one-head-one-vote to one-dollar-one-vote. We should call it "pecuniacy".

(Note: "pecunia" is Latin for "money"; I know, the right way to do this would be to use the ancient greek equivalent for "money" and replace it for "demo", but I couldn't find it.)
I was hoping for assassination politics, but this was amusing. Maybe I'm a bit thick, but this couldn't be legal, could it?
Show HN: Learn Chinese - fun, fast and effective
I've recently launched a startup called Native Tongue. Our vision is to make language learning fun, fast and effective.

We've released our first product "Mandarin Madness", which is to learn Mandarin Chinese vocabulary. Its available on android and iOS. Its for beginners to intermediate, including those with no experience.

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dramatically limit the size of government

Any specifics? "Limit the size of government" is a trite platitude that anyone could agree with on some level. Shove 100 random people in a room and you have 200 conflicting ideas about the appropriate role of government.
Their interest is not 'having a conversation'. They have degenerated into monopolists. Let us clarify the game they play:

One year they lobby government to strengthen enforcement. They say: piracy means they are not getting what the law says is their due. (it sounds almost reasonable!)

The next year they lobby government to expand copyright. That is: they are deciding for themselves what is their due.

Far from the general public interest, and, indeed, plainly very far from the free market.
The wealthiest countries in the world have large governments and don't have these problems.

Still, if we can bank online, we can vote online. I see nothing stopping a proposal where if 25% of the public vote online, the result is accepted over what Congress voted. No advertising allowed. Suddenly, bribing/lobbying Congress would no longer make sense.
I really don't like SQL.

It doesn't follow the relational model and the syntax is extremely hard to parse.

It was written in an era that was more worried about conserving computing resources than thinking about abstractions.

I've nothing against relational databases, but I wish SQL would hurry up and die :(
Board Room Spying for Fun and Profit
The proof will be in the pudding, as we say. All that we need is a few digital learners to go on to become world leaders in some particularly hard fields. That will get the attention of the mainstream parents.

Many parents are very conservative in their approach to education, and the parents see the University path as the most certain way forward. Since the parents are largely the motivators toward higher education and sometimes pay the bill, they're a large target audience to reach.
Microsoft names alleged Kelihos botnet creator
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Women report feeling pain more intensely than men, says study
Anonymous targeting Facebook
I recognize that Lawrence Lessig is beating this particular drum lately, and he's probably way smarter than me. However, I can't escape the idea that money is the mother's milk of politics. It's like water in that it always finds a way through an obstacle, no matter how much you put in its way. If you eliminate overt lobbying, organizations will find a way to route around whatever laws are in place to lobby covertly, in ways that are likely much harder for the average person to detect.

Furthermore, I'd point out that, depending on the form of a ban on lobbying, the recent SOPA protest might not have been able to happen. Google might have been prevented from blacking out their page as would Wikipedia, lest they run afoul of anti-lobbying laws. That's something worth thinking about.

It's also not just the business sector that has lobbyists. There are tons of other groups. The Sierra Club and NRA are two biggies that come to mind. As an individual, it's much more efficient for me to throw in with one of those groups to ensure my interests are protected than it is to do it myself. Both are exceptionally effective at getting what they want because they spend all day keeping an eye on elected (and unelected) government officials and their continued existence hinges on their success.

I'm not arguing that we have to like this current situation, but it's hard for me to think of a better scenario that doesn't infringe on the rights of people to assemble as a group and voice their opininon via financial support, advertising, etc... Just because some of the time we don't personally like the result of lots of lobbyists, doesn't mean this is the root of all evil. In the end, all the money in the world isn't going to compel ordinary citizens to vote for someone who doesn't have their interests in mind. Exhibit A would be John Corzine who had an incredible fortune at his disposal in his reelection bid as governor of NJ and still lost to Chris Christie in 2009.
the link is http://blographi.es
Blossom — Lean Product Development.
Where exactly is that? Apple does a great job of making the mic location non-obvious.
Some people hate having a bookmarks bar visible or just want to make more space for other things.
I didn't like their mischaracterization of the issues: SOPA and PIPA, two almost-dead pieces of legislation that would give the U.S. government and copyright holders the authority to seek court orders against foreign websites associated with infringing intellectual property.

It's not the court orders that were the issue here - it was the entirely extrajudicial ability to shut a site down merely on a copyright holder's say-so. And not just foreign sites!
Thanks for the explanation and for pointing out Yonatan Zunger's comments: I hadn't seen them when I made my post and they paint the new policy in a much more positive light.

I understand that Google did a lot of research in designing the real names policy, and that there are culturally aware teams implementing them. I don't really understand how they determine what's a likely-looking name--even in English, there are a great number of naming cultures: I would imagine the name StJohn Fetherstonhaugh looks as unlikely to an American as Page Lane does to someone from England, but both are "real" names. Would they be routed to the same team?

When you broaden this to the entire world, my confidence in Google's ability to do what is effectively a tedious customer service job falters, especially when you consider that the exact spelling of one's name can be a contentious issue in some parts of the world if one identifies as a particular ethnicity.

What more would I like? I'd like Yonatan Zunger's explanation to be made official policy; I'd also like to know what would happen if I sign up as Fifi Trixibelle Honeyblossom Peaches Pixie Heavenly Hiranni Tigerlily[0] Harlow (not my real name, but equally obviously someone's real name, and thus "name-shaped"), and I'm flagged what recourse I have that doesn't involve changing my name on Google+.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Geldof#Personal_life
Hey man! Thanks! Errr.. long story. I kind of broke it down on there with this thread: http://www.thefastlaneforum.com/progress-threads/32190-progr...
"There was some back and forth about how best to combat piracy, with some in the audience advocating a strategy that supplies more content in new, affordable avenues to undercut the temptation to steal, and Fithian arguing that cheap-prices-up-front approaches such as Netflix streaming and $1 Redbox kiosks are "bad business models.""

Clueless
Sheela ki jawani Chipmunks Version song ~ Daily World News
Shoot me an email james@freelancify.com.
Sucky Things You'd Rather Not Think About
You can sort through thousands of opinions, or you can organize them. Organzied groups of similar thinking folks are what the media calls "special interest groups" or "lobbyists".

Now, quick - find me some scientific literature on a 1031 real estate exchange (for example). Then tell me what you think of them. How long did that take? How confident are you that you understand the issue?

Now do that for 1,000,000 more issues of equal or greater complexity.

Lobbyists are a necessary and good part of democracy.
The problem isn't lobbying. The problem is the corruption that occurs when lawmakers grow dependent on campaign cash (much of which comes from those who lobby for wealthy interests).
Perhaps "plutocracy" would work. The root "ploutus" is the ancient greek word for "wealth".
We must think of the system as a whole. Analysis it as a whole. Then change it for the better. Both lobbyist and politicians are running the system. I dream of a day where the Internet can support a direct democracy, instead of a elected representatives.