skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
In the US (and Sweden) it's apparently illegal to possess /drawings/ of child porn. No child harm needed, only the potential for impure thoughts.

Fundamentalists of any kind trying to impose thought crime is the real problem here. Fix that, and the rest will follow.
I have a real problem with your argument here - as I suspect many lawyers would.

I'd go so far as to call your hypothetical example completely laughable. The idea that if I stumble across someone raping a child they would "point and laugh" is completely ridiculous. It's somewhat ironic that given one of the arguments for strict liability laws was "won't someone think of the children" you're basically making the same point.

I agree with many of your points - a 17 year old being sentenced for having sex with a 15 year old, for example, and it's possible to cite many, many cases where this sort of thing has occurred.

I doubt, however, you can cite a single case where somebody has been prosecuted for unknowingly recording child pornography. I think this very much weakens your argument, because you make it sound as if strict liability is a be-all end-all, when in fact there is precedent to override it (speaking in general terms - the exact precedent would vary from country to country).

Laws are typically not designed to cover future eventualities. It seems to me highly likely that the situation you describe is already easily avoided legally. After all, if a CCTV camera recorded a child rape in progress that would not be a criminal offence, since most countries provide exceptions for recording images for the purposes of preventing crime. It would be relatively straight forward to branch these laws out to devices like Google Goggles.

But you don't really consider these arguments, I suspect primarily because the image of a child rapist "getting away with it" is quite powerful, and you're designing your post to evoke heavily emotional responses. But it's very much a "won't you think of the children" argument, and that sours it for me.
> Only that they do represent a risk and the status quo represents the most reasonable way to manage it.

And yet, the status quo dictates employing people to throw out water bottles you purchased at the duty free after already having been screened for it yourself (and probably screened the store's inventory as it was coming in). And consider nail cutters a deadly weapon.

I did not read the GP to say that stricter enforcement was warranted - just that it was not in-line with how other controllable risks associated with passengers risks treated.
Wasn't it you who said "I don't want to have to store as a CHAR or VARCHAR and have to write my own date handling routines in my app"? rowname.year and rowname.month sounds a lot like writing your own date handling routines.
I agree. There's a great "Yes Prime Minister" video about this. I just wrote a blog post about how it relates to this poll.

http://diegobasch.com/google-surveys-know-what-you-are-askin...
Never mind the irony of your crusade to end the pressing of moral values onto others itself constituting pressing of values onto others, you seem to completely misunderstand the concepts of morality and religion. Please read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt if you care to broaden your horizon a little.
"Standing on a Slippery Slope" by David Clark [pdf]
It's good to have a jaywalking law on the books if someone runs into traffic and causes and accident.
Class Central is wonderful. Thank you so much for your effort.
But why should a valid notice be charged? Isn't it similar to paying to report a theft[1]?

[1] I know I have used the word theft loosely here.
"very heavy form of disapproval"

Please don't do this. It's not the purpose of flagging and screws up the site mechanisms.
Owning It
Amazon: Not To Be Like Apple, To Be More Like Amazon.com
Show HN: Log in to Facebook by scanning a QR code
If you dislike S(omething) (e.g. abortions) you can go two ways.
First, you can help people avoid S. You can argue against S. You can support people who rejected S. You can give prizes to people who skip S.

Second, you can violate whatever social conventions there were and make S illegal. This means more people in jails, this means pain, doubt, suffer. This does NOT guarantee any reduction of S, however.

Religious organizations chose the latter, so they are like dead to me now. And they should be for you, to.
"Christanity. Making your laws worse since 33 AD"
Why Are Companies Still Responding to Data Breaches Badly?
Care to expand on that?

My daughter is two weeks old today. In the past 14 days, my wife has been responsible for providing 100% of what our baby consumes, but at least half the time, I'm the one feeding her (we're about 50/50 breastfed/pumped breastmilk in a bottle).

Aside from that, there's effectively no difference in our roles in caring for her. We both change diapers, we both bathe her, we both hold her and comfort her when she's fussy. We don't pay any particular attention to making it a 50/50 split for these activities, but it probably works out to approximately that, for all intents and purposes.

Right now her schedule seems fairly nocturnal (she seems most awake from ~2300 to ~0400), and I tend to be the one up with her during that time, since I find I'm pretty productive during those hours anyway (I've gotten pretty good at one-handed typing).

On a practical level, there's effectively no difference in the amount of care provided between her mother and I. Your statement that her impact is "much more important" is fairly offensive to me (and while I haven't bothered talking to my wife about a comment on Hacker News... I suspect she would be equally offended).
Treating your personal website as a startup
The Five best things coming in Ubuntu 12.10 Linux
I dont buy it. Some features just aren't reasonable to do without js and the number of people without js is tending towards vanishingly small, and you can have a nondegraded experience for a very significant percentage of traffic by not just dismissing all versions of IE. Not that you should support all versions, but if you are sending a separate no-js version to IE10 then you are doing it wrong.

In my experience it is totally absurd to think that you can just write "standards compliant HTML" and expect it to be rendered correctly on IE6 or 7 in any meaningful way anyway, you will always need to change your HTML and CSS to specifically support those browsers and realistically any browser that you want to support, the standards just are not uniformly implemented.
> Turns out you'll need a doctor's prescription to even order a plain cotton mattress.

Alternatively, you can order one of the cotton/latex/wool mattresses that don't have any flame retardents. The most popular is Naturepedic. However, such a mattress will set you back $2200 for the most basic queen.
Most movies in history would be illegal, because most of them depict murders. Note that it being an /actual/ murder or abused child is not a requirement.
> "I doubt that it's possible to check these lists and criticize them at the same time."

It's quite reasonable to find value in the lists of dangerous sex offenders, while criticizing the inclusion of people for trivial offenses.
So what are they replacing it with?!

EDIT: from the comments I get the impression that they want to move the memory closer to the CPU.
Crazy Welding Techniques
It would be interesting to run these numbers again (this article was from 2009) to see if newer runtime/JIT is any faster/slower.
It is not strange for someone moving to an area to check out the sex offender registry here in the US, especially if someone has children. Anyone can check the registry out at anytime @ http://www.nsopw.gov as well as other websites. There are legitimately dangerous people on the sex offender registry. There are also people who are on there due to dubious reasons, e.g. being drunk and peeing in public or having sex with their girlfriend while under a certain age.
"Because of the of demand we have had, due to the success of Entrepreneurs, Inventors and Business People using LookAft, we need to add you to a queue to get going. "

I think it's fine that you make these things up but please word it another way. As it is now, anyone can see that it's BS. Also, if you have 25 paying customers, do you really need to make John Hobbs of Uni CRM up?
Instead you could take the fact of him posting that instead of being killed in flight as empirical evidence. ;)

BTW, I also don't turn off my devices in flights. I'm still alive and kicking.
This, this, this. If you subtly lay out the possible angles and all the interesting data for a journalist, they will be that much more likely to cover your product. Don't make them do too much research.
The article, for one. And quite a few hours personal experience using electronics on planes without incident.

Can you point to any evidence anywhere that using a cell phone, laptop or e-reader on a plane can cause problems in flight?
What's up with the quote on that page from "John Hobbs" (guessing it's fake) using a picture of Bryan Person (http://twitter.com/bryanperson)? The pic is also hosted by Unbounce's s3 account it seems:

http://unbouncepages-com.s3.amazonaws.com/www.lookaft.com/te...

Isn't this product essentially supposed to compete with unbounce?

edit: I'm guessing that it's because the other option on google image search for "person" don't look that genuine. https://www.google.com/search?num=10&hl=en&authuser=...
Indian government jails a cartoonist for drawing cartoons against corruption
Kindle Fire HD hurts Microsoft more than Apple
"SIM Info" for Android has reached 10K installs today. Thank you
fixed now thanks again for spotting this
Are you referring to the potential weaknesses just discovered recently?
Approaches to data recovery
> let's generalize the criterion to include any exchange of value, including in-kind exchanges

> Possessing an image taken by oneself, or by a friend, possibly by the subject -- all these would be legal

If you're a prosecutor and you can't find anything in an average teenage text-exchange that constitues a quid-pro-quo ("I'll show you mine if you show me yours"), you simply aren't fit to do your job. And then we're back to square zero.

How about this: it's an indisputable fact that exchanging bits online (with the copyright holder's permission, of course) has no victims, don't make it illegal. Producing child pornography very much has victims, and should be illegal with the full force of the law. Managing money originating from illegal activities is also illegal, so paying for the production, or acting as any kind of middleman, would be too.
From the link -

This video is no longer available because the
uploader has closed their YouTube account
When reading the title I thought the article will be about how dangerous the couch is for our generation, because we are spending more and more time on it and so do not exercise enough our body, etc. You know, related to Tablet devices and Internet which allow more and more entertainment from the couch.

Was quite surprised it is about another type of danger. I guess I am too much on portable devices and on the couch ;)
> I think the impression that Postgres is more difficult than MySQL roots in the fact that it's more difficult to install at home. (Why so many installation steps? MySQL is basically just installing the package, changing pw and done?)

I think much of the blame here can be put on the people writing installation guides on the Internet. The guides often suggest setups more suited for networked databases than for a local database. When I install PostgreSQL for development machines it is just these two steps.

1. sudo apt-get install postgresql-9.1
2. sudo -u postgres createuser -s `id -un`

After that I can create whatever databases I like.

So it is the same number of steps to setup a PostgreSQL and a MySQL database. I admit it took me some time to figure out that this was the simplest way, and I have yet to see a installation guide which suggests this method.
Ah, good point. Obviously servers don't need that. :)
Any comments on why alecco's (seemingly informative) comment is dead? http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4496441
Suppose I want to run a survey, and I want the responses to be as unbiased as possible (not like in the video). How can I learn to do it "the right way" ?
My son is now a senior and he's had a part-time job since high school. He is responsible for paying for his books, transportation and food. I pay for his tuition and fees which amounts to around $20K per year.

My daughter is a national merit scholar and received a scholarship that covered tuition, her room and paid her a stipend. Since she's also farther from home, I pay for her car, airfare and to feed her plus some miscellaneous expenses. I think I'll spend between $7500 and $10K per year for her education.

Both kids went to a private high school, so we (to some degree) got used to paying tuition before they headed off to college. We've been fortunate to be able to afford their educations, but we've certainly sacrificed to do it (I drive a 20 year-old car).

I worry about the kids who graduate (or don't) from college with large amounts of debt. Not only have we burdened them with a payment plan, but we've taught them that you should just borrow money for anything that comes along. If there are two things I'd like my kids to see patterned by their mom and I it's to save for what you want to buy (instead of financing it) and that it's okay to not have everything (at least right now).

The mistakes my wife and I made when she graduated from college and we became DINKs (Dual-Income, No kids) was that we didn't realize how much disposable income we really had (we should have saved a lot more) and we thought we could afford everything our parents had accumulated through-out their life-times.

This is probably a longer answer than you want to hear, but our decision to help them was born out of our experience. My parents paid for my college but my wife's did not (I actually paid for her last year of her undergrad and we took out a student loan for her master's degree). We've warned our kids about the risks of easy credit and showed them how to save for things they want/need ... it wouldn't seem right to also throw them into student loans if there was any way to avoid it.

As a final note I should also state that I think their work-ethics are stronger because of their up-bringing. They're going to make pretty good employees if someone gives them a chance.

A few questions for you:

a) Where are you going to school?
b) What are you majoring in?
c) Are you passionate about the jobs you'll be qualified for?
d) What percentage of your future income will be required to service your debt?

I have to admit I'm a bit intrigued by students who frequent HN and have their curiousities intact. Ciao.
"Here's a proposal. Mere possession should be legal, as Falkvinge argues. What should be illegal is purchasing child porn."

Really? Why focus on purchase, when sharing is just as bad as far as incentivizing people producing new material to satisfy demand?

People will scan and distribute books, or crack software and distribute it, purely for whuffie or reputation. They'll do the same with child porn.
And if it isn't, that would make it even more interesting and unexpected.
I'm glad somebody mentioned this, because World Go Boom was the first thing I thought of when we started a discussion about mashups. DJ Earworm is a master of the art.
Here's what I use: https://gist.github.com/3686357

It looks like this: http://i.imgur.com/523PD.png
Yes. Duh. Now, if wishes were horses...
The Tweebo
Python Turkey
Very good point, and I wonder how the same amount of false theft reports would be handled by the police. They might tell the person filing the reports they have to stop crying wolf, or perhaps start ignoring them altogether.
There's no such thing as F-T-L travel of anything. It's okay though, the quantum information is not traveling.
Only thing I can guess is it was deleted. I don't see any reason why it'd be flagged.
I think most of the heavy users/contributors probably use a client.
Hints have appeared suggesting that interpolation will be deprecated at some point in python 3, e.g. from this article:

http://docs.python.org/dev/py3k/whatsnew/3.0.html#changes-al...

PEP 3101: Advanced String Formatting. [...] The plan is to eventually make this the only API for string formatting, and to start deprecating the % operator in Python 3.1.

As far as I know, interpolation is not actually deprecated yet though.
A few things I think the article either left out or didn't consider:

1. It discusses the odds that somebody on the plain has their phone on. As someone who frequently flies with his phone on, I can attest I have yet to die in a plane crash. However, it doesn't necessarily follow that a relatively small number of us rule breakers imply complete safety if the rule is removed. I'd be willing to bet that there hasn't been a flight where every single person had their phone on let alone with airplane mode off. I don't think even this would be an issue on modern planes but it's still silly to claim "a few phones is okay" to "a few hundred phones is okay" without further connecting evidence.

2. In today's terrorist-focused air world it seems implausible that the rule would be handled so casually, especially given criticism of the rule, when they would likely be insistent about this potential terrorist weapon. The prototypical terrorist specter that modern security theater seems so concerned with would love nothing better than a magic electronic box that could take down a plane as easily as some suggest.

3. The focus on safety as the cause seems to ignore other effects. In particular they've created a system that handily avoids people talking loudly on their cell phones for the entire flight. I would not be surprised if they'd keep the rule in the face of conclusive proof on the safety of cell phones just because of this effect.
First thing I would do is mask the affiliate links using something like http://www.w1posters.com/go/<insert-unique-id-for-each-p...;

Second thing I would do is emphasize current coupon codes for your visitor to use. Free shipping, 25% off, etc etc
Numbers.vim - A vim plugin for better line numbers
Find a name for your startup with The Thousand-Sided Dice
In US Law, you can make an "affirmative defense" [0] if you discover that you possess a small amount of child porn, and either immediately destroy it or immediately turn it over to law enforcement [1]. By doing so, you demonstrate that you did not intend to procure or possess said material, and are therefore not culpable [2].

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Affirmative_defense - admitting to the fact while introducing a factor which justifies it

[1] for example, http://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/18/2252A section (d)

[2] I am not a lawyer. This is not legal advice.
I completely agree with the Eternal September point, or maybe it's just a problem of non-makers tearing down others instead of doing something more worthwhile.

I recently solved a tricky bug in some Java code that we eventually realized only happened after de/serialization upon server restart. Seeing no related questions on SO, I took the time to create a self-contained test case as part of a question[1] and also to answer that question with a solution that showed how to use reflection to set the value of final fields[2].

For my trouble, several SO members[3] trolled or ridiculed me. This doesn't exactly encourage future participation. My time is too important to waste it helping self-important, ungrateful jerks.

[1] http://stackoverflow.com/questions/12324472/a-transient-fina...

[2] http://stackoverflow.com/a/12324473/1237044

[3] nicholas.hauschild trolled me for answering my own question (deleted by Anna Lear), and you can see EJB's discouraging comments.
I am neither Catholic nor pro-life, but if you see abortion as murder (as many do) it makes sense to be morally outraged by anyone's murder, not just their own.

I don't even know you, but I am against the idea of anyone murdering you. See how that works?
Stacked DRAM, if I understand it correctly.
What I don't get is why they keep going down the same path. Their Android application has evolved from a simple webview to many many webviews over the last year and they still haven't gone native. Maybe they're fine with the detriments when compared with the ease of creation?
Here is an excellent blog post: http://www.singularity2050.com/2010/01/the-misandry-bubble.h...
That article has no technical information at all, it seems to be pure click-bait.

Does anyone know more? Are they moving the RAM or replacing with some flash derivative? Something else?
This is what I have noticed several social scientists reference when discussing survey/questionnaire development:

http://www.amazon.com/Asking-Questions-Definitive-Questionna...
The Tiniest GIF Ever
Feel free to run the experiment. No matter what text-based language you use, it's going to take a helluva lot longer than Scratch. That is the actual point here.
Agreed, it would be better to become more involved in a project before contributing. Unfortunately for those new to open source, the easiest projects to contribute to are often ones that they've never heard of before. I think that just learning about the process of open source development has it's own merits.
It's yet another flawed microbenchmark.

The RealBASIC version calls the inbuilt "chr" function while in C# it calls:

public static char Chr(byte src)
{
return (System.Text.Encoding.GetEncoding("iso-8859-1").GetChars(new byte[] { src })[0]);
}

I'm sure there's some overhead to calling this 16 million times.
In other words, you're always building a product: your startup, your personal website, maybe even yourself.
Congratulations! My daughter was born almost four weeks ago, though we've only had her home a week (she was premature and spent a while in the NICU.) I'm glad you're getting stuff done at night; I've been stuck on the same moderately complex C++ state machine implementation since she was born. I'm just too tired to load the problem into my head.

While my wife is theoretically capable of doing everything on her own we share duties like you do, if only because there's no way I could allow the woman I married to suffer the entire burden of childcare unsupported. I don't know of anyone who does things any differently.

> I've gotten pretty good at one-handed typing

In another context that would be a source of shame, not pride :)

In bearmf's defence, we do matter more to the child after 2 years old. What we're doing now is supporting the mother.
I made comics deriding IT recruiters; this was to promote my programmer-testing web app (now defunct). This HN thread persuaded me to find them in the blog archives. Here they are: http://www.flickr.com/photos/46384225@N00/sets/7215763148518...

There were also text articles on the blog, one of which was even on the HN front-page for over 24 hours (it reported some friendly social-engineering by a then-competitor, now a YC company). The comics significantly outperformed the text articles in terms of engaged readers, though I didn't run the whole thing long enough to be of any practical help.

My partner and I are releasing an iPhone game soon, and we're planning to repeat this experiment but with somewhat longer-form comics. The idea is to communicate the human story behind the making of the app. If anyone is interested, my email is in my profile.
Okay, this 'not strange' is obviously something tied to local social norms and values, I guess.

I retract the implied contradiction between checking the list and complaining about the content. That said, it probably is impossible to understand the reasons for its existence or the need to check out a neighborhood like this without growing up in a culture like that.
You should check out Librato (I'm a co-founder), we let you define your own metrics and build dashboards: https://metrics.librato.com
For a less biased still gentle introduction on epigenetics: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/nova/body/epigenetics.html