skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Yes we've had online petitions in the UK for years of this kind and absolutely nothing at all gets done. Its the equivalent of sitting down and doing fuck all and making you feel happy doing it. Its another form of quelling dissidence from the lazy portion of the population.

Direct activism and martyrdom is about the only way to get a result unfortunately.

And don't go on about a vote - the population is by majority moronic dross unfit for breathing let alone voting. Don't expect miracles from monkeys.

Perhaps a natural disaster may redress the balance.
Whenever I read about natural disasters affecting some large urban dwelling, e.g. Winnipeg, New Orleans, I always wonder why we still have that problem. Not that people are building on that land, but that we haven't yet figured out how to live safely and conveniently on flood plains, etc.

The health care analogy is rather than spending public money on fixing broken people, spend money on making fewer people broken in the first place. Better preventative measures, better safety rules, healthy eating campaigns, more anti-ageing research, etc.

Surely when looking for 'stimulus' plans, this kind of thing that will work out net-positive financially for the government and result in a better quality of life for people in the affected area should be amongst the first thing getting funded?

In short: why on Earth are we still subject to the whims of God?
If you have even one American customer you're subject to these rules and ridiculous software patents.
> The idea of owning a house and having to fill it with shit just stresses me out.

Friend of mine was twenty-three when his parents insisted he buy a home in Sunnyvale since 'he could afford to'. We got to the point of describing the place as an 'albatross' repeatedly, since it cost him many interesting opportunities had he not been nailed into place. He's now very happily in Japan and free of the burden of home ownership.

I'm in my thirties and I've lived in quite a few places. Yet to live somewhere and say 'Yep, this is it. Nothing else to see, this is the best culture has to offer.' and then stay there. Minimalism simply works best to achieve mobility and it's not like you cannot find partners whom also feel the same way.

I find a lot of the hostility and stereotyping over this lifestyle I see here fascinating. Buyers remorse most likely.
Yeah, 'cause gastric bypass and daily insulin injections are gobs of fun.

Humans are really bad at long term risk assessment. No one says "I'm going to eat 2000 extra calories every day because the government will pay for my daily insulin injections when I get diabetes". They say "bah, it won't happen to me".
Also the World Wide Web would never have happened because who would want to marry themselves to a platform encumbered by so many patents?
You're missing the point that, on average, insurance benefits the insurance company, not the policy holders. How do we know this? Because insurance companies are eager to sell you a policy. If the policy benefited you on average, insurance companies would go out of business on average. But ... they don't.

> The people whose houses don't burn down pay for those whose houses do.

Yes, and I don't smoke in bed. Why should I pay for the risky and unhealthy habits of others? But more importantly, I'm better off investing my money against a future loss than handing it over to an insurance company. This is only true if I can afford to lose the insured item, but many people buy insurance without asking themselves this basic question.

> What if your house burns down the day after you buy it?

This is all about probability, not focusing in on the worst possible case. Insurance companies naturally enough want you to focus in on the worst possible case. But in the long term, and statistically, you're better off self-insuring -- unless a mortgage requires you to carry insurance, or unless you simply cannot afford to lose the insured item.
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I think any good social marketers (as they've now rebranded themselves) are fully involved in subverting The Social Web. Any site that reaches a certain size (Digg, Reddit, etc.) will become a ripe target for less than organic posts.
I don't think this is a good analogy. Google's job is to make sure good content is ranked high and crap is ranked low. You should just create content that is useful to others and let Google figure out how to discover it and rank it high (they are good at it).

To create useful content, you don't need to know Google internals.
I was recently informed that it's not that easy to do this in the US.
Ubuntu Phone Experience for Android
Ah, you mean what Intellectual Ventures was supposed to be?

Pay a small membership fee to have access to their "technology" as well as immunity from being sued with regard to their patents. It's not unlike the mob, though, having to pay a 'protection fee'.
Exactly what I thought, SEO should not have ever become a "thing" if Google did its job right.
A well written article but it seems mostly like a re-hash of the basic argument for government provided healthcare, not something addressing large, pressing problems facing implementations of public healthcare. I'll be the first to advocate the right to be treated, but this needs to be done extremely carefully.

For example:

- Government is notoriously inefficient. How can we fix government bureaucracy in a sector that requires speed ("Can we operate now?") and offers lean margins?

- Modern insurance companies pay top dollar for mathematical modeling and financial services. Will/Can the government do this?

- Does a morbidly obese person qualify for a life-saving liposuction on the tax-payers dime?

- Do you perform life saving abortions on the tax-payers dime?

- Do you tax progressively based upon risk and past history?
If yes, does that mean that the poor are unfairly taxed vs. the rich since the rich have better quality care? If not, should someone who is a health nut be taxed the same as those who dismiss their body?

Private companies can throw away people's morals, prejudices, philosophies. If you don't like it, don't buy it. But once you introduce government (and something mandatory) you encounter issues that were never even remotely related before.

A lot more needs to be discussed on this topic than just "it's like flood insurance".

Edit: Formatting
Filling up a Toyota Camry with gasoline (say 15 gallons) adds about 90 pounds of fuel. A lithium-ion battery with the same energy content would weigh about 5,800 pounds. Clearly electric vehicles will have a difficult time competing with gasoline vehicles no matter how much charging times are reduced or how much better the software gets. It seems that without some breakthrough the sweet spot for battery-electric vehicles is urban driving done after charging overnight at home.
I think I have a pretty good idea about what it takes to run something similar to what our 15 year old has going on. I think where we might find we have different views is on what constitutes knowledge. Skills are acquired by learning and practicing all the 'how' questions around a topic, knowledge is acquired by learning all of the 'why' questions around a topic.
Asahi Associates - Brazil's ANP Fines Chevron.
What are the appropriately open / stripped down alternatives? I don't need a social network (or even 10s update rates), just a cloud that knows what I've already read.
I'd say it's an effect. Without corporate funding large and co-ordinated projects (Gnome, KDE, OpenOffice et al) have fallen by the wayside.

That's why progress has got so slow the last 6-8 years in so many parts of the OSS world (and on lots of proprietary software, that lazily relies on OSS). Things like Gnome or OpenOffice are essentially the same as they were 10 years ago, whereas the proprietary alternatives have gotten tons of changes.

GTK+, the main toolkit behind Gnome has one (1!) major contributor (which complained about the issue). In a proper world, something like this, used by so many millions, should have at least a full time team of 10 persons.

Contrast the additions to GTK+ in the last 10 years with the development of the corresponding Cocoa libs, and it's like night and day. A tree-view widget here, a spinner there, ...

Small libraries and stuff can still flourish under such an environment, but not big, co-ordinated projects.
It makes sense for a streaming radio app to acquire a wakelock, unless you want it to stop playing when the screen shuts off in 2 minutes. It does not make sense for any game to acquire a wakelock, and acquiring one is a sign that your app does not respect the Activity lifecycle and probably doesn't handle notifications or task switching well anyway. I know GTA3 absolutely sucks at this.
Oded Shenkar, a professor at Ohio State University and the author of Copycats, defines it thus: "Basically, you try to innovate where you have an advantage and imitate everywhere else."

Samsung was innovative because they stood on the shoulders of giants (Apple) and made something more advanced, instead of going back to the drawing board and throwing out everything learned from the iPad.
This really would be ideal, but I'm not sure Moglen has the time to both run the legal effort and run the org and FSF legal really does an awesome job. I think maybe what the FSF needs more than anything is a NEW champion, someone younger perhaps without the baggage of RMS that would be able to relate to a new generation of devs without compromising the FSF agenda. I don't have any suggestions to this point. It might take a new organization to make this happen. I hate to suggest "forking" the FSF because that's probably the worst outcome short of a total dissolution, but they desperately need new voices.
> Seems to me that everyone would then say: "well, let's not be healthy, let's not eat well, since the government will pay for all our surgeries and medicine..."

The government might pay for your health care, but they can't reincarnate you if you die. So there's still a reasonable incentive to stay fit.

There's some UK TV show where the government (I think) is paying for fat people to get stomach staples. Preventative medicine can save money in the long run, and public health systems are often more willing to do it (since the guys in charge care about the next election, and not just the next quarter).
This is extremely interesting. My start up team always passed on event's like this due to our busy schedules, but we'll be sure to start making time to learn from others!
> The only criticism I have of this comparison is that, well, maybe people shouldn't be living in flood plains.

The problem is of course historical imperative: cities used to be set up on waterways (not just near water, but on major rivers), and cities which grew big existed pretty much exclusively on waterways: up until the 19th century they were the only way to move major amounts of materials (and supplies) in a timely manner and with acceptable costs. Also the only way to move water in and sewage out past a certain size (again until the 19th-20th century).

So big cities grew around big waterways, whether inland or at the mouth, and big cities act as black hole, they have a "mass" attracting more people and growing bigger out of it.

And big waterways flood, so you end up with the places which have been the most likely to accumulate huge populations over historical times also being those most likely to get flooded.

To fix that, you have to tear down and remove cities with hundreds of thousands of years of history, social accretion structure and huge populations.

Not really easy.

And that's before you factor in the costs of creating a complete mature metropolis from scratch, and you start wondering about the location: coasts are out (storms, tsunamis); waterway plains are out (floods); geologically active zones are out (quakes, volcano eruptions); periodically dry places with vegetation are out (fires and firestorms); space is out obviously (hard life support system dependency, no ringworld for you).

You're pretty much left with deserts, big mountain ranges and waterworld.
I like the detailed text formatting especially the fraud page: https://www.gittip.com/about/fraud/2012-11-05.html
Lean Product Management Class
I would hope that google, of all companies, would be capable of writing a crawler that ignores robots.txt comments.

Other than that the guy only has one rule.
"The same media which profited from his leaks is the media whose portrait of him you're choosing to accept unless you know him personally"

I really have no interest in "media" portrayal, and I certainly don't want to enable their continued "successes", as dim as they are, but I do take sexual assault charges and evasion seriously. The profile makes it easier for him to avoid them and find supporters to fund/house him, but I don't see how it would stop a government from whisking him off if they were able to.
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Apple's Rumored iWatch Could Be Your Own Personal Surveillance Machine
Does anyone have experience working with Titan, either on the side or in production? Is Titan production ready?

The flexible storage backends, clustering, and the open source license are all very enticing. I've been looking for a graph database for an upcoming project and have yet to find something that really matches what we're looking for.
http://www.nerily.com/#demo -> Or this with a JSON API output.
Nikon D7000 vs D90: An upgrade option?
Insurance doesn't work, period...for anything. It's gambling in reverse, and the house always wins, especially in the last few decades when they can crunch so much data and know the price points with great precision. What's worse is that insurance companies are becoming even more monolithically inefficient than government agencies while still racking in obscene amounts of cash, without having to do anything more than bombard you with horrible advertisements featuring talking geckos.

The fact that some insurances are required by law (in the US at least) disturbs me deeply.
I find the perspective of the SEO guy interesting, even if I find what he does kind of skeezy and annoying.
> a) Not all keyboards have Home/End keys (macbooks for example).

Macbooks all support fn + arrows to do page up/down, home and end.

fn + left = home
fn + end = end
fn + up = page up
fn + down = page down

It seems annoying at first to not have a dedicated key, but after a week my muscle memory started working and I've never noticed it again.
But health isn't a question of if, it's a question of when. Insurance is a fundamentally broken system with which to pay for healthcare or any other commodity. As this article says, no one would ever sell me flood insurance if I live on a flood plain. The fact that I can buy health insurance at all, given my inevitable demise, is a miracle. But it doesn't make it a good system.
About this petition:

America is ranked #16 in the world for broadband penetration, speed and price. Where high-speed service is available, it is often expensive and unreliable — and frequently there is only one monopoly service provider.

The United States needs new leadership at the Federal Communications Commission to help establish a competitive regulatory climate and to encourage new entrants into the market. Susan Crawford has spent her career studying the global telecommunications industry and has a keen sense of the history that brought us to this point.

Ms. Crawford would facilitate changes at the Federal level which could help America become the leader in global telecommunications innovation again. President Obama, please appoint her as FCC Chairman in 2013.

About Susan Crawford: http://ti.me/WWIMhU
Ask Moderators:Why was the "Man who killed Osama .. is screwed" article dead?
Honestly not flame-bait :

An article that (IMO) does fit "satisfying intellectual curiosity" was marked as dead, even after a lot of comments.

The article seems to me to be intelligent, putting a human interest story up against several wider political debates - not politically partisan issues, but issues of intellectual weight where there are no easy answers.

Could we have a text box for mods to put a reason in ? Sometimes there is no need. but this time I would like to know.

http://www.esquire.com/features/man-who-shot-osama-bin-laden-0313?src=rss

http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5201324
Nobody else read this as a joke? I read it as a joke (and a slightly racist one at that).
And we would just do this if Google actually made good on their promises to do this, but I see an awful lot of crap still ranking in the SERPs especially because of hacked sites and link networks.

Full disclosure - I work in SEO.
>> if an insurer evaluates your true risk and offers a policy, it's not worth it

> This is kind of a silly argument.

No, that is a silly argument, because it doesn't offer an explanation. Consider those electronic service plans that retailers are always trying to get you to buy. They's not worth it. How do I know? Because the retailer wants to sell it to me. Therefore he must come out ahead in the transaction. Therefore it's not in my interest -- I would be better off paying for a repair myself, or replacing the item. How difficult is that?

It's the same with insurance. If you cannot afford to lose the insured item, by all means insure it. For every other case, think a little harder and you may realize there's a reason the insurance company is so eager to sell you a policy.
Unfortunately, health costs have far outpaced inflation and earnings. Just(?) 20 years ago I worked as an IT consultant for a large health insurer and the comfy corporate group PPO "family coverage" option (2 adults and an unlimited number of children) cost $300/mo total, not just the employee's portion. Today's total rate on a similar plan is about $1500/mo. That's almost 10x the net increase in the CPI over the same period.

Put it another way: in 1993 there were plenty of IT pros (not company owners) making $100K+. Are there just as many percentage-wise making $500K+ now?
The story really didn't dissuade me from thinking about the profession of SEO as the sorts of people looking for easy money at the expense of others.

I'm sure MLM operators and spammers didn't do well in school, were hostile to the people around them and love flashy clothes, big checks, and fast cars as well.
Seems like the best part to me. Usually unless you're well-off or wealthy, justice is hard to come by. In this case its the argument that matters, not the weight of wealth behind it.
It is indeed closed source and available as a NLP as a Service model, what we do have instead is a quick-to-deploy ReST API, with JSON output, and even a chrome extension to train your own dictionary.
In short, don't hate the player hate the game?

I understand where you're coming from, but that's crap. Just because there is always someone willing to do ethically questionable things that fall within the letter of the law, doesn't mean that those types of people shouldn't be treated with disdain by the rest of us.
Best not to compare yourself to others, as hard as that may be. Many people's achievements seem to be at odds with what they say they want to accomplish, like travel or hobbies. Have goals true to yourself and ignore what others think.
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Letter to 35 year old self
I'm not sure what you're talking about; what I mean is we don't know who hmexx or any of the founders is, not even a first name, location, or anything.

I'm not that paranoid, but if this was a completely imaginary enterprise, we wouldn't be able to tell.
If medicine floated with the cost of supply and demand, then outbreaks and epidemics would be an ethical nightmare and a commercial blessing.

Medical supplies during epidemics always fail to match the huge spike in demand, so the price would rise exponentially. Medication providers would make a fortune while only the rich would receive medication.

Depending how much you want to bend toward conspiracy theories, it would almost be like incentivizing medication providers to cause huge outbreaks.
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When I see a market behaving insane, I want to know what market incentives and government regulations are distorting it. In your case, the knowledge that you saw a specialist would make a logical underwriter raise the price, but you should be able to get insurance at some price.

The big regulation that I know of is the tax treatment that makes it much cheaper for insurance to be purchased through employers. This has prevented a robust individual insurance market from developing - it would be very costly for the insurance companies to build out this service for a small percent of the market.

The other major regulations that increase cost and reduce choice are required coverage regulations. There is always some heartstring pulling to get treatment X included in the required bundle.
The perfect option for you is to buy a Thinkpad T430U and install Chrome OS on it. It's remarkably similar to the CR-48 with regards to hardware design, it's $600, and it's a Thinkpad.

Which means you can use it as a breakfast tray when you're at a business summit, as a bludgeon when intruders come into your home, as a bulletproof plate if you live in a ghetto, as a riot shield if you're a journalist in Syria, and also as a skateboard if your car is broken.

Or, if you really want, you could use it as a really good, durable computer.
> Unless "future" happens to be "next tuesday", and "loss" happens to be "catastrophic fire".

That's why people should learn statistics and probability. By buying insurance, you're betting that your house will burn down pretty soon. The insurance company is betting it won't burn down very soon. On average, the insurance company comes out ahead. How do we know? They stay in business, a business paid for with your money.
Good 'til the last drop?
Is it not their prerogative to ensure a good quality of network service and user experience? These apps harm everyone who uses the service unnecessarily.

Is Google also being hypocritical by encouraging users to use networks for Search et al, at the same time encouraging developers to optimize for network usage and battery life? [1]

[1] http://developer.android.com/training/efficient-downloads/in...
All members of the European Parliament are directly elected. The entire Council consists of the member states' ministers, which are elected politicians in their home states or appointed by elected politicians. The Commission too consists solely of persons appointed by elected politicians.

I too would like more direct elections and more openness in the legislative process but that does not come from lobbyists paid by American companies.
That's one of those toolchains which just makes me go: huh?

I don't really understand why this exists let alone why anyone would want to use it.

For ref I sit in front of visual studio 4 hours a day and am pretty handy with gcc/gdb/vi as an alternative stack so I'm not particularly biased.
People shouldn't have to evaluate the risk involved in living anywhere, that is the job of actuators. Their evaluation is presented to consumers through the price system.

If the government didn't bail out homeowners who didn't have insurance, then the risk would be reflected in the price of insurance, and a potential homeowner can then easily compare the utility of living in that location relative to the total cost of owning the home versus any other location. As I said, insurance companies don't even try to offer risky coverage like that because they are competing with bailouts based on compulsory taxation (they are competing with a "free" service). When the government interferes in this case, the consumer is falsely led to believe that the cost of living in that area is lower than it actually is, because they don't have to pay for insurance. Therefore, more people move there than can afford it, and more people need to be bailed out by the government when disaster strikes. It's a vicious cycle.
Should have just patented the single click then, as a catch all...
Feds offer $20M for critical energy network cybersecurity tools