skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I've long thought that if there was one law you could pass that would fix the most about what's wrong in Washington today, it would be to require that representatives live in their districts full-time, and conduct congressional business electronically via web or videoconference.

Think of the implications:

It's a psychological fact that people tend to develop the strongest loyalties to those that they spend the most time with. If you spend the year in your home district, you develop attachments to your constituents. They are your neighbors, your friends, your kids' playmates' parents. Betraying them for some big corporation becomes much more emotionally difficult.

Lobbying becomes virtually impossible. Lobbying works today because you can hire one lobbyist in Washington who has time to hobnob with dozens of congressional reps. That facetime is what makes the congressman takes the lobbyist seriously. If the congressman was required to reside in his own district, then any company wishing to pass legislation in their interest needs to hire 200+ lobbyists, one for each of the districts that must vote their way. Suddenly it's a lot less economical to buy Congress.

Gerrymandering becomes residentially undesirable. Are you going to add a poor black neighborhood just to gain some Democratic votes if you have to live there? Do you add the fundamentalist Christian neighborhood to pick up Republican votes even though you can't stand the folks there? Add a law that the congressman must meet with his constituents regularly, and the idea of gerrymandering districts becomes even less attractive, as suddenly you have to drive a long distance for dinners & events and stuff.

Direct citizen participation in government becomes possible again, as it becomes possible to meet directly with your congressperson and raise a pressing issue.

Representatives will be much more clued into the "pulse" of their district, and aware of how the choices they make in government affect ordinary citizens of this country.
To see why it's not worded that way in the Wikipedia article, imagine each sentence in the article implicitly preceded by "According to source x,..." -- source x of course being the relevant citation. If the cited source states that he "said", then using "claims" or "allegedly" does not accurately reflect the degree of certainty expressed in the cited source. Veracity of that source notwithstanding.
i started implementing a rope implementation for dart about a year ago

https://github.com/fishman/dart-mutablestring

some things working some things missing, but it's been a while so i don't really remember

https://github.com/fishman/dart-ropebench
Unless you think "said" implies truth, there is no clear improvement between "Julian said" and "Julian claimed". "Julian said" is not implying that what he was saying is beyond reproach.
In most cases, crying or bleeding strangers will use a handkerchief I give them. Bottles of water are also a hit with bleeding or sick people. It also gives them a chance to talk to me if they want. Sometimes they do, most of the time they don't, that's ok.

(I wanted to cite your post, but the relevant part is too long. HN could use citation boxes, I guess.)
Particular qualifications to address economic theory? What is this, quantum mechanics?

There is a fight and a struggle over how the pie is divided up. To call the arguments around this "theories" which one must be "qualified" to discuss, is a laugh. It's more akin to theologians arguing over how many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Most economic "theories" boil down to who the money should go to. In your world, only people with "particular qualifications" are allowed to have a say on this topic. Also, what a surprise, the "qualified" people always say that what should be done is what is good for the heirs who bankroll their think tanks, endow their chair at their schools and whatnot.

There hasn't been any mainstream study of economics for well over a century. There has never been actually. In the time of Adam Smith, there was an area of study called political economy in which, right or wrong, there was an honest attempt to study the topic. Although honest mainstream inquiry stopped before it happened, when "political economy" was tossed and "econom-ics" (like phys-ics? mathemat-ics? genet-ics?) came into being, the field had already been completely overrun by BS.

Read Adam Smith, Ricardo, Say, Mill etc. if you're interested. There is no living mainstream "economist" who is not a complete BS artist.
I believe the answer might actually be yes to that as well. Remember the NSA treats analysis (search) of information as different from collection of information.

Doesn't matter though, the proposed law talks about search of American phone records which the NSA is already forbidden (even with PRISM) from looking at.

In other words the new content of this law would be exactly zero, if that's all it purports to add.
Crazy valuation, shit load of funding and no way to make money? Quick somebody should let Yahoo! know...
No funding? No problem! Moochstrap your startup
> Definitely, I'm on the lookout for any kind of service that operates in a country with transparent law enforcement and accountability.

Being European, I'm looking for services which operate in my home country. I prefer to be spied where I'm a citizen, because US clearly only protects the privacy of its own citizen, and because it is illusional that intelligence services be transparent.

However, there is no such thing as a european company running cloud services for email, rss, file storage and social network: Not even talking about dismissing american-funded strat-ups, all the supposedly European services are run under a .com website, and this extension puts them under american trade and penal laws - We've had this example of a piracy UK website run by UK citizen be trialled in US, where the defendant knew no-one, for the domain was in .com.

Note that I would trust a cloud service registered in my ophome country and in .se, because they have proper forms of government.

Who's up to start such a company? I'd give them big money to keep my records home.
On a more positive note, this could be a real boon for future historians, if the data is made available to them hundreds of years from now.

By mass recording a sizeable chunk of the world's electronic communications, they effectively have crystallised human culture at that point in time.

It would be fascinating to see the equivalent from, say, 500 years ago. (Reminds me a bit of the plot of The Light of Other Days [1], where wormhole technology is used to peer anywhere into the past.)

Unfortunately the intelligence community will likely just keep such data secret, and continue to use it for their own suspect ends.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Light_of_Other_Days
Best solution IMO would to repeal the FISA Amendments Act.
well that's not how trains are supposed to work at all ;_;

... fine. I guess I'll go get my hammer then.
Many in fact were prosecuted for their political beliefs. Remember that Yates' conviction was reversed by the Supreme Court on the basis that they never showed he did anything other than distribute Communist literature. Additionally I don't think you can look at the shift in Supreme Court precedent between Whitney v. California and Yates v. United States and conclude that the Supreme Court eventually decided that prosecuting for mere party membership and political belief was falling out of favor in the party.

> Still, of course, maintaining legal representation even to the worst of the worst is the important part of the due process, so I guess he has a place in the picture too.

Sure, and defending such rights at the cost of one's job and even being kicked out of the ACLU when the ACLU didn't want to touch the issue requires a certain degree of courage.

> As for the practice of taking the Fifth, I can appreciate that people associating with organisation with official goal of overthrowing US government and which is financed and directed by Joseph Stalin would feel the need of some defensive tactics when the same government their organisation is trying to overthrow comes in and asks questions.

Taking the 5th started after people were prosecuted for refusing to testify before the state legislature in Washington State.

But a goal in the abstract is just a political belief. It is not until it is paired with concrete steps to make it happen that it is actionable. This is what Yates turned on, unless you think the Supreme Court in Yates got it wrong and the Smith Act never should have been castrated.

But if the Communist Party's goal in the abstract of overthrow of our government at some indefinite point in the future makes them illegal, then surely the National Rifle Association's view that the 2nd Amendment protects the right of the people to rebel violently against the government would be illegal too, is it not? There is not much difference between "things are such that at some point we will have to take over the country by violent revolution if necessary" and "this provision of the Constitution is to ensure that if and when the government overreaches, we can exercise our duty and take over the country by violent revolution if necessary." Drawing a line between the CP and the NRA is surprisingly difficult.

I want to underscore this by saying one of my most memorable conversations with John was about gun control back in the early 1990's and I thought it was interesting that he made the arguments almost exactly that the Supreme Court accepted in Heller years later.

My question to you is whether you think the Supreme Court got it wrong in Yates v. United States, when it held that arguing for actions in the abstract with no tangible steps to make it happen was fully protected under the first amendment even when it came to advocating the moral desirability of violent overthrow of the government. Maybe you think that was wrong and the NRA should tone down their rhetoric too. After all the "cold dead hands" mantra is a threat to rebel if sufficient gun control laws are enforced.
Also remember when all the fatwas were proclaimed for a Danish newspapers publication of a cartoon featuring the Prophet Muhammad? That's not even considering the issue of extremist religion and Sharia law, as led to the shooting and near-murder of Malala Yousafzai.

Islamist culture is not entirely compatible with Western democracy, just as far-right fundamentalist Christian extremism is not entirely compatible with Western democracy (e.g. the 1996 Olympic Park bombing).
It's fairly common to word things that way in Wikipedia articles, though of course not for every citation. It's a judgment call whether it should be or not, since adding a qualifier in-text more strongly contextualizes the claim as being from the source, rather than in "Wikipedia's voice".

For example, I recently wrote an article about an ancient Roman politician. A number of sentences are in the form "[Scholar A] argues that the person did X [cite]" rather than "The person did X [cite]". I'll use the second form for uncontroversial facts, but the first form when it's more like a proposal from a particular scholar which isn't necessarily an accepted consensus viewpoint.
Easystar.js - Asynchronous Pathfinding library for games.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/europe/turkey/1010...

http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2012/dec/29/fbi-coor...
We should give foreigners rights that Americans enjoy. If American enjoys 4th amendment protection, so can foreigners. That mean you can't spy on foreigner without getting a warrant from an open court, rather than secret courts with secret ruling.

Edit:

I am not arguing that foreigners should receive welfare check and benefit from social programs. I am arguing that if they are targeted by the US government, they should be subjected to the same protection. There should be no special exception for anybody, because the special exception was used to justified the NSA spying program.
Nope, the processes and safeguards around what the GCSB and SIS can do in NZ are laughably relaxed and just became more so. The GCSB were the agency who fucked up Kim Dotcom's case, after all.
"I apologize in advance for bothering you. If you need someone to talk to who doesn't know you, isn't going to judge you, and will probably never see you again, I am here."

Doesn't hurt to say something along those lines to someone in distress or down. If they shoo you off, that's okay. Better to do something and fail, than do nothing and wish you did. Introverts know the "shoulda coulda woulda" feeling all too well. And most of the time, upset people simply need an ear, and maybe a hug.
The comment about MS Paint is one of the stupidest, most naive things I have ever seen on HN. Have you every worked for a company or organization outside of SV? Nobody gives a shit what your slides look like in the real world. Sure, ideally slides wouldn't look like crap, but since most "normal" people don't even notice, nobody tries very hard.
Is there a precedent for that?

I don't mean to agree or disagree (though I am inclined to disagree, I admit, which is why I ask the question). By asking, though, I hope to see the advantages and disadvantages in a real-world situation.
It should be noted that the European Economic Area is currently implementing the Data Retention Directive[1], which in my opinion is worse for end-users than what the blogosphere is extrapolating from some dude's PowerPoint slides in this case. If you're using a US hosted service, there's nothing preventing you from deleting your data if it hasn't been subpoenaed already. European countries are starting to enforce a 6-24 month minimum retention period for traffic data.

1. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Data_Retention_Directive
The word "infinitesimal" appears in this document.
Thanks for posting this. Here's something I wrote to someone recently: "I view talking about FISA (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Foreign_Intelligence_Surveillan... ) like handling radioactive waste or juggling chainsaws: it has to be done carefully." The reason is that FISA orders come with a gag order: see https://ssd.eff.org/foreign/fisa . So I understand why official company blog posts, even from Larry, have been carefully worded so far, even if that comes across as legalistic or weaselly-worded to some.

For what it's worth, I'd recommend reading this post: https://plus.sandbox.google.com/+YonatanZunger/posts/huwQsph... To me, Yonatan's post read as the sort of personal, even blunt statement that you're asking for.
Unless Assange is going to claim that the bomber crew knew there were that many women and children there and dropped the bombs anyway I don't see how a video of a horrific event is really supposed to add to the horror. "Massacre" could be said to follow from the Wikipedia article video or no video; "War Crime" is much more serious but requires actual evidence of that, such as occurred at My Lai during Vietnam.
Ed Bott on CNET says its all bullshit, ok we should all just go home then. excuse me while I http://trololololololololololo.com
Of course the Afghans are going to hate the US if you are killing their children. Imagine the uproar if an Afghani had set off a bomb in the US which caused the same casualties. Actually you don't have to imagine, you have the recent Boston bombing as a demonstration.
I highly recommend 'We' by Yevgeny Zamyatin. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/We_(novel)
Giving the project a D for not supporting https.
We're talking about stock consumer services which should be commoditized, at the very least. With AtMail, The Old Reader, Diaspora, there is already open source software to cover most our vital needs, and it is not impossible to develop cloud services in other continents.

I wouldn't be surprised of a sweeping European law saying "For the safety of European Intellectual properties, it is forbidden for businesses to store their email in Gmail". The game is to explain the WTO that this is not protectionism, and given the present NSA leaks, it only makes it easier.
Actually, that is what Yates v. United States turned on and why after the Supreme Court said that distributing literature could not be sufficient but must be paired with actual concrete steps to make it happen there was only one further conviction under the Smith Act (for a Communist Party member who was also a martial arts instructor).

Read Yates v. United States. The conviction was reversed and it brought an end to Smith Act prosecutions of the Communist Party.

Decision at: http://www.law.cornell.edu/supct/html/historics/USSC_CR_0354...

Oral argument at: http://www.oyez.org/cases/1950-1959/1956/1956_6

Yates also largely overruled Whitney v. California (and set up the formal overrule in Brandenburg). It is worth noting however that although the Supreme Court (this was decades before Yates) held that Communist Party membership itself could be subject to prosecution, Brandeis's concurrence apparently lead the governor of the state to pardon Whitney.
So what do we do? What does Stallman do? Do I run my own postfix box in my closet? I'm suppose I'm technically literate enough to pull it off, but what about friends and family?
It would be interesting to get insight of least editor of all editions (if that is a sigular person) on rating of the the countries in this year's edition of these books, rating being general impression of handling a business in stated countries.
Manning supposedly leaked only the video about the airstrike, the facts about it - including high number of civilians killed - were known long before. Even the reference article was created before the Manning story. Since the video was never released, the connection between Manning and this story is rather weak.
>Given that computers (that can run long-running background services) and land lines are going to be the exclusive domain of the rich or the programmers in a few years, there is essentially no hope at all of fixing this.

Not nessasarilly. I suspect that in home wifi will continue to be common, which means that homes would continue to have a wired connection to the internet. If a company develops and markets a product to be a 'personal cloud', then a typical consumer should be able to use it. The requirements for such a server (for a typicall user) are pretty low, and computers continue to become cheaper, so the price shouldn't be prohibitive for a large market. Even the UI for the server itself seems relativly simple. Essentially all you need is a good package management system, and for the individual p2p 'apps' to have easy to use configuration. Once IPv6 takes off, it would be trivial to these machines globally routable, then it is either a matter of allowing consumers to easilly get a DNS to their server, or creating some easy way to tell devices where to look (this is probably the hardest part).

The main problem in getting this adopted, I suspect, would be that it does not provide enough additional value over the centralized servers for mass adoption. Combine this with the network effects of lock-in, and you would need serious value add for this to work.
Well, I'm going to try "only going to use services that allow client side encryption", at least.
No Evidence of NSA's Direct Access to Tech Companies' Servers
Regarding the original Veriz court order.. Answer me this: Does your phone number, or the fact that your particular string of numbers is a phone number, somehow exist in the universe with some sort of innate privacy apart from you? Nope. What exactly does a phone number, absent a name, address, billing info, or other customer info, mean to anyone, even the NSA.
It's war. Shit happens in war.

It's terrible, of course, but I don't think anybody in the military intends things like this to happen (aside from a few legitimate psychopaths who use the chaos for their own ends). It's 'just' a horrifying side effect of using war and military power as a blunt instrument for statecraft.
U.S. Releases Details on PRISM
"it seems like the NSA slides overstate how much access they have"

This strikes me as pretty implausible; verifying the extent of their access to someone's gmail or facebook account seems like something the NSA should be able to do very easily. I think it's safe to assume that this part of the project is $20M, not that they have $20M worth of access to the internet.
Interesting, do you have a link for that?
> In your world, only people with "particular qualifications" are allowed to have a say on this topic.

In the real world ("my world"), economics involves multiple actors in complex, dynamic relationships, which require precise, controlled examination, in order to derive theories that enable accurate predictions and insight into causes and effects.
I'm way more worried about skilled computer crackers w/ organized crime than I am about the government (who I've at least personally verified the incompetence of :).

I'll continue using tarsnap (thanks cperciva!) for stuff I need private and learning not to worry as much about the rest.
It's odd that you're on hackernews if you don't have a phone and use paper maps. That just seems like an odd combination.

I actually find it very hard to believe that someone who develops for a living wouldn't use google maps, which are far superior to paper maps (traffic, for one thing). I'd be very suspicious of your code!
Ideally we wouldn't need crypto, locks, weapons, or legally-binding contracts either though. :-/
There is no contradiction between being a democracy and being a republic however, as you add "constitutional" in front of "republic" it becomes a constitutional republic, which is not a democracy.
I try to give to software non-profits every paycheck. Even if it's only $5 or $10, it's better to give than to think, "Oh, they are great and I want to give them a big donation but I don't have the money right now, so I'll wait until I have $50 to donate" and never get to it.
The GPG UI is ultimately a relatively minor issue when it comes to mass adoption. There have been several PGP-like products with decent UIs and good mail integration, none has enjoyed mass-market success. Creating another one wrapping an existing crypto library would be no epic undertaking.

The real problem is key management. Any system which depends on users to think about keys, protect their keys, back up their keys, is doomed.

The fix is going to have to involve cheap, idiot-proof hardware. When crypto key management is the same as house key management, people will start to use it, hopefully in a semi-correct manner.
The point is that with a multi-level system, where the CA issuing the certificate is internal to the target, and where certificates are tracked over time, you can detect what I call a divergence of timelines, i.e. a disruption of key possession.
All the organizations in question have a permanent smut on their record. The angle I'm missing in this discussion is that this is a business opportunity for something new and better. Acquiring new users for a search engine, social network, etc was damn near impossible because you couldn't compete with the resources, quality and brand. Now they have a flaw; privacy. Maybe the homogeneous landscape of the tech industry can get shaken up. Kim Dotcom is creating an anonymous email service and I'm curious to see what other alternatives for common tech pops into existence in the wake of this.

Changing a government will take a lot of time; but a business outside the reach of US legislation could pop up tomorrow.
I think this is also missing the point a bit. SMT solvers are great, but as far I can it's not really SMT vs. CP or LP, they have different strengths and weaknesses. As far as the sudoku example while neat is pretty much identical in approach and expressiveness to the core.logic version I linked to.
Firefox 21 (Windows) seems to be vulnerable, too.
As a Canadian I'll be "repatriating" my services to Canada. I think anyone using US-based services from a non-US location should do the same.
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