skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Pardon me? I don't believe I made any attempt to defend. In fact I suggested that the mindset of the U.S.A being safer than tyrannical regimes might be worth reconsidering.

As far as police enforcement and incarceration in general, the US does not compare to Japan or western Europe. Which is why I didn't compare them that way. It is well known that the US has the highest incarceration rate in the world. According to wikipedia, "The United States has 5% of the world's population and 25% of the world's incarcerated population". That doesn't happen without some questionable police behaviour.
This doesn't sound like the behavior of a police force to me. It sounds more like the behavior of a gang.
A great article, but it has a misunderstanding about what is 'science' trying to figure stuff out. He's right about the neuroscientists - they're trying to figure stuff out from the bottom up, and it's a fairly new discipline. But he's wrong to think that that's all science is. The other half of science in this field is psychology.

Neuroscience is a 'bottom-up' field, starting from the smallest components and trying to understand how they're interacting. Psychology is the 'top-down' field, starting with complex phenomenon and trying to break them down. The psychology of cognition and attenion is the stuff that's relevant where magic's involved. Much of the things that Penn & Teller expose in the workings of magic is known to cognitive and attentional psychology - it's the flawless execution to make it work that is the trick, an idea supported by the magician's mantra 'practise practise practise'.

The problem with the two disciplines above is that there's so much we don't know - we're nowhere near being able to make them 'meet in the middle'. The human mind is incredibly complex.
Just another data point confirming a well known pattern:

The Israeli government has no common sense. They behave like fanatics and should be treated as such.
There was a program called Zune for Windows desktop which was like Windows Media Player but with a radical UI.
It seems obvious that the best long term strategy for media companies is to start addressing the demand. Indeed, over the long term, any other strategy will likely result in those companies being left behind.

But if you're in charge of a media company today, and your bonus this year is tied to a cash cow you can keep alive for a few more years, would you be taking the risk and short term pain of making the transition?

I don't think it's stubbornness or stupidity we're looking at, it's a classic case of misaligned incentives.
In other countries (like the UK), the worse you could expect is them to take your drink, pour it down the drain, and send you on your way. Only if you start getting threatening or violent would you expect a response at that level.
Markdown will let you mention a bare link, e.g. <http://google.com>, and will turn that in a hyperlink with the URL as the linking text.
There's a third option Marco forgot. Imagine that the problem is avoided because someone says, "it's right that we have a trash can by the door because people don't want to touch the door knob with their bare hands," and then follows through on that _correct_ theory by putting a garbage can there.

So I say: if your theory is correct, it'll make sense as a theory (i.e., integrate with the rest of your existing knowledge) AND it'll work in practice. If what you're trying keeps failing, the solution is to go back, check your premises, and identify what's wrong with your theory. Often people do this automatically (and call it being "pragmatic"), but with bigger ideas, an explicit approach is required.

To go for long without theory is to fly blind, and that's dangerous. Ideas and theory are what allow us to fly in the first place, as well as to change course before we hit the proverbial mountain hidden in the fog just ahead.
Most importantly, I never knew why so many people at my office threw their paper towels on the ground next to the door (or in a trashcan located thereabouts, when available). Now I do.

I still don't understand why people think the post-bathroom door is disgusting enough to merit hand protection. If anything, it's the door people are most likely to have touched AFTER washing their hands. Do these people bring another paper with them to open the door on the way in?
I'm trying to write this comment without hyperbole, but if I fail, forgive me.

The US is systematically destroying their main competitive advantage: luring the hardest working and/or most intelligent people to their country with the promise that they will be surrounded by others like them (either smart, or hard working, or both) and that they will be free to use their talents as they wish (research physics, build a chain of clothing stores, or start an internet startup).

I wanted to move to America when I was much younger. Canada was a bit more left wing than it is right now (although it still has its problems, don't get me wrong, and I'm mostly talking about the cultural attitude of left wingers, rather than the policies themselves) and America was a bit more economically free and much more socially free. The mindstate that the common citizens are in is appalling. I talked to one man the other day that seriously believed that police should be able to come into your house without a warrant and search your belongings. The fear of terrorism, the blatant anti-intellectualism, and the rampant corruption are ruining the appeal to foreigners to relocate.

And I'm a white, Christian, English speaking, male. The only mark against me is that my dad's name is the Turkish version of Mohammed, but he's half German, so none of it shows. I can't imagine how much damage has been done to the attractiveness of America in the past decade to a real middle easterner.

Now all of this being said, I've been to America many, many times. American people are great. Some of my family is American. Many, if not most, of my intellectual idols are American, but America needs to clean up the corruption and relax a lot more in order to restore her place in the world.
Welp, I don't like it. It's too, erm, "indistinct" [which itself is a pretty nondescript description!]. For MS I suspect they couldn't use this as a major theme because of lack of contrast.

On a consistency POV, in http://img198.imageshack.us/img198/9029/desktopoy.jpg, why does the [web] browser have a separated tab bar but the file manager doesn't? No tabbed file browsing? Why are the tabs in the skype window not coloured like those of the browser window?

Aside: Which leads me on to wonder as cloud storage and web apps grow ever more the focus will we move back to the earlier concept behind IE [and Konqueror and the like] of browsing local and web-based content through a single interface.

Couple of other questions on the UI - why is the top padding inconsistent, and so large (it's massive isn't it?!); where is the limit of the scrollbar and why don't the scrollbars start a consistent distance from the top of the window.

I can see why it's loved by those being vocal about it; but it's not for me.
I've been working with Rails since 2004 and am in the group that cheers both the negative and positive stories since, well, I think a lively atmosphere filled with debate is a healthy one.

And.. I'm no big Rails 3 fan but it's still a fine technology to use and even to begin a career on nowadays. Just like PHP is. Just like Java is. Rails is not going to get swapped out wholesale for anything else in the next several years but new things might start to find new niches, just as Rails did 7 years ago.

A lot of us who've used Rails for a long time can see the warts a little better and might be getting itchy feet in areas where we'd have shoehorned Rails. But that doesn't mean Rails sucks or is about to die.
I'd rather have people understand there's no simplistic black or white right vs wrong. But only each ones personal interests. Than to come up with subjective excuses of why we shouldn't try to do the "right".

Piracy isn't "wrong", it's in the best interest of some and not of others. The most healthy attitude, imo, is to objectively measure the pros vs cons and only then judge what should you do. Almost any decision you ever take will favor someone and not others. What we cannot let happen is let those of opposite interest convince us that our interest is "wrong", ignoring one of the sides of the issue.

Intellectual monopoly privileges might be in the interest of a few select copyright holders. But maybe not in the best interest of users. No side is right our wrong, but just have different interests.
I don't see how the requirement to ingest $SPECIFIC_CHEMICAL_A is any different than the need to ingest any other chemical i.e. food.
> am I missing something? This strikes me as primarily being a visual design or what some people call a theme.

Looks like it's a little more than a theme, maybe a theme for a shell replacement? Like what desktop modders used to do with LiteStep* back in the day.

Very attractive, I would add -- minimalistic, clean, perhaps a little soulless. I'd use it, though, as others commented, the lack of contrast might get a little taxing in the long run, hard to say.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LiteStep
I think this approach helps to avoid simply building up muscle memory for certain words.
Because the chemical in this case is something we have all the necessary things to produce.

I can't make energy (ie. food) from no input, but with some energy expenditure, my body could carry out the set of reactions to convert glucose (which is readily available in the diet) to Vitamin C.
And it's awesome!
+1
Well the difference between the pre-bathroom door handle and the post-bathroom door handle (opposite sides of the same door, presumably) is that one of them is much more likely to have been touched by someone who may have just been to the toilet without washing their hands.

You wouldn't be that worried about touching the door on the way in especially if you knew you were going to be washing your hands in a moment.
Overrated: Bully's R Rating Should Mean the End of the MPAA
My point is that voting determines what's relevant. Voting has put this on the front page. It's not about what you think, or whether you would argue that cognitive bias "is arguably more germane to HN", it has to do with what HN readers think is valuable and vote for.
This reminds me of one of my favorite GTK themes: Elegant Brit (http://gnome-look.org/content/show.php/?content=74553).
So critiquing the practices of US agencies (and advising to steer away from their reach) is xenophobia all of a sudden?

Then in your eyes, critiquing the reckless and brutal behavior of the Israeli government against Palestinians must be antisemitism. ;)

And I thought it was me who was using a broad brush.
There's a similar theme already called Elegant_brit. It doesn't look exactly same, but there's resemblance.

Also in this concept window manager takes really much screen estate. Even tough it looks great while looking at non-maximized windows, it would start itching really quick when working in day-to-day basis. Also I wonder how concept author would replace lost functionality of menu bar...

Finally, what bugs me most is that scroll bars are a rip-off from Ubuntu-like scroll bars. (I don't say that Ubuntu didn't ripped them off tho.)
You totally hit the nail on the head: DRM 'works' if it makes it difficult to get access to content, not impossible. And of course, I say that having spent the majority of my teenage years reversing DRM. Nobody believes that DRM will hold up forever, but there's a huuuuge imbalance here that favors the DRM creators, which is that it's really, really easy to put together modifications on a DRM system that make a reverser's life hell. For a while, iTunes was rolling out a new version of their store page crypto with every release (and deprecating the old one) so I'd have to go and reverse it to keep my iTMS client working; I may have kept up for a while, but eventually I stopped because it simply took too much damn time, and they won in the end with a fairly small amount of work from their side.

That imbalance means that DRM will always work, even if it doesn't 'work'.
On a personal note, I had a workplace bathroom once that was worse than this, also in trash bins. The one you were supposed to throw paper towels into after washing your hands, had a spring-loaded lid that required at least two pounds of pressure to open - and that was the least of the design problems.

More to the point, it fascinates me how the media companies' obduracy makes hackers in particular blindingly angry. It's interesting that from our side, they seem so insanely, self-destroyingly, offensively stupid that we just can't believe that they're really doing this. It's interesting on that cultural level as well as on the less abstract levels.
But then I'd have to take a more nuanced view and admit it's not all black and white. And I don't want that, because I'm really angry right now. And I think such anger does have a function by making a tiny contribution to the public pressure on US govt agencies. Let them know they're having a really bad image in the world.
Weird article.

First, so far as I can tell, this guy wasn't arrested. If you're going to have strong opinions on US civil liberties, start by knowing the difference between detention and arrest. In this case, the guy appears to have walked away from the incident with a ticket. He wasn't taken to a station, booked, processed, read his rights, or informed "you're under arrest". Also, in the state of New York, open container is a misdemeanor; in many (maybe most?) states, you can't be "arrested" for a misdemeanor without an outstanding arrest warrant.

Arrest is very bad. It creates a record, it allows the officer to search (thoroughly) your person and immediate presence, and in major metro areas will probably incur the very unpleasant process of being booked (in many cities, this may involve a strip search). Don't get arrested.

Detention is what happens when you're not free to leave but aren't being arrested. You can be cuffed during a detention. Very little cause is required to detain. Detention does not create a record, and (very importantly) does not allow the detaining officer to do much more than frisk for weapons.

In either case, laughing at police officers, while legal, is dumb. Picking a fight with them ("you're giving a bad image of America!") is even dumber. Stanford Prison Experiment aside, whatever the power dynamics may be, you are unlikely to be able to fathom the bullshit city police have to deal with on a daily basis during their shifts. You simply aren't going to be able to take the high ground from them; they don't care. The very fact that you'd consider needling a cop about their behavior is a spectacular luxury, and while I support vigorously everyone's right to avail themselves of that luxury, I'm not particularly impressed by people abusing it.

Finally, a summons for open container is in all likelihood not something that would have any impact on one's immigration status (you can Google this question to see immigration lawyers answering it). "Court summons" sounds scary, but it is exactly the same language used when you get a traffic ticket. Cops: not immigration officials. Happy to clear that up for him.

(Incidentally: in most of the US, you cannot buy alcohol in a pharmacy 24/7 --- although that is, I think, a silly rule).
Good news - it looks like you can just plead by mail:

http://www.courts.state.ny.us/courts/nyc/criminal/specialpro...

Effective July 1, 2004 individuals who receive a Criminal Court Summons citing a violation of Section 10-125 (2b) of the N.Y.C. Administrative Code- “Consumption of Alcohol on Streets Prohibited” ( also known as “Open Container Violation” or “Consumption of Alcohol in Public”) are eligible to plead guilty and pay a $25 fine by mail. This program is available to persons charged with this petty offense only, and only if no other summonses are issued to the individual at the same time.

In order to plead guilty by mail you must send the following:

the plea form, completed and signed
the summons you received
check or money order for $25 made payable to NYC Criminal Court (DO NOT SEND CASH) with the summons number written on the payment
The above items must be mailed within 10 days of the date that the summons was issued, to:
N.Y.C. Criminal Court
P.O. Box 555
New York, NY 10013-0555
If you plead guilty by mail, you do not need to appear in Court.
That is the kind of ignorant idea I used to have. It is time you got beyond the media failing to provide a true historical context for what is probably the most over-reported region of the planet.

Already in 1929 in Hebron "Palestinian" Arabs were massacring jews in Hebron. Jews who had live in Hebron for some thousands of years. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1929_Hebron_massacre The way the media presents this story, the jews arrived in Palestine after WW2. There's never any mention of the Muslim Brotherhood joining forces with the principle muslim leader of the area and with the Nazis in the 1930s. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haj_Amin_al-Husseini#In_Nazi-oc...

The media bear a terrible responsibility for their failure to provide any kind of historical context to the problems in Israel/Palestine.
No matter how friendly you think they might be, you should always avoid talking to cops. http://youtu.be/i8z7NC5sgik
Python never converts an int to a long. Instead, it may return a long from the result of an operation on an int if that result wouldn't find in an int.
Japan's immigration control: Gulag for gaijin

http://www.economist.com/blogs/banyan/2012/01/japans-immigra...

Just off the top of my head because it was recently published. But if you don't think it'd be easy to dig up French or British security service nightmares you're deluding yourself.
the HN guidelines determine what should be submitted. The flag option exists in part because some HN readers submit or upvote stories that the guidelines say don't belong here.
I don't understand what you're reacting to here. This is a guy who successfully got into the US and got a ticket for an open container (his friends may have been arrested, I couldn't tell --- but he wasn't). What systematic problem is this article indicating?
Open containers are illegal in New York. Moreover, a 10 minute search on the Internet would have let him know that he doesn't have to appear in court, but can plead guilty by mail and pay the whopping $25 fine.

http://www.nycourts.gov/courts/nyc/criminal/specialprojects....

You know what I try not to do when I visit other countries? Break their laws.

Also, I pay attention when the police are talking to me and don't antagonize them.

Edit:

After reading it for the third time, I am still at a loss at what the cops did wrong in this situation except be exceedingly polite to people who are breaking the law.

My reading of this is that the police shouted at two people committing a misdemeanor to halt. They did not. The police stopped them with appropriate force. One person fought the police like a drunk moron and was tackled.

From then on the entire group of them is acting like drunk idiots and the cop tells them to shut up.

Polite? No. Abuse of power? No. I see nothing wrong here, unless you think that the police should be forced to take etiquette classes to deal with blazed foreigners who don't take the time to read about local laws on controlled substance use.
I'm just like you in that I'm more of a hacker that has trouble figuring out how to make things look good. Try this book (I've read 3/4 of it--excellent book):

http://www.amazon.com/Design-Hackers-Reverse-Engineering-Bea...

It was made just for people like us!
Visually it looks nice but practically I don't think it works for a lot of users. I would guess that with all the white-space and over-sized elements you're only getting maybe 50% of the same content on a screen layout. What this would be good for say is to throw Windows into a "Streamlined" mode. Set basic users set this interface and then use the stock UI for advanced users.
Best to avoid the US altogether. Police over-reacting is totally [1] unheard [2] of in Europe [3].

[1] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=A683tiFk6tM

[2] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ii_Kx-mExBg

[3] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tI0S-AcqQ1g

I hardly want to excuse police misbehavior; it's distasteful wherever it happens, but it's hardly a phenomenon unique to America.
Where I live, there are lots of men that don't wash their hands after urinating. I've seen it enough that I'll never touch the door without a bit of paper to protect me.
A large bank in UK has all of it's office doors plated with metal near the bottom, also the doors open both ways making them really suitable for kicking, I don't know if the original intention was that.
He could have written exactly the same "my NASA dreams are dashed" hyperbole had he run a red light, or even jaywalked. In every case, if he doesn't pay the ticket, a judge could issue an arrest warrant --- but almost certainly wouldn't. If this had happened in Chicago, the likely outcome would be that he'd be turned over for collections.
I have a phone call planned for next week about becoming an intern for my Year in Industry (during my third year at uni)... hopefully it will not require such a high level as yours did!
One thing that kind of stuck out was that you were walking with a group of your friends who were drinking in public, and you were high. I don't mean to be crass but you were basically waiting to get picked on in the city. It seems like the cop had thought you were in possession of drugs.

Apart from that, I think that there are a lot of details that are missing that could have shed more light on why you were treated as such. The officers comments, however, are not the kind that I would expect a police man to say.
Bret Victor - Inventing on Principle
Let's not confuse our terms. If you break the criminal law you are a criminal. If you violate some other statute (e.g. failing to stop at a stop sign, drinking in public, being undressed in a public place) it's not the same thing. You are not a criminal and shouldn't be treated as such. Yes you can be charged and required to appear in court, but that doesn't, in any way, make you a criminal.
I wish things were different, to be honest, but if you put yourself in the law enforcement officer's point of view, what's the difference between a few tourists enjoying a bottle of wine on the street, and a few drunken hooligans causing trouble and starting fights. I'm not saying you were doing anything like that, but a cop really can't discriminate.

Don't make needless excuses. Firstly, there are many ways the law discriminates in your example; given your description, a cop could probably cite the second group for disorderly conduct or assault.

In addition, cops are not machines who accept a sequence of events and output "legal" or "illegal." Nor should they be, or could they be, given the complexity of law. An individual officer is indeed expected to exercise discretion and to enforce the law in ways that help society. It's impossible to take that discretion away from them, since we don't always have a way to judge the objective truth of situations without trusting some of the people involved, so we should remember that they hold that responsibility and be wary of attempts to discharge it.
Staples: A company in dire need of a Bain Capital Moment
For management to be right they should take away the paper towels and install a hot air hand dryer.