skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The situation in the Netherlands is a little more complicated than the article leads you to believe.

It is legal to possess cannabis, it is also legal to grow it at home, as long as it is for personal use.

What they say about not enforcing the laws against the shops is partly true. The shops are allowed to have a very small amount in stock. However, the legal amount is ridiculously small, and less than what most stores sell in a day.
The shops solve this by having regular drops during the day.

I'm not completely sure, but I believe that the warehouses where the shops get their drops from are legally allowed. And I'm also not completely sure about the legallity of importing cannabis from other countries, although it does happen a lot.
Corrupt mayors aren't the only reasons those cities languished. You lose banks, big box retailers at a time when people still shopped at them and have a rise in crime due to all of the jobs being shipped to the suburbs and your cities would go to hell in a handbasket too.

Corrupt mayors didn't help, but let's not act as if this was some sort of problem that was borne solely out of poor management.
Google Chart is a good choice : various graph types & facility of use. You may want to use a wrapper like pygooglechart
For creating graphs you might want to look into SciPy's Matplotlib. It's a graphing library based on Matlab's stuff. Pretty good if you want those sort of graphs.

See: http://matplotlib.sourceforge.net/users/screenshots.html

Here are instructions on hooking it into Django: http://www.scipy.org/Cookbook/Matplotlib/Django
I have voted on a survey and this referred me to google.com is that normal?
>"there's no mention of small government, lower taxes, which are what conservatism is about."

I disagree. I believe Conservatism is context-dependent.

In the 1700's, Conservatism would have meant resisting the Democratic revolutions in places like the US and France. That's why Edmund Burke's pieces against the revolution in France are still considered important tomes in Conservative thought.

Modern American Conservatism is weird. It was not meant to preserve the old order, but to rebuild an order that no longer existed. Limited government was thoroughly eradicated by the New Deal, which the Conservative movement was born in opposition to. Thus, it is in some ways a "Revolutionary Conservatism", which is slightly oxymoronic.
I think it's more an issue of voting for one's self-interest, rather than say, voting for a particular race. It's why for instance, GOP Chair Michael Steele didn't win a senate race in Maryland over a white candidate.

It's not so much about voting for race, as much as it's voting for a candidate that is more likely to understand your experience and as a result, will be "thinking of you" as he or she makes decisions.

It explains why so few minorities (Specifically, blacks) have made it to the Senate since Reconstruction.
As Nations Try to Contain Flu, N.Y. Cases Are Confirmed
You'll never get consensus on what "conservative" means; conservatives themselves will never agree completely, just as liberals will never agree on liberalism, Marxists on Marxism, etc. It's a political question. If we accept the paper's definition for the sake of argument, then maybe we can have an interesting discussion about it.

Of course, it's a given that the definition and the means of measurement determined the results, so the definition used in the paper is extremely important to interpreting the results. Whether the definition is correct, however, isn't important.
Why do I get redirected to google after filing a survey?
Seb presented the story behind this at the 5K app competition final (http://fivepoundapp.com/wiki/5kapp/), held in our coworking space (http://theSkiff.org) in Brighton, UK last week. Absolutely brilliant!
The parties flipped. Blacks were heavy Republican voters due to Lincoln until the 1950s when it started to shift. Edward Brooke, the first black US Senator since Reconstruction was a Massachusetts Republican.

Things didn't really shift until the Civil Rights Acts in the 1960s were passed, coupled with Great Society programs of Johnson, that put blacks in the Democratic camp for good and sent Dixiecrats to the GOP.
The bigger issue with veganism (and to a lesser extent vegetarianism) is that it requires cleverness to avoid malnutrition. Like it or not, the human colon is too short for a generic vegan diet; we evolved to eat meat.

There are people who already have issues getting enough iron and protein. This problem would only be exacerbated by a pure vegetarian diet.

Furthermore, we do not have an issue producing food for people. We have an issue convincing people to produce food for people. That is, most of the people who starve do so because they cannot afford food, rather than because food is too expensive. This is not a problem of too little food production, because farmers can barely support themselves in places.

This is not to say that reducing meat consumption is not a bad thing, just that it would probably not solve all the worlds problems (or even the food-related ones).
Flot is great for generating graphs directly in the browser, saving the roundtrip for the image and allowing some interactivity: http://code.google.com/p/flot/

You can also generate simple Sparklines client-side too: http://omnipotent.net/jquery.sparkline/
I think frame of reference here is important when we talk about private property rights. You obviously want to frame this as a discussion based on a dense, urbanized population. To do so otherwise would be to fail to "distinguish between abstraction and reality"

But we have lots of examples of private property with a lack of government support. The early history of the United States was almost completely without lots of local civic support of private property rights, yet private property rights worked just fine. In absence of the government, I have the duty and obligation to protect both my private property rights and those of others. I could go on, but we can all agree that private property exists quite well without government support. Take a look at criminal activity and ownership, or ownership of explored lands during the Age of Exploration. (Now you can argue that the natives weren't given much private property rights, but that begins to diffuse the entire discussion. Let's stipulate that once people owned or took possession of things, they mostly held on to them just fine)

In the same way that strong private property protections are a bedrock of western civilization, you can throw in "decent behavior in public"

Not really. "Decent behavior in public" is only relevant in regards to how it relates to private property. We always get back to private property. And yes, we threw chamberpots out the windows for a long time and civilization went along just fine.

People are free to think of me as an inconsiderate ass. I welcome their disdain. That's the entire idea -- others' opinion of my behavior should be non-relevant to my life as much as humanly possible.

I think you're confusing a couple of things here. I am not trying to "win the pro-property-rights argument" I'm not a politician. I'm not a good orator. I'm not especially good at persuasion. I'm simply pointing out that private property rights are the bedrock of modern societies. This exists with or without my consent, support, influence, or whatever else.

You seem to be rambling around a bit, or perhaps I've done a poor job at reading your post.

There is an interesting inverse relationship between population density and available freedom of ownership. I can't own a loud dog if 200 people live within 50 feet of me, yet owning one on a farm is non-controversial.This doesn't mean that the basic amount of freedom required by the individual for a healthy and dynamic society changes, it just means that compromises have to be made. That's my point: saying it's relative and political and all of that is somewhat true in application, but the underlying principle has hard limits somewhere and with a constant drift towards less freedom we are bound to overrun it -- if we haven't already.
I think we've exhausted any vein of disagreement. That said, there's one thing I want to point out:

I think you're overestimating the extent to which there are any natural principles that'll set in and show their hand; they're out there, but most human behavior that actually bumps into them gets corrected pretty fast, all things considered (a few decades, usually, between discovery and adaptation).

For most of the debates of interest there aren't really principles you can fall back on, and even if you do there's a big "so what?", because principles do not in and of themselves supply a valuation.

Let's stick with secondhand smoke.

Let's assume it comes out that, eg, using much-more-definitive science than anything we currently have on the matter that there's a non-zero but seemingly negligible increase in risk of lung cancer from second-hand smoke (say: above some level of exposure your risk of lung cancer becomes 0.0002% instead of .0001%).

This seems compelling, but at the end of the day it doesn't really help you resolve the issue of "secondhand smoke regulation" (without the backing of some state to dictate the resolution).

It might be irrational, say, for the consensus opinion to be that secondhand smoke is worth banning even though other, unbanned activities have higher risks, but so what? The point of "owning" something is being able to do what you like with it without having to justify those actions to others; matters of fact can make certain conversations more likely to go one way instead of another but they ultimately are just dead facts on the table.

An extreme example is something like trying to build an apartment complex over an indian burial ground; it's a pure battle of aesthetics that can't be won by reason alone.

The "second-hand smoking" issue is only superficially different: it seems like there's more of a scientific aspect (does second-hand smoking actually cause harm?) but those facts only serve to inform the parties; without some agreement on underlying outlooks (how to interpret those facts) the facts don't do anything.

One of the commonest forms of self-delusion in internet political arguing is to (unconsciously) assume enough about "the other side's" core beliefs and assumptions that for them to disagree with the conclusions you've drawn would be irrational; this isn't usually an intentional mistake, it just arises from a failure to conceptualize other people's outlooks as differing from your own in any fundamental way.

What I see this century holding is (sadly) a huge flux in underlying outlooks; even when there are principles they depend on pragmatics to accomplish anything, and failing to deal with that flux will lead to sucking at pragmatics.

I'm out, it's been a pleasant sunday.
So a white racist vote = 'bad decision' but a black racist vote = 'less bad decision'?
Apple axes 1,600 full-time retail positions
If you have read 'God Delusion', you would see how much of that damage is already being done.

And "God Strikes Back" parts in 'The Genius of Darwin' documentary: Many schools, public funded to a large extent, dump evolution in favor of 'Creationism'. A science teacher, who was interviewed believes that the Earth is less than a ten thousand years old, because God said so in that holy book.
Thanks for the helpful input... the page is fixed now ;-)
>"especially now that it is known that human races have essentially nil biological significance"

Citation? Your doctor isn't going to screen you for sickle cell if you're white.

As far as I know, race correlates with genetic isolation of ancestral groups, and there are differences between races.

Researchers looking for genetic diseases are careful to choose a mixture of races in their control sample.

I agree that people shouldn't be treated differently in civil society based on their race, and who doesn't? But they should certainly be treated differently based on their race by their doctors.

Race may become less significant in the future if more genetic mixture occurs with globalization. But for now, to say it has no biological significance sounds like wishful thinking.

Edit: I make some stronger claims here than I was ready to defend specifically with citations and literature. I overstate my case. However, to the extent of my current knowledge, you can tell where someone's ancestors came from solely by looking at their DNA, and I know that some diseases are more prevalent in people with certain ancestry. That suggests to me that there are distinct genetic lineages in the human population. As far as I know, "race is biologically meaningless" is a stretch.

However, it is true that the popular social conception of race is very different from any biologically defensible conception thereof. For example, a person with significant African ancestry in America is considered "black", even if that person also has significant ancestry from other places.

Saying that race is meaningless sounds to me like saying "there are no large phenotypically distinct subgroups in the human population". I think that is simply wrong.

Since "race" is such a socially charged word, perhaps it should be dropped and replaced with another word.
Nah, white racist vote = bad decision in one direction, black racist vote = bad decision in the opposite direction. If – in a two party system – there are about the same on both sides those bad decisions cancel each other out.

Bad decision in the sense that race played a role where it shouldn’t. This works only in two-party systems like in the US.
I'll probably have the price taper off when it hits the high end.
We're merely on the plateau, rushing headlong to the edge of another precipice.
The Sorry State Of Online Privacy
There is an 'embed' link to allow you to do this. Typically, I find it's broken at the moment, but should be fixed soon!
Again, when the fuck did I bring up adding taxes? Do you really think there's no way to decide as a community to work towards some goal without involving the state? How about instead of whining about the argument you expect, you address the one that was actually made?

Responding with crazy talk to arguments I never made isn't really a great way to get through to me how dangerous a sort of thinking that I never thought is.
The title is wrong. Portugal hasn't legalised drugs, but rather decriminalised possession for personal use. In effect they have the same laws, but whereas users could be sent to prison before they will now instead be assessed and treated by the state. Proper legalisation would remove all consequences of drug use, rather than just reducing penalties. To argue that this proves any arguments for or against legalisation is wrong in my opinion.
If you are going to define the best decision as the decision made by the majority, then no. But let's say for the sake of argument that one leader can be better than another independent of the decision made by the majority.

Let's create a model to look at how this works. Say there are 30 voters. 6 of those voters are racist; 4 only vote for whites, 2 only vote for blacks. Of the remaining 24, all try to vote for the best candidate, but are only able to successfully determine the best candidate 52% of the time.

So there are 24 voters trying to choose the best candidate.

Without the racist black voters, the black candidate starts out at -4 votes.

With the racist black voters, the black candidate starts out at -2 votes.

With or without the racist black voters, each candidate needs 16 votes total to win. (A simple majority of the original 30.) Now let's assume the black and white candidates are equally likely to be the "best" candidate. Given that a voter trying to choose rationally is likely to choose correctly 52% of the time, we can see that the system with the racist black voters would choose the correct candidate a much higher percentage of the time if we were to run the simulation 10,000 times.

edit: I actually tried this in excel, and the results were quite interesting. 52% is way too low though, rather try 60% instead. What we see is that without racist black people, the best candidate essentially never wins.
I have that great picture of Feynman on the wall (I got it cheap - it's an Apple 'Think Different' poster, with the text hidden by the frame's matte).
that's laughable. he knows what's the best thing to say.
Your doctor isn't going to screen you for sickle cell if you're white.

Do italians, greeks, arabs, and other mediterreanean europeans count as white? Because doc should take a look at them too, I think:

http://www.emro.who.int/Publications/EMHJ/0506/09.htm

http://www.ornl.gov/sci/techresources/Human_Genome/posters/c...
This is a very encouraging report. In Portugal there was a significant drop in drug usage, hospitalization, and deaths after decriminalization. The savings in enforcement paid for improved treatment. Selling drugs was not decriminalized.

The situation here in CA is insane. Medical use of marijuana is legal, but the feds raid the shops. We spend billions turning minor drug dealers and users into prisoners and billions more building new prisons. The prison guards union is one of the most powerful lobbying groups in the state. I remember reading around the turn of the century that nationally 40% of black males, teens to early 20's, were on parole, in jail, or awaiting trial. Insane.

It seems that decriminalization reduces the attractiveness of drugs. I speculate that it reduces peer pressure, hard sell drug dealers, and the profitability of drug sales.
Sickle cell anemia isn't somehow limited to black people:

http://www.sicklecellsociety.org/information/resrep/res14.ht...
The title is not completely right, but then, it's a newspaper article title, and it explains it all perfectly in the body of the article.

Of course the article does provide good argumenst for legislation. While they may not have completely legalised it, it does show that a lot less harsh punishment has a very positive effect.
Wall Street pay bouncing back
Yeah, I read and applied that advice many times, but in the long run, I've found it to have some really nasty side-effects.

Unless I'm doing something obviously unproductive (e.g. watch TV or play a game), I'm rarely sitting there doing nothing for ages. The only time when this happens, consistently, is precisely when I tell myself "This is what I have to do, above all other things" and it just so happens that that one thing is something that I just don't want to work on or think about right now.

The "Number 1 priority" trick works for a while, and while it's working, it's great - but once you hit one of those snags, a whole day can vanish without a trace or any output. The only time "Number 1 priority" works reliably for me is when there is an imminent deadline and I cannot not do it. Any form of artificial "I'm going to do only this today" has a high probability of reducing my overall output instead of increasing it.

When, instead, I tell myself "I can do any of these 20 things, or even anything else I can think of", suddenly I run through things at a really rapid rate - especially if I know that in that list is one task that I just don't want to do... it's like I'll do all the other stuff just to avoid doing that one task.

So, anyway, not just different people, but different techniques - both work, superficially, imho - i've just found that the "focus on one thing" approach hits some terrible snags every once in a while that devalue it on the whole...
The big red flag is the sponsor - the CATO institute is hardcore pro-legalization. I love the findings as much as the next libertarian but the report would be more persuasive if it came from a neutral commission.
You are right an upon further review I wanted to change the title. What would be a better representation of a summary without getting too long?
"Effects of Portugals changes to drug possession punishment?" I keep getting too jumbled, and would like to properly rename if you can help.
David Allen...

Paul Allen founded Microsoft
You're reading too much into this. In a light-hearted blog post, the author is casually referring to the interesting trivia fact that the ubiquitous test image was excerpted from a Playboy nude. He's not making a big deal out of it, and neither should you.
The checkboxes will soon be turned into radio buttons.
Well, if we really must...

The definition merely states that material is pornographic if its primary purpose is to appeal to the erotic instincts, without mentioning that it actually has to succeed. It can be easily shown that this is also the commonly understood definition by making the simple observation that most people would agree that granny porn is still porn by virtue of the fact that it was created with the intent to arouse, even if neither you nor I are, in fact, aroused by it. In other words, you have no case, even if I were referring to that, which I wasn't. (Incidentally, that definition came from a dictionary, and is not "my definition", just so we're clear.) Now that we've established that the author need not have been aroused by a picture for it to be considered porn, we can, I suppose, argue forever and a day about whether the author was referring to the full Lena picture or not when he said it was porn, but I won't do that. I interpret it as the author referring to Playboy, the source of the picture, which is by definition porn, but if you interpret it to mean that the author is saying that pictures of "women's faces and feathered hats" are porn, well, then we must agree to disagree, even if I think that is a weird position to take :)

Now, to get down to cases, in the comment I was actually replying to, what you said was this:

What I see is a rather artistic photo. It surely contains nudity, but it's nonetheless a work of art.

Since Lena as used in CS does not contain nudity, you must have been referring to the original Playboy picture, which I doubt you can honestly argue was not created with the intention of appealing to the erotic instincts.
Stop dismissing credentials. Stop vilifying academic research. Stop rewarding people who are merely controversial, or who play on petty emotional impulses or thinly-veiled bigotry.

These principles may not give consistent guidance with respect to the article under discussion. Isn't that what we're talking about? Maybe we should stop pretending that unobjectionable generalities actually advance the discussion. (Except that one -- it's the only one allowed :-P)
Gravity works exactly the same throughout the entire universe, however from our pathetically small perspective on the matter the differences are quite literally astronomical. On a different planet, you'll be able to jump 100 feet into the air, fall the equivalent of about 1,000 feet and not get hurt. Most people can't grasp why, simply because their brains don't compute the monumental scale of things.
Uh, so, I usually really hate comments about how an article isn't related to HN, but with this submission and the one about China on the front page, I felt like I needed to write one too.

I sort of feel like I'm looking at the front page of CNN or the NYT when I see stories about national legalization of drugs and the problems in a nation's infrastructure.

I think some of us have taken the guideline of 'stories that are interesting to hackers' to a bit of an extreme. It's almost become 'ok, some hackers take drugs, this story is about drugs, it should be interesting.' I still think that stories submitted should have a basic level of hackishness to them. As someone who'd consider himself a non-hacker, I find more hack related stories to be much more interesting than any of these Time/etc. articles, and I come here to read them because I wouldn't have been able to find them elsewhere, whereas these globally related articles are relatively easy to come by.

So, flag. And the other one.