skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
"if there is a genuine need for ____, and value in having them (quite plausible), then Government funding is not the best approach to creating them or running them efficiently".

The problem with that argument is there is Nothing that get's past it.

People talk about creating wealth like it exists in a vacuum but without the knowledge and resources that comes from living in society You can't create such things. Bill gates would have been completely incapable of creating 99.99999% of his wealth if he had been born a mere 10,000 years ago. That's not to suggest society should the vast majority of your output but giving up 1/3 of your income to keep things running smoothly is in no way unfair. If you really think you would be better off fending for your self without tools or knowledge then feel free to get a lobotomy and move to an island somewhere otherwise you do owe society a great deal.
TL;DR - Just because you don't use the library doesn't mean no one needs them anymore. Not everyone's Real Life Issues are amenable to a self-service web portal, and that's not just because no one has built the right widgets yet.

> it will be a slow death by a thousand cuts

It will be a slow descent into budget fugue, followed by an extremely quick death when we pass an inflection point in "the number of people who remember getting awesome value out of their local/municipal library system."

I bet when a lot of people here first started hearing about library closures in their old neighborhood, or wherever they're living now, their initial reaction was one of total shock followed by "well I guess I can see how that could happen."

When people hear about library closures now, they could be skipping the shock entirely, passing smoothly through "aw that's too bad", and fading into "well there's Google."

> [the library] need[s] to become the center of civic engagement

We need a center of civic engagement with both equality and equity of access. Libraries are a decent foundation on which to build such a thing, but there's at least one common feature of libraries that makes them awful for this: people are supposed to be quiet in the library.

There should be almost nothing quiet about civic engagement, finding a job, learning new skills, research, etc. Less giant rooms with rows of people not saying anything; more smaller sound-proofed rooms with whiteboards and projectors. Like a giant executive briefing center, only with fewer executives and more regular folks with something to ask/teach each other.
"Less interference"? The Singapore government left their fingerprints everywhere here. If you want to hold Singapore up as an example, you are really advocating the government poking their nose into everything.

How would you like to have all your telcos, transportation companies, media companies, all owned or controlled by the government? Welcome to Singapore.
> we will not do anything remotely creepy with your data

That is exactly what I'm trying to advocate for in my post. However, I don't agree that you should wait until you can afford a lawyer to put up a policy. Think of it this way: If a regulator comes knocking at your door accusing you of some privacy violation are you better off saying, "I couldn't afford a lawyer which is why I have no policy," or "I couldn't afford a lawyer but I did my best to comply with the law as I understood it?"

I think the later is obviously the better position. In addition you get the trust building benefits to boot.
I agree, and I think Julia's designers have chosen correctly not to use the JVM (although, in the comments below you'll find that Julia uses boxed types for "structs" as well, though it would be far easier to build true array-embeddable complex types on LLVM than on the JVM). However, value types for the JVM are a work in progress (as well as tail-calls), and I think they might have already been implemented in the DaVinchi project (future JVM improvements), and so will find their way to the JVM in due time (see https://blogs.oracle.com/jrose/entry/tuples_in_the_vm). Until then, scientific computing languages will most likely choose a different platform.
Digital tools 'to save languages'
> take a look at any interface created to "replace" a paper form. I haven't seen one that looked or functioned like it had been updated in a decade.

The best example I can think of is tax software, and that's hardly changed in a decade. Sadly, most "replace a paper form" interfaces fall short even of that.
Did it 12 years ago after a tiny windfall from stock options...

During that time I launched one of the first distributed computing projects and almost finished porting a console game to Java. At that point, I made the decision that getting paid is good and went back to work.

More recently, I took a month off after working briefly at Google nearly sapped my will to live. But in this case, I already had the next and better gig lined up.

But I made the call that the first hour of every day from then on would be devoted to reading tech books. In just a few months I went from crusty niche engineer to working knowledge of Javascript, Python, Django, GWT, and HTML 5 and I'm already applying all of it. Ironically, I think if I had gone into google with this in my head, I would have had far more opportunities made available to me instead of the wretched allocation that was my only choice.

(Now if any googlers are about to chime in about the smoke blown up one's patootie at orientation that it takes ~6 months to come up to speed there, I was told point blank by my manager that rule only applies to NCGs and that I was already falling short by not having come up to full speed in 2 to 3 weeks)
The "get rid of society" mentality of some libertarians/anarchists is one of the reasons I do not call myself a libertarian.

However it's no reason to reject all libertarian or classical liberal type ideas. Just because society brings value, and Steve Jobs made his fortune in context, does not mean taxes should pay for all sorts of stuff or that it's necessary to either give up a third of my income or find for myself without tools or knowledge. That's a false dichotomy. It'd be possible to have a functional society, with knowledge and tools and so on, with a lot less being provided by taxes and more being provided by non-Government entities.
I see the Libertarian stance essentially as a claim that people who are born into difficult circumstances deserve it wholly; and people who are born into good circumstances deserve it wholly.

Thus, we see heavy support for this philosophy from people who are fortunate enough to be born into a class of people who haven't spent much of their lives figuring out where they'll get their next meal, how they'll travel to work or school, or where they'll sleep that night. We see support for this philosophy from people whose skills happen to mesh strongly with the skills that are rewarded by our economy at this point in history.

Not everything that creates value makes money. In business we can often point to examples where excellent customer service increases the lifetime value of the customer, but if you attempted to charge the customer directly for that customer service, they'd revolt. Libraries have a similar function in that they create lifetime value for their customers, but because much of the value takes years to accumulate, many of the customers simply can't afford to pay it up-front.

While your arguments are straight out of the Libertarian playbook, that's their great problem. You want an every man for himself anarchy, but many of us prefer a society in which many large, useful things are handled out of the box for a nominal fee; and those of us who support that find it quite annoying that you want to make our lives harder and call it freedom, that you want to take away protection against circumstance and call it liberty.
Libraries are good for the majority of people who can't afford them.

People who have the money to support them, don't need them.

By the time there are enough sufferers, and discontented others who create an externality where libraries are useful, the solution for those who can afford it is personal protection.

So as a result, libraries wont get funded.
Can I ask why they are the "last dying days"?

A refurbished ThinkPad T61p, Core 2 Duo, can unofficially be upgraded with 8Gb and an SSD, 1920x1200 in a 15" screen is now under £300. It is also many years old, but I suspect that a former top of the line ThinkPad would beat any modern bottom of the line laptop for the same money, and better screen spec too.

I'm uncomfortable about how old it is, though, hence wondering if you mean your laptop is falling apart, or if you mean it is too low spec for modern use.
For anyone else who hits this, this should get you going:

http://loopkid.net/articles/2011/09/20/ssl-certificate-error...

Basically, you need to get the right certs and then tell wget to use them.
alright... i contacted him... the site is down permanently
Wasting? How is it a waste in your opinion?

Edit: You are getting downvoted, so at least you should have a chance to explain your position.
It's funny, I never used to listen to drum & bass except when I went out, but these days it's pretty much all I listen to - while at work, on the bus, wherever. I guess that when you get enough exposure to a certain genre, you can find all different kinds of music to suit every situation just in that genre.

Phace & Misanthrop have been doing some awesome work! The Neosignal music is really great.
Same here. I think it's very personal at the end of the day. Stigma is an all time favourite! :)
If you have to ask, you are neither. </non serious answer>

<more serious answer>

At what point did we start creating such nonmenclature by which you are either one or the other. They aren't mutually exclusive, and by most accounts, 99.9999% they are the same.

I tell people that I am a coder.

</more serious answer?
Early fire departments were run by insurance companies to fight fires on their customers' properties. Those who couldn't afford insurance would be left to burn.

http://www.london-fire.gov.uk/FireMarksAndPayments.asp
It sounds like he's saying it's hard for Julia to interop with languages that don't support arrays of inline structs (e.g. Java). I could be misreading it though.
I meant persuade people with money to pay for them.

You value them. Why don't you pay something voluntarily? And a thousand other yous? Why doesn't Bill Gates throw some money at it if it's a super efficient use of resources?

He will, and many other non-poor people will, if they are persuaded it's a better use of their resources than Greenpeace, Oxfam, malaria medicine for Africa, clean water for Africa, and so on.

If such people can't be persuaded of this -- that it's an efficient use of resources -- then that's no time to send the tax man to take their money for this purpose and divert it away from the purposes they judge to be more important.
Horizons still gives me goose bumps listening to it! Such an amazing vocal sample :)

Happily surprised by the amount of people posting dnb on this thread to be honest :)
Drawing a parallel to the Canadian healthcare system:

I haven't been sick in 12 years. Yet, every year, I pay taxes to keep the public healthcare system running. Even though it's not something I use, undoubtedly, there are people who need it, and wouldn't be able to pay for it if it wasn't public.

About a month ago, I exhibited the symptoms of some kind of ventricular tachycardia (heart arrhythmia). As advised by a friend in medicine (in a different city), I tried to get myself booked for an ECG, to see what exactly was wrong. Without getting into the details, let's just say that even to this day, I haven't been able to get one.

I can definitely see why people don't want to pay, not just for services that they'll never use, but for services they'll probably be unable to use, even if they ever need to.
In Compton, people could give two shits about a web app, but everyone knows that the library is down the street.
I don't know about others, but I find it hard to jump from one syntax to another.

The other day I started doing some Java after months in Perl, and all my variable names were starting with "$", and I had "my " before declarations. I know an IDE can prevent this, but it took me some time to get my bearings.

Having said that: exposure to a spectrum of languages makes one think differently, and, IMHO, makes one a better problem-solver. Just observe how you think of a problem when trying it in, say, LISP -vs- Prolog; or FP -vs- Java.
A flag no more: Microsoft unveils new Windows logo
Stash: a Smalltalk shell or what happens when your mind wanders in the shower
Yes...let's be realistic here. I would wager nearly all apps on the app store have reviews by employees of the company that made them. This is not unusual, or surprising.

Hate on Zynga for ripping off another guy's work, but I'm pretty sure the other guy would have reviewed his own app too!
Yep, you're absolutely right. I was mainly offering a different viewpoint that might be refreshing to those who have always heard the "code is data and data is code" statement, but never really understood it.

Focusing on `read` was a way to anchor my article, even if it truly isn't about read either. I tried to tie that together at the end.
make worked very smoothly here on my Mac, downloaded and installed its own deps.

Great work guys.
Now you have a situation where a large part of the population is forced to pay a private middleman for the privilege of interacting with their government. That's not an improvement.
Hm, copy & paste inside Inkscape worked for me well.
Neat feature. In my opinion, they should go even further and make use of the information and inform the user, too:

"Your ISP (network administrator, ..) is intercepting and manipulating DNS requests. Do you want to use Google DNS instead?"

Comes in real handy when we need to have a "DnsManipulationDetector" in the future that checks if your DNS is actively censoring...
Maybe I'm just not in a skeptical mood today, but the anecdote in that story points out something that I tend to take for granted. I'm probably not alone, especially here on HN.

That is, the fact that some people just really don't understand the most basic concepts of using a computer. And it's not their fault.

Your breath seizes in your chest, and you realize you have no idea what to do. You have the form that they gave you at the social services office, which has an address, which you sort of know what that does, but you can't quite remember – 17 minutes, by the way. You try typing X City Social Services in a box at the top, a page comes back and says “address not found” with a list of things below it. You're panicking...

I'm all for increasing the use of technology in order to make things work more smoothly and efficiently, but this story points out just how left-behind this can leave some people.

I guess the answer is better education, and not just in schools. I guess I can be glad that there are a lot of people working in that space. Even then, before anyone can use Khan Academy or enroll in online classes, they need to have a better idea of "what a [web] address does", and sometimes even whether to "do a left or right click".
Caterina Fake gets a better first look on her projects because she earned it. She's cashing in on the value she already created. To overcome that, you just need to work harder, smarter and be better.
Any pointers to Ubuntu (10.04) packages for this version of VLC?
From College To Silicon Valley: Tips From A Veteran
I don't know if I'd call it duck-typing when methods are not grouped into interfaces. I think you could say that in Julia, each method is an interface. I find it much cleaner than actual "duck-typing" (the way it's done in , say, Scala with structural types) because then you have both an interface, which specifies a contract, as well as the method name, which also specifies a contract when duck-typing is used, even when it's found in different interfaces.

Must compound types in Julia be concrete? I don't think I saw it in the documentation.
I'm going to reject one of the premises of the article, namely the premise that he is helping people who are "barely surviving".

Let's consider people who are receiving cash or non-cash benefits, as the article described. Among these people, 67% have cable or satellite TV. 38% have a playstation. 47% own a computer. 23% have a big screen TV. Only 14% of people receiving government benefits lacked all of these luxuries. [1]

It's only in a nation as wealthy as the US that we could describe such a group of people as "barely surviving".

[1] Data from this csv file: http://explore.data.gov/Energy-and-Utilities/Residential-Ene...

Code definitions taken from here: http://www.eia.gov/emeu/recs/recspubuse05/pubuse05.html

It's my new favorite data set.

[edit: wow, do some data analysis on raw govt data, provide facts, and get downmodded about 3 seconds after posting. Did I accidentally post on reddit?]
For things that are super good, super useful but not profitable nor predisposition for voluntary support how does a community get those things? Especially those within the community whom might not afford otherwise? And especially when the lack for them causes cascading affect to the whole of the community?

Seems to me an outbreak of disease by the poor surely effects the whole and that we all would do well to pay a "tax" to prevent that?
Government is also useful for things which have massive positive externalities. Education is the paradigmatic example.

Libraries are also an example of a good where maintaining the "option to buy" is potentially more important than any service you consume. In other words, having a big pile of books in a building, available for close to no cost, enables us all to act more freely -- knowing we can get more information when we need it.
in any language where objects are boxed, it becomes very tricky. We're working on it, however

Naive question (and I'll hold my tongue on my naive guesses): I understand why it is necessary to box user-defined types on the JVM, but why build this restriction into a new language that doesn't run on a restricted platform? Especially when performance and C interop are high priorities?

Or perhaps I misunderstood, and your statement should be read as sparsevector suggested.
This has less to do with moral panics, and more to do with an acute awareness of the dangers that come with unidirectional transparency.

HN's demographic may be more attuned to these problems than most, but it's absurd to think that this basic concern is feature of this community alone.
I was trying to present the good side of libertarianism.

The argument you present for libertarians is bad and borderline shameful (and, I think, not representative of the majority of libertarians. but certainly something some of them would say). But there much better arguments with similar conclusions.

The main reason it's an awful position, in my view, is that it's premised on conflicts of interest and compromise -- some things outweigh others, and there are losers which must lose while having legitimate points. It views life as a mixed bag, with inevitable suffering and sacrifice and loss.

This is not the position of, for example, Ayn Rand who argued in Virtue of Selfishness chapter 4 for a very different worldview in which there are no conflicts of interest among rational men.

Your claim that if voluntary charity worked, no one would have invented public services in the first place is incorrect. If voluntary charity didn't work in the context in which Government was first invented, that absolutely doesn't imply that a more sophisticated version of voluntary charity could not work today in a rather different world.
The infrastructure cost of it is a barrier. One has to understand the 'news' is "the highest value video production out there next to porn" [1], you take a producer, a camera person, and a talking head, and you record what you see.

And to the text only question, efforts using text have not been successful, people seem to prefer to consume it as video or audio when doing something else. The goal is to disrupt Fox, not the Chronicle, you need to do it in a way that the average person has very little friction between wanting to know 'what's happening' and getting the news. They have been voting 'video' by their consumption habits to date.

Most of the efforts I've seen that have started along here have chickened out when it came to being the network vs being a repackager. They spend a weekend writing a server that repackages the AP feed and maybe reads it aloud. But the editorial voice is pretty important for this endeavor. You really do need to be the news organization.

The other barrier is that the 'value chain', which is to say the way in which news is monetized is very well understood and so you cannot succeed by being another 'channel' to get to the same stuff someone else has, if you are successful they cut you off from the content. Or if you leverage someone else's network they cut you off from the bandwidth. So you either have to 'go big' here, or not go at all. That means a studio for putting the final product together, a mobile reporting force which can get to places, and partnerships in place for places where you cannot afford to get to yet.

The change which has been occuring which will make this possible today when it wasn't possible before is that enough consumers have the requisite network bandwidth to their home or office to support it, and they are likely to have a device which can stream it (Roku, PS3, Samsung 'smart' TV, etc). The sweet spot of this market is the 22 - 42 year olds who want a better news experience than they are getting and have high comfort with technological solutions. As a 'network' you also already have a business model that can slot you into a relationship with folks like Comcast, DirectTV, or Time Warner. Partner with them and their 'smart set top' on a rev share basis and you give added value add for their customers, and pricing leverage against those networks you are disrupting.

[1] This was a quote from the guy who was the GM or EVP of the KRON TV news group at a talk he gave back in the 90's in Palo Alto.
I didn't know about this and it's quite interesting. But I wonder why it no longer exists this way? Is there a reason why a "for-profit" discontinued a service like this?

EDIT: Seems I found a clue ....

"In 1862 insurance companies told the government that they were unwilling to be responsible for London’s fire protection as the cost of compensation was becoming too high. The government decided that the Metropolitan Board of Works would take control."