skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Punishment that neither makes the victim whole or rehabilitates the offender is just useless vengeance.

You're ignoring deterrence. And yes, deterrence works. I don't park in red zones all that often.

You're also ignoring the benefits of "warehousing". If person A commits an assault a week, general society avoids an assault every week that person A is in jail.

You can argue that the cost exceeds the benefit, but you don't get to ignore the benefit.

> At one point in our history the criminal justice discussions were about how best to rehabilitate the offender rather than punishment.

Yes, that's what they talked about, but what did they accomplish?
Scrivener for iOS: An Update (There’s a Long Road Ahead Yet)
I was a conference director for seven years, and everything you say is true. In addition to what you mentioned, conference organizers are forced to estimate the number of attendees and reserve blocks of hotel rooms to ensure availability. In most cases, you're doing this eight months in advance - before any of the speakers have been selected. If you fail to hit your room night reserve, you pay out the nose.
Reference: http://www.kashflow.com/about/people/duane-jackson/
This article is shockingly bad, from the very first sentence:

> There are only 3 enterprise-grade technology products I’ve ever seen that sell themselves. Two of them are from Apple

Huh? What "enterprise-grade" Apple product? XServe? Apple is nowhere in the enterprise, and thank god for that.

Here's some enterprise software that sells itself: Exchange. BES (well, used to). ProCurve. DRAC. Symantec Ghost. Did you see iTunes Group Policy Server anywhere in that list?

The article starts off stupid and only goes downhill from there. This guy doesn't know what the hell he's talking about.
Ex parte Yarbrough:

The proposition that it has no such power is supported by the old argument often heard, often repeated, and in this Court never assented to, that, when a question of the power of Congress arises, the advocate of the power must be able to place his finger on words which expressly grant it.

In other words, this argument was a boring cliche in 1884.

We know of no express authority to pass laws to punish theft or burglary of the treasury of the United States. Is there therefore no power in Congress to protect the treasury by punishing such theft and burglary?

You'd find this and probably 100 other establishing SCOTUS cases on even a brief Google foray into the limits of the Necessary and Proper Clause. Long story short: you still have to pay your income taxes.
The FEDS are trying to Spy on our Skype and Social Networks
Apple and Samsung make up 99% of the mobile phone market profits
Did you read the article? Here's the important point:

From this perspective, comparison shopping may focus
consumers' attention on differences between available options, leading them to overestimate the hedonic impact of selecting a more versus less desirable option. To the extent that the process of comparison shopping focuses attention on hedonically irrelevant attributes, comparison shopping may even lead people to choose a less desirable option over a more desirable option.

Pricenomics helps you get the best/fair price for an existing thing you were already going to buy. It is purely about making a more informed decision about one item, not comparing between somewhat different products and making the wrong decision.
Then presumably they'll also be removing books like this one?

http://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/web-security-testing-cookboo...
Boeing agrees to buy Airbus jets to ease 777 sale
No Starch Press owned by the founder, not some large corporation. They publish excellent technical books.

I've met the founder, Bill, he's a great guy.
Scoop.it – My Curation Platform Of Choice » Borasky Research Journal
In a better system (basically the system we as citizens of our respective countries should be pushing our lawmakers into.) socioeconomic trends, race and sex shouldn't have anything to do with how bad someone gets punished.

Also, I would appreciate it a lot of you did go into details about the wife versus husband abuse. Seems to me that the only answer to that is sexism though. For many years it's been held in certain groups that women being the child bearing gender and men being the "bread winners" meant that men were somehow above women. In many area's of the world it's much worse then others but regardless you see that everywhere. It would seem to go without saying that that's wrong, but I'm speaking as a man who respects people equally, and leaves it to each individual to prove to me their merit. A whole ton of people think that their race is best, and that their gender is best, for reasons they all think are good. It makes me wonder how we might be able to change this, I feel it starts with leading by example.
Truecrypt is OSS and has some insanely brilliant people working on it. I think that more than a couple people would notice if there were shenanigans afoot.
A brief history of Haiku OS
Very nice, but what if you get a gag order from FBI or NSA? Then you would be required to go to prison if you uphold your promises on the web site and disclose what happened.

But I would be interested in your comments regarding this theoretical situation. Surely you must have thought about it.
I enjoyed your book! Are there any plans for an updated or expanded version?

If anyone wants a simple introduction to Rx, Paul Betts (and Jesse Liberty) wrote one last year.

http://www.amazon.com/Programming-Reactive-Extensions-Jesse-...
I'm unsure what you're trying to say there. Yes, I am aware that it's possible to serve files without exposing your whole file system. Did you think that was something that might be in doubt?
The new Samsung Note comes with a S-Pen that I believe retracts into the device. The Samsung Galaxy SII works with a stylus. Early tablets (from the 90s) came with similar pointing/writing devices.

Do people type faster because of predictive text?
Hiring??? :D
Some domain names that are in their redemption period can be bought directly from the registrar. For example godaddy has godaddy auctions (https://auctions.godaddy.com/) Maybe the registrar of your desired domain name has the same. I would buy it that way if you don't want to take the chance it gets snatched right after the domain is available.
Never respond to those emails though.
I can recommend "The Land of Lisp" - a fun introduction into Common Lisp: http://nostarch.com/lisp.htm
The real story should be how they put the Confluence back-ups on the same raid disk as everything else. Yeah, thankfully we had back-ups when their server went down. Or maybe how sub-tasks on JIRA can't have sub-tasks. Or that any other thing I've seen that tries to compete with it looks better/feels better/gives a better user experience. Or... should I continue?
What I am assuming is that someone who doesn't have a college degree has this knowledge in bits and pieces, accumulated randomly over the years. I don't mean to imply that knowledge accumulated in that way is insufficient in order to be a balls-out startup founder, or have a very high-paying job as a software engineer.

I left high school having a lot of programming experience already under my belt, and by then I've read quite a few CS books (the two "programming pearls", and the two "turing omnibus" books), and since then I've met quite a few people like myself, so a large part of what you are saying resonates with me.

However, I would argue that every so often there are problems that one encounters in software engineering for which a haphazard, practical education is insufficient, and only a very rigorous, "from the ground-up" education will do. For example, the sort of position that is nowadays advertised as a "data scientist", which is a very complex conglomerate of advanced mathematics and computer science.

I've never met someone who is a self-educated, no-college-degree data scientist, or audio-video-photo compression expert, or a computational finance guy. I will readily admit my limited sample, and I would be happy if you proved me wrong. Still - what concerns me is that the general view is that formal education is a waste, and what is consistently left aside is that there are many things that one can do for which a haphazard education is simply not enough.
You could just leave the label off. "Many crimes that much of HN disagrees with".

You could even say "that I believe much of HN disagrees with".
I quite like Atlassian's software from a functional level but installing it and keeping it running is a real ball ache.
I recently switched from Trac & ReviewBoard to JIRA. Crucible is ugly, clunky, and unusable compared to ReviewBoard. I would switch back if I could.
Food for thought
I have a strange feeling, an unease in my belly.<p>Everyone says technology, innovation... faster faster faster<p>I'm not so sure. 7 billion people don't need a start up. they need a seed.<p>Can food grow any faster than sunlight will permit?
Interesting, but this does not mean a 40% (or better) chance of break-even.
Except I have never seen it counted as such by any happiness/consumer research.
I feel ashamed again, how few technologies I knew when I started studying Computer Science.
Diablo III 3 (RU) (SCAN)
I think the main reason for such a high failure rate is the ridiculous number of "me too" apps. This is true of many categories, but especially games.

There's some huge market gaps on iOS that are just sitting there waiting for someone to come along and fill. For example, people are always complaining about how the iPad isn't good for content creation. Why not create a product that lets people do some of the stuff like this that they're still stuck to their PC for, instead of making another puzzle game?
dang, yo
> In fact, throughout much of our nation's history, law enforcement had no idea what kind of communications criminals had. The universe did not explode. Somehow life went on.

Not really. Crime rates have been going down. Murder rates have been going down. People's lives have been saved, that wouldn't have "gone on" before.

This is due, in part, to better policing. To what extent this has do to with wiretapping abilities can be debated/analyzed, but a "somehow life went on" attitude is pretty much a blunt argument for "let's never change anything then", and is therefore irrelevant to the discussion.
Good eye :). Fixed as well.
Firefly/Serenity Lego set
Thanks! No plans for a 2nd edition yet, but I definitely have a lot I'd like to add.
Somewhat of a shameless plug, but in order not to miss great programming books, you can signup with my new book notification service (http://anynewbooks.com/). We featured 'The Tangled Web' the week it came out: http://anynewbooks.com/2011/11/30/this-weeks-new-books-in-pr...
It isn't controversial, no, which is the problem.

Well, let me back up a little first. Criminal penalties as deterrent do work up to a certain point, and there is nothing wrong with embracing them to a civilized and practical degree. But the retributive nature of the American justice system is beyond fetishistic. This is harmful for two reasons.

First, evidence suggests that draconian penalties are counterproductive as a deterrent. The exact psychological reasons for this are being researched, but it is thought that it is a matter of respect for the rule of law. When people perceive a law as unjust and disproportionate, they are more likely to break that law, and that applies to the punishment as well as the crime. It seems paradoxical, but increasing the penalty for a crime beyond what people view as equitable will actually reduce the deterrent effect of the penalty.

Second, we as a society have become so obsessed with retributive sentencing that we will, to that end, actively cut programs that are proven to reduce crime. Any program that helps felons to get legitimate work once they are out of prison is likely to be attacked as "soft on crime" and "wasteful", even though such programs are usually relatively inexpensive and actually save the government money in the long run by reducing recidivism.

It is not hard to understand why giving ex-convicts non-criminal career opportunities is good for society, yet the idea that we should at least throw a couple of bones in that direction is actually quite controversial.
I've been releasing iPhone apps for the last four years, since 2009, a little more than 6 months after the app store opened.

At first, honestly, the app store was better than a lottery ... it was an ATM.

I'd release an app and -- BOOM! -- $1200 a month would come streaming in. Seriously.

Things have cooled off A LOT. There's a lot of competition that adds a lot of noise to app store search results.

My focus has always been on finding a unique niche / rabid group of loyal fans ... finding out what they want ... and then giving it to them. Building a brand around that niche. Then launching multiple apps in those verticals. With this approach, it's still fairly easy to make $10/day/app. I'll still get the occasional breakout hit that has 5K+ downloads a day. But it's not like it was.

Do I do any marketing? No.

What I've found separates the successful app developers (those that at least make their money back) from those that aren't successful isn't marketing. It's this: intelligent market selection.

The people I know who's apps don't go anywhere don't do any market research. They release an app that would be useful for their own idiosyncratic life ... and no one else.
Thanks.

Besides cultivating relationships with bloggers, have you found any other form of effective online marketing to boost app adoption? We've gotten some newsletter signups and downloads off of our front page and blog page (I've been creating a lot of topical content that relates to what our app does) but the numbers aren't that big. Maybe two or three people clicking off to the iTunes link on a typical day.
Wouldn't that be really easy to spot?
Can Going Without Money Hurt the Economy?
'Self-Combusting' iPhone on Airplane Due to Screw Lost in Botched Repair Job
Ask HN: Place to find short term Python gigs?
I'm aware of the big ones like odesk, rentacoder, elance, &c... but I was wondering if anyone knew of lesser-known and specific sites for Python or Erlang programming?
I'm building my own startup but I'm finding myself in a position where I need some extra cash and doing a short term gig is the only thing I can really think of.
Tim Cook’s Style is Working, Bloggers Are Not
"Justice is blind". Fair != equal. Men and women are different. Applying the same standard gets unequal outcomes.

The details:

You do more time if it is premeditated vs. a crime of passion. You do more time if you used a weapon vs. your bare hands. Most of the time, an abusive husband who kills his wife beats her to death with his bare hands. Most of the time, a woman who finally kills her husband to protect herself had to plan it and used a weapon to accomolish it. Men frequently have a size advantage and are also more likely to have served in the military, taken martial arts or otherwise be better prepared to do physical harm than a woman. The law currently does a poor job of accounting for such differences.

That is without getting into what happens if the judge or one of the lawyers is a wife beater. Edit: That is also without getting into other relevant factors, which don't get properly considered under the current system.

Peace.
Ubuntu Converts Your Smartphone Into A PC
Auto insurance chicago
If you choose a interpretation of the Elastic Clause, the Supremacy Clause, and the Commerce Clause that is radically different from that of the Supreme Court, you will indeed end up in a situation where much of what the federal government does --- some of it uncongenial to you, like domain seizures, but much of it not, like air traffic control and NOAA --- is "Unconstitutional".

It's therefore a viable rhetorical strategy to attack the pillars of federal Constitutional prerogative head-on; don't like something the FBI is doing? Relitigate the Necessary and Proper clause! All you have to do is win an argument that the Supreme Court got it wrong 150 years ago and you've achieved a legal framework to support almost any argument.

Of course, this only works because in the frictionless vacuum of a message board argument, you can ignore the consequences of a radical new interpretation of the Constitution. And when I say that, I don't just mean "Cargill can sell rotten meat at the supermarket and label it 'Health Meat'", but rather that it does not follow from your argument that we'd have less regulation from the federal government if the Enumerated Powers and Elastic Clause were narrowly construed.

The people obviously want safe food, planes that don't collide no matter how cheap the tickets are, and laws that prevent giant corporations from refusing to offer jobs to people because of their ancestry. So some other mechanism --- a series of Constitutional amendments, most likely --- would have stepped in to fill the vacuum had McCulluch v Maryland gone the other way.

Put simply: if you were right, and the only legitimate powers of Congress were those in the Enumerated Powers, we'd have enumerated more powers since 1810 (starting, I guess, with the power to organize banks, that being where SCOTUS started us down the Necessary And Proper stuff with McCulloch v Maryland).

And you would probably not be better off if we had followed a Constitutional strategy of "run into a problem, call a Constitutional convention and add another enumerated power". The people would likely have enumerated some awfully silly powers.
I think the engine multiplies mouse movement by some factor, so the OS cursor diverges from the game cursor. But in fullscreen+mouselock mode it should work fine, not sure why not in that link, but here is a link to another wip port of the same game engine to JS/WebGL,

http://syntensity.com/static/bb/client.html

In fullscreen mode the mouse cursor works ok (at least in browsers that support mouselock).
http://priceonomics.com/search/?q=feces

I think I've discovered a new niche.
Hmm. Interesting statement since the authors have chosen to remain anonymous. You would think it would be impossible to know weather or not they are brilliant, or if they are working for the US security agencies.

So you have people working on the most well known full disk encryption system on planet Earth, but they are living in obscurity.... kind of interesting isnt it?
The Main Frame and Art Shoppe
We are the largest picture frame shop in the San Diego area, located in the industrial area of Escondido, with over 3,000 corner samples to choose from.
I have that book on my Amazon wish list, but the e-book is $39.95 on No Starch's website (so $19.98 after 50% discount), yet is only $17.57 in Kindle format on Amazon, every day. Am I supposed to feel bad about saving $2 but contributing to DRM by buying it for Kindle format?
The gag order is the whole point.

Read through it again - it is a positive, affirmative statement that we make each week (and make in three continents). A judge (or LEA, whatever) would have to compel us to make false public statements on an ongoing basis, and would have to further compel foreign (swiss) nationals to do likewise.

Can we be held in contempt, etc., for refusing to make public false statements ? Perhaps.

In reality, since rsync.net is not actually an ISP (we take pains to make sure we do not count as an ISP, since it allows us to skip things like the OP has posted) and since we host no publicly available materials, we're not likely to get a warrant. If we do, it's likely to be an extremely mundane act of discovery, etc. That would get added to the warrant canary and we would continue updating it.

In our 11 years of running this service (7 years under the "rsync.net" brand) we've not gotten a single one.

But the parent to these comments was speaking of taking a stand, which is why this was instituted - people do indeed need to make a stand. We refuse to live in a world with Lettres de Cachet, and that's that.
Do you mean that Ruby code tends to be simpler than Objective-C code, or that the language itself is actually simpler. Because, while I haven't done a formal comparison or anything, I would find the latter to be pretty unlikely. Most of Objective-C can really be boiled down to little more than few teaspoons of syntax sugar on top of C (although that is less true today than it once was), and C is definitely a simpler language than Ruby.
Memory is made of associations. I remember very few flashcards; they're just not at all connected to real life. I remember a lot of silly picture stories, though, like 古 looking like an old grave. Do I have to go through that process every time I look at it to remember that it means old? No, I do not. But the memories stick in ways that simple flashcards do not.

Maybe other people don't or can't learn that way, but these silly picture stories are enough to let me memorize characters I've never seen before so that I can look them up later.
No he means specifically with respect to Lispiness, what does Ruby have that Smalltalk doesn't. I thought of a few different answers, and then I found them all in Smalltalk, so I think GP is right, on both the OO and FP front, Ruby is pretty much just Smalltalk.
So Objective C programmers can't print code to read it? :-(
Ah, this is a little bit embarrassing. I had somehow read your comment as meaning that somebody should make something like RubyMotion but with Smalltalk, with the REPL being a neat incentive. Rereading, I see that was totally in my head. Sorry. No idea what I was thinking, but it's too late to delete it now. I suppose my brain just saw "Smalltalk" and "iOS" in the same sentence and got worked up.

But incidentally, do you happen to know offhand of any resources about adding new compilers like you were talking about? That sounds pretty neat. I unfortunately missed the golden age of Smalltalk, so most of what I know comes from playing around with Squeak and GNU Smalltalk and reading about older implementations.
This is due, in part, to better policing.

That's... debatable.

I think it's due to Disney movies.
I had no problem watching that on my mobile, what are you on about?
They recently removed wiki formatting from their wiki in JIRA. If you want to edit a page you have to use their in-browser rich-text editor.

This (on top of a bunch of other friction I have with JIRA) makes it clear to me that JIRA is not a product they're building for hackers. It must be for program managers, or for check writers at enterprise companies.
Even this loses context. The suggestion here is that intrusive airport security was a knee-jerk reaction to 9/11. But that's not true at all; we've had intrusive airport security, supported Constitutionally by the framework of "administrative search", for dozens of years.

What happened after 9/11 is that the government (rightly) acknowledged that airport security was run by a decentralized and largely ineffective hodgepodge of private and local security organizations. The TSA was a "reform" of airport security intended to centralize the practice and make it more consistent.

The TSA is obviously terrible and much of airport security is a farce. But this isn't simply a result of people begging for farcical centralized security theater; it's a consequence of centralizing airport security in the federal government and thus making it far simpler for airport security to be "responsive" to "new threats".

The TSA's incompetence and intrusiveness is largely an emergent phenomenon. It isn't a policy goal.