skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
As someone else already commented, the conditions in Texas prisons run by corporations like CCA aren't exactly the greatest. The state of Texas currently pays, on average, $21k per prisoner. Keeping the prices low at $14k per inmate in states like Indiana and Kentucky could potentially be creating additional costs to the state in the form of recidivism, and other social problems. We didn't find conclusive data (comprehensive hard dollar figures)on this but answering your question is the next step.
How can a zero-day be well documented? By definition it's not yet public.
Why is the C++ STL so heavily based on templates and not interfaces?
that would be the point though, wouldn't it? This whole essay is based on the assumption that transit is cheaper overall than personal cars. the cost of providing transit service would increase, but the city's overall transportation budget should be neutral or improved.
Public transit is needed most by those who cannot afford a car; placing extra penalties on areas around public transit lines will hurt the poor dis-proportionally.

Not to mention, if your city has good public transit, you should be able to get around anywhere, so I guess what you really mean is 'tax everyone,' which seems reasonable.
My day in the FISA court
Bus commuter here -- and also a wild advocate for mass transportation expansion

Most commuter buses in Seattle fill up before reaching some main dumping points in downtown. Imagine if 75% of those people were on the road instead, what that would do to traffic, road conditions, pollution, etc.

I think the free market is fine, but subsidizing something like mass transit seems universally beneficial, even those who still choose to drive their evil cars to work every day (like my wife).

Sure you can nitpick at edge cases like people taking taxis more, but I don't think there's much a case for overall arguing that mass transit isn't beneficial for a city.
It takes very very few derelicts to make the bus system too crowded to use.
TFA: "More helmet laws had come into effect, but head injuries didn't go down at all."
The free market measures efficiency in terms of immediate spending, not long term environmental impact.
Exactly. Mozilla has been working on a lot of stuff that really matters in a long game and for the internet in general. A lot of the OS foundation level features coming to the browser aren't coming from Chrome/Google, but from Mozilla/Firefox and Samsung/Tizen. Check out all the WebAPIs. How many of them are being pioneered by Google? How many by Mozilla?

My personal opinion is that both are doing a lot to innovate and a lot for the web, but that they are complementing each other. Google is pushing forward the front-end and how the browser works with current content. Firefox is working to get browsers to the point where they can do many of the same things that operating systems can do today. A lot of that work is not as straight forward as reimplementing what operating systems do, since they often require entirely new trust paradigms because sensitive things are being exposed to the open Internet. It's not a trivial task.

Lastly, Rust and Servo matter a lot. You will only be able to get so far with WebKit/WebKit2/Blink/Gecko/Trident, etc. before you start hitting the limit of the architecture of each is capable of. Rust and Servo are being architected from the ground up with the future of computing architecture in mind. This means that they will be behind now, but will jump ahead once Servo is production ready.
I don't think it was the change in law, but the defunding of mental health services that followed the closing of the psychiatric institutions.

http://www.nytimes.com/1984/10/30/science/how-release-of-men...
If you like this article, I wrote a similar one called Devops for Dummies.

http://tech.pro/tutorial/1335/devops-for-dummies-vps-configu...

It teaches you how to setup a DigitalOcean (or any other) VPS from scratch to host N amount of Rails applications using Nginx and Passenger. It took me some time to get things working properly and I distilled it into this short article that holds your hand and takes you from A to Z.
Superiority snark is more effective when spelled correctly.
I worked at three different units Beto I, Estelle, and Ferguson. All were maximum security. Beto and Ferguson primarily housed violent offenders aged 18-30. What fun! I probably visited a dozen other units in the system during my employment there.
> Think of a suburbs -> downtown commute situation. Houston comes to mind here.

> I believe that was the study. I'll have to go look at the source to be sure, though.

That makes more sense, although I have to imagine some prioritization of public transit would alleviate this somewhat.

> Speaking of convenience factor, I can't wait for self-driving cars in this regard

Imagine self driving mixed with public transportation. Instead of large buses (or in addition to) we could have more, smaller vans, seating 6-10, depending. We could have multiple per prior bus serviced route if replacing a bus, and they could be more accurately dispatched base on load (having a bus service a route when there's few to no riders is a waste). Additionally, these could be used to add less commonly used, but still beneficial routes between farther points.

To really make it next gen, you could allow people to reserve seats online for a small fee, which would give useful information on route usage and upcoming demand, to allow reserve units to be dispatched accordingly.

If the cost of the drivers is removed, and the vehicle cost and repair can be brought down, a lot of really interesting things could be done with public transit.
Secret court: Warrantless NSA wiretapping fine (2009)
I agree the best rebuttal to my comment is to argue about positive externalities, as you have done. I fully admit that I don't have all the answers regarding "tragedy of the commons" and that at some levels arguments about "how far we take the free market" is affected by issues that end up becoming ideological without strong evidence/arguments on either side.

However, I would argue that modern technology could go a long way towards capturing these costs in a way that's tractable, at the point of the user.
I thought you guys were in business??? I met Thomas at a DC HNer meetup about a yr ago and I thought you guys were already launched... did I miss something?
> The very first issue is regulatory. Because the addition of passangers does present a real cost to bus companies, no tracking device on how many passengers it has has difficulties from a regulatory standpoint.

Counting passengers can be done without charging anything.
The real problem is the entrenched legacy software that uses BSD sockets. I don't want to even imagine the cost of rewriting all of that to use a different networking paradigm. POSIX certainly isn't the best way to do things, especially with the move to the cloud, but much of today's high-performance software today does fine with sockets. There are absolutely some hacks that are used to get around some inadequacies, but BSD sockets work, by and large.
The author mentions private prison scandals, but neglects to mention that scandals occur in public prisons like [1] this one as well.

[1] http://baltimore.cbslocal.com/2013/04/23/25-correctional-off...
GMemcachePG
Actually, that overhead is not entirely wasted. For example, on Solaris (unlike Linux), Asynchronous I/O is supported for network sockets. (In fairness, Windows also supports it.)

As another example, Solaris has the event completion framework which is also available when using sockets:

https://blogs.oracle.com/barts/entry/entry_2_event_ports

So I wonder how much of this is the platform implementation they were testing instead of their new API? It's unclear from their presentation materials whether this is really just covering up for problems in the implementation.

I would have liked to have seen more test data comparing this work on multiple platforms.
its free at 2pm when the bus usually only has 2 people, but it costs money at 5pm rush hour

If the goal is to pull people off the roads, you want to charge people a lot to be on the bus at 2pm, and nothing at 5pm.

And a bus with 2 people probably shouldn't even be running. Get them two taxis.
What Is the Risk That Amazon Will Go Down (Again)?
I think most people would be shocked to learn that buses are using more energy per passenger than if the same passengers were transported in cars. Buses are more expensive too. There are very few transit agencies in the US that operate more efficiently and pollute less than private (car) transit. It's a myth that bus public transit is green.
Using WhatsApp with XMPP client
Is there anyway to use WhatsApp with any of the XMPP clients? If yes, how it's done<p>The Wikipedia article says, it supports XMPP.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WhatsApp
Perhaps because he likes the idea of poverty being a pit that's progressively harder to dig your way out of. Don't have the money to pay for the road access which will get you to your job? Should've thought about that and been rich in the first place!
You make a good point. I agree we would need to increase usage fees on personal cars for my argument to hold.
It sounds scarier than saying: "If you use PHP, remember to set the following in your .ini"

cgi.fix_pathinfo = 0
It's not universal, but most road maintenance is paid for through fuel taxes. Obviously the BIG projects (new highways, etc) are funded through bonds which are repaid through general revenue.
I think you mean your perception is that my description is marginal, which is my point.

We're just maths if you go far enough down. So are machines.
Is there pricing information available yet? I only see pricing for web app/mobile app.
I see, I was just confused by the comment
Seattle used to have an area of downtown where you could ride the bus for free. (You could ride within the area free, but paid if you rode out of the area or started your ride outside of the area.)

Busses became makeshift homeless shelters, which probably ended up driving away actual commuters.

Seattle also bought fancy self-cleaning toilets many years ago in order to give tourists a place to go and to reduce public urination by the homeless.

They ended up selling those toilets on eBay a few years later because the toilets had become a place for addicts to shoot up and for prostitutes to take their customers.

Free is probably a bad idea...
Dart: Faster Editor and more
In that case, yes, it's a real phenomena. People go in for minor things. They make contacts (network). After release many have no (real) alternative but to participate in criminal activity since they cannot find a job due to their background check.
This is a joke, right?

http://www.schneier.com/crypto-gram-9909.html#NSAKeyinMicros...
I'll come out right here and say that I advocate for prisoner's rights. On humanitarian grounds.

But if one wanted to do so for the practical matter of wasting less money on prisons and having more productive members of society and less crime, then it would behoove one to do so as well.
Seattle did experiment with a free-ride area in the downtown neighborhood a couple of years ago. They ended the experiment instead of expanding it, but I'm not sure why.
The USA Today/Pew poll had similar results: "Sixty percent of 18- to 29-year-olds polled support the leaks, compared with 36% of those 65 and older."

http://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/2013/06/18/young-p...
He's mtgx, not mtgox (the Bitcoin company).
It's quite easy to get more buses, or only run buses at certain hours of the day. They are extremely flexible.

My comments on this page might make me seem anti-bus, but I'm more anti-bus-proponent. Buses are probably better than trains because they are so much easier to rearrange.
While I love the idea of connecting supply and demand for a niche skill, I worry for folks in the Motion Graphics/Post Production world who are already being paid very poorly for their work [1]. I just hope this product doesn't trivialize the amount of work that goes into video editing and post production. Great idea otherwise.

[1] http://www.wired.com/underwire/2013/03/oscars-vfx-protest/
I lived in a city where there were free buses for a few months. It didn't work, since drunks would come sit in the bus for warmth (and drink, despite the rules).

My conclusion is that, though I like the idea of free buses, there should at least be a token fee to discourage people taking a ride for the roof.
Awesome, thanks @sergiotapia!
What a ridiculous whiny pointless pile of crap. The author seriously needs to man up and stop feeling threatened by pastels.

Edit: oh wait it's full of ads... click bait. :P
Working on the bus is great, but you really really need to make sure that it's a comfortable place to work.
The problem with this reasoning is that the free market tends to optimize efficiency very locally. It optimizes the interests of the two parties involved with a transaction, but notoriously fails to account for externalities.

Public transit is a perfect example of that. There are a ton of ways that availability of transit helps society at large, and approximately zero of those are particularly of concern to an individual when deciding whether or not a fare is worth it, or to a transit provider when deciding how much to charge for a ride.

The free market is not magic. It's just a simple optimization process. And different optimization processes have different limitations. If you try to optimize a problem without accounting for the limitations of the process, you'll get bad solutions.
Usage of energy isn't the only metric by which something can be considered green, as you probably realize but fail to cite. What percentage of buses are powered by natural gas or ultra-low-sulfer diesel compared to cars, for example? What percentage of buses are hybrid compared to cars?

You're using a little bit of information to make a big claim.
I agree. The solution is a token fee.
I can't decide if he's doing the Blue Steel look or Le Tigre.
I don't think making it free is a good idea, because people have no respect for something provided for free, so you'll end up making the service more expensive to maintain and at a lower quality than by charging a nominal amount.

However, you can use pricing to discourage paying to the driver. Where I live (belgium) I can pay 2 euro per ride to the driver, or 80 euro for unlimited travel during a whole year (partially subsidized by my employer, which they're legally required to do), or any of a range of payment options in between. Paying cash to the driver is so much more expensive than the alternatives that almost nobody does it.
Shouldn't this actually be an empirical question? There are wasted costs in extracting a toll: it takes away minutes of time from tens or hundreds of thousands of commuters, costs extra gas which is itself heavily subsidized, increases the chance of getting into an accident, requires an initial capital outlay, maintenance, and salaries for related workers, costs money to enforce penalties for cheaters.

Sometimes the value the road provides heavily outweighs all these costs, in which case a toll makes sense. But every road? I'm skeptical.

We can imagine (expensive!) systems that governments could use to track which cars go where, resulting in a monthly use fee. But some system of satellites visually tracking your every movement or a mandate that you have a GPS tracking device on your car that reports to the government is... problematic in lots of ways.
it's all free!
I've gotten off buses because of stinky people.

The fix is to provide sanitation and hygiene resources.

I would never want to deter, filter, screen any person (who is not harming others) from public services.

Tolls, fares, fees, onerous parking and impound rules, etc are a way to separate "us" from "them". It's becoming more acute as inequity continues to increase (in the USA).
Thanks for pointing that out. The current cost of high-end surveillance drones is higher than helicopters, yes. I do wonder if that $18 million is only for the drone, or for its associated infrastructure on the ground as well, though.

My point was more theoretical than based on current costs. To me, it seems prices will almost certainly drop fairly quickly. There are many fewer constraints in building a vehicle that doesn't have to hold a human. As the technology is produced in greater numbers, and as the technology is refined, I imagine the cost will plummet. And as the process becomes more automated, it will require less personnel as well. I imagine there will also be "light drones" that cost much less, if there aren't already.

If there's a counterargument for the price dropping, I'd love to engage with it, but I'm having trouble coming up with it myself.

I'd love to see some real numbers. My suspicion is that the amount of surveillance per dollar spent already heavily favors the drone and will only get better, but I could be wrong. In a situation in support of an ongoing event, I imagine the helicopter is currently a lot more useful.
Agreed. Normally server companies backup to tape. Where are the tapes?
tptacek, are there significant changes in the vulnerability landscape since 2010 that could have led to Microsoft's change in position?
Of course, there's still no remedy for the fact that the annoyed are much more likely to speak up than the pleased, AFAIK.
I am still having a hard time with it. However, you might try the "Lite" version: https://duckduckgo.com/lite/
Adventures in Jank Busting: Parallax, performance, and the new Flickr Home Page
More like Facebook is blocking Tor except it was an accident, and MySQL is now under a new license except it was an accident. The idea of shaming people away from pointing out, and yes, speculating on the motives for these changes is a terrible idea for a forum. And if these things hadn't surfaced on HN, do you think they would have been corrected so quickly? What would the the "newly-damned organizations" be posting a response to?

Will HN ever get past all of the whiny meta about what other people are posting or upvoting?
Has Snowden crossed a red line?
Further, "We think it's reproducible" is an absurd defense. If it's reproducible, point to a reproduction. If it hasn't been reproduced, you don't have any clue if it's reproducible.
Awesome! Looks like it's time to get hacking.
The problem wasn't that those things were free, but that homelessness and poverty are systemic issues that aren't actually meaningfully tackled. Even in places with token free transit systems, the homeless still occupy those spaces and will continue to do so.
when it becomes free how do you keep people from living on it?
Public transport is an enormous problem in the UK outside of London - the prices are very high, and the service is often dreadful.

In my home town for instance the local operator regularly cancelled buses without notification, ran late all the time and repeatedly made hugely over the top above-inflation/fuel price fluctuation price rises every year. On more than one occasion they cancelled last buses stranding people.

The company would cheat the monitoring of punctuality by having buses wait at certain points along the route (notably the points at which punctuality measures were made) for sometimes 10 - 15 minutes, whereas wherever you actually wanted to catch a bus from you'd often be left waiting 20-30 minutes for a bus to turn up.

The bottom line is, if you want to live there + have any kind of quality of life, you have to own + run a car. Full stop. This is pretty well true for anywhere outside of London (not sure about other major cities, however.)

A lot of the issue is the monopolistic nature of any bus service, and the lack of teeth of the government regulator. Personally I think it ought to be run as a public service with some means of ensuring quality (ok so that's a tough problem :) or at least improve the regulator's ability to fine companies that fail to provide a decent service + have some oversight over (already subsidised!) fares.
There's a half way house here. Passenger's could pay a nominal fee for the right to ride the bus. They are issued with a card. If people abuse the bus service the card can be revoked. This way many more people could afford to use the bus but there is still some control on who can use it.
I don't get the fascination with mapping 1984 onto current events when Brave New World always seems to fit so much better: http://www.acceleratingfuture.com/michael/blog/2010/07/amusi...

Sure, we're all talking about PRISM now but give it a month or two.
Cost concerns killed it.

Here's a piece from a ride-free advocate:
http://www.thestranger.com/seattle/the-death-of-the-ride-fre...
Fight Club quote:
"A new car built by my company leaves somewhere traveling at 60 mph. The rear differential locks up. The car crashes and burns with everyone trapped inside. Now, should we initiate a recall? Take the number of vehicles in the field, A, multiply by the probable rate of failure, B, multiply by the average out-of-court settlement, C. A times B times C equals X. If X is less than the cost of a recall, we don't do one."
Boy am I glad I didn't sign an expensive contract with New Relic recently.
Hopefully it drives the right behaviour.

http://search.dilbert.com/comic/10%20Dollars%20Bug%20Fix
"She spent a few days in Vegas, staying at the Bellagio hotel"
It was available as an early alpha. And we've had users all along, which helped understand what people need. But today is our public announcement.
we do have a few cities with free bus services (only Chateauroux comes to mind now). It's a bit complicated because it shifts social behavior, (people just loiters in the busses).

But the reasoning is that the bus system is a complete taxpayer money think, and the fare collection system is just adding more drag than easing the bill. It's not sure it's always the case, like sometimes the collected fares pays a bit more than the collection system. There is no hope in paying the whole system with fares in a medium size city tho, it's always money coming from somewhere else (mostly taxes).
Are the buses in Buenos Aires cheap for those who live there? I remember it was around 1.70 pesos (about $0.40 at the official exchange rate) which, to me, is ridiculously cheap, but I wasn't sure if it was seen as cheap by the locals due to disparity of income.

On another note, I loved the buses in Buenos Aires. They were cheap and went everywhere, though I could never figure out the Guia T. The 39 was my regular line and I took that thing everywhere.
Okay, good to head. Unfortunately I don't know of any public ones, no.
As a different data point, in Manchester (UK) there are 3 free bus routes around the city. They are used quite heavily and work extremely well. There seems to be no problem with homeless people using them as shelters. I would love to see them expanded.

One stark contrast between these busses and the ones that charge is the time it takes to get people onto the bus. After getting used to the free version, getting on a paid bus feels glacial when it's busy. Seeing queues of busses feels wrong. I can't help but wonder how much better the transport system would be if you took out the time it takes to take payment and give tickets to people and just let them on.
I don't think it's really a big deal. $8 for the new season of Arrested Development or Game of Thrones is a perfectly reasonable price to pay. It only seems like a tough price to swallow because netflix advertises themselves as a place to find all the content you want to watch.
But then you need to offset that against the damage that would be done if that person was not incarcerated. The $ amount of damage a car thief can do in one month is very high.