skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I totally believed this comment, completed the game and liked it, but am slightly disappointed about not having built pyramids and fought pharaohs :)
Charlottesville Commonwealth's Attorney Dave Chapman
read Daly's account and said it was factually consistent.
And your opinion of the "cold blooded" mistakes? That is to say planning to swarm a couple of young college kids without any clear identification that they were officials? This type of swarming is always loud confusing and chaotic. All on purpose. The goal is to overwhelm and induce a "deer in the headlights" situation in the people approached. This girl just happened to have good survival instincts and did what she could to get out of a situation that was designed to activate those instincts. At the very very very least, those officers should be punished for entrapment. I honestly think she would never have tried to get away if they had calmly approached and showed proper identification without the drama.

But hey, they are just doing their job right? If something bad happens, they as fully sentient beings can't be held responsible for their own actions, because job.
> And this hurts so much, because the internet is perceived to not be bound by countries and borders, while still residing mostly on US soil. But the rules for spying are most certainly governed by borders; This leads to this weird asymmetric situation where one particular domestic intelligence agency is able to collect almost all international data.

Pretty much this exactly. I don't think any part of our legal frameworks for security amongst the nations is really prepared for the migration to the Internet.
I wholeheartedly agree with your last point. Hit them where it hurts, and that's their wallet. If you dislike what's happening and you notice a certain corporation is associated with that, simply stop using their services and stop giving them money. If you dislike your information being shared, stop using Facebook or any of the other tech giants. They didn't have much incentive to protect their user's privacy, but they would if they noticed people moving away from their services because they can't be trusted.
The Diamond Age is based in a reality where all countries collapsed due to the advent of cryptocurrency and cryptocommunication which undermined nation states' ability to collect tax. I think this is an eventuality.
ABC agents are mainly a police force to stop college kids from drinking. They are armed like police officers, but their primary mission is a lost cause.

Good use of taxpayer dollars.

Edit: redundancy
Interesting points, but I'd argue my IDE should make refactoring so easy I do it all the time. Since, I don't write perfect software the first time, I have to iterate. That iterative process shouldn't be a punishment.

Also I don't want to have to think about code formatting. It's a necessary piece of writing but it only gets in the way of logic flow.
I disagree with pretty much every assertion in this article's rant. Advanced visual editors like Visual Studio make the syntax irrelevant and the architecture easy to focus on. Now I can keep my brain focused on separation of concerns with relative ease. Re factoring is also ALMOST irrelevant if you are adhering to a good MVC or MVVM pattern. Granted, if you are a genuine hacker and not interested in building mainstream web apps, then what the author is saying may be true. I wouldn't know.
It's really difficult to get into section 8 housing and private developers have been snatching up rent stabilized and controlled apts as much as possible, renovating them to end the rent price controls, and then putting them back on the market. There's also considerable desire to buy and develop new condos on properties that used to house lower rent apts. To that end, the very poor are priced out since they are unlikely to get section 8 and are more likely to see an existing apt they have got bought out and/or get the priced raised.
The Scientific 7-Minute workout from the command line
I wonder what this has to do with technology or start-ups. It's a valuable read, but it belongs elsewhere.
In DC and New York (and probably other places), the local unions will pay big groups of homeless people to get together and protest non-union construction sites with drums and noisemakers. If they get noise-complaint fines, the unions just pay them and tell them to keep going.

After spending a few weeks with people with no stake in the cause wrecking my productivity with drums for a few bucks an hour because an organization didn't like the building next door, I started to appreciate the value of _some_ abridgement of picketing rights.
David Simon of The Wire has talked about this. You can fudge statistics for things like robbery, burglary, rape, etc. by reporting them as lesser crimes or otherwise making them go away, but it's much more difficult to fudge the stats when it comes to murder, because murders are so visible.
Thank you for the post and translation. I really enjoyed reading it.
Why? Think about it. You charge one lousy euro a month. That's nothing. If people are long-term users, they get a lot of value out of your service. Why shouldn't they pay for it? If the service provides value to them, they'll pay. If it doesn't, they don't add anything to your business anyways. This leads to a very one-sided business relationship, if users want your service but don't want to pay for it. It's like they're saying:"You're not worth it."
I agree. I have no problem with the occasional political article highlighting some issue that might be of interest to the community but 60% of the stories on the front page have nothing to do with technology. This story isn't even relevant outside of Virginia.
I imagine it's pretty easy to be "technically, guilty of eluding police and such" when you haven't done anything wrong and half dozen people in street clothes come barreling at you screaming and jumping on the hood of your car.

Frankly, if half a dozen trained officers are so afraid to rationally approach a sorority girl who might have beer on her, then maybe these fuck-ups need to be fired. Paint the picture for me, where what they did would have provoked a rational response from the girl.

Did I mention they did this because they thought a sorority girl might have beer? Beer! Context is everything, and these people don't have it.
No. Snowden's own father acknowledges that he technically broke the law, and is especially worried about him getting mixed up with WikiLeaks (gee, I wonder why he'd be worried about the perception of that happening?).

I actually think the government could accede to the requests of Snowden's father completely and still get justice in the end (though we'll see what they do).
Attention HN Homeowners: The MJ article links to a short page about lead pipes in houses. Sadly MJ sticks with the scary story but devotes very little attention to replacing the lead service to your house. The good news is that as far as house troubles go replacing a lead service pipe is not that bad and your local water authority can probably help out a lot.

Call your water authority and ask about lead abatement programs. While you are on the phone with them ask if they can send someone to your house and test the water for lead (some do some dont). Most municipalities have programs to help homeowners replace the lead service. The most prevalent is a program where the municipality pays for the lead service replacement and you slowly pay off the debt with monthly payments added to your water bill. Some municipalities have grant money so that they can replace the lead service pipe for houses with children.

Given the clipart picture of galvanized pipes it is no surprise that they did not do a stellar job covering lead abatement programs.
The homicide division doesn't prevent murders, they solve them.

People generally credit methodology changes under the term 'community policing' for the turn-around. Basically, the idea is that rather than just riding in, cracking skulls, slapping cuffs on once a night, engage with the community more, address more stuff like noise complaints and vandalism, to build relations with the community and coincidentally crack down on the same troublemakers a lot of the time. In theory (and in practice), it turns out to be more effective at stopping crime from happening than the deterrent factor of riding in lights blazing every night.

(This isn't to say that NYC cops are perfect or that stop-and-frisk doesn't happen all the damn time, just outlining the general theory behind community policing)
The obvious question being - who gave these morons a gun instead of a flashlight?
True. The need for a full IDE is probably not always necessary. The need for no more than a notepad.exe? Hell no.
All I said that NSA, Drones and imprisonment of the population for victimless crimes requires money. I would also claim that if taxes were not collected (or would be impossible to collect) with a threat of force, very little number of people would pay them voluntarily. Also, if people were not forced by law to use national currencies for exchanging goods and services, they wouldn't be subject to hidden taxes, such as inflation. Bitcoin makes taxes prohibitively expensive to collect and inflation impossible. How is it an oversimplification then?
I don't know anything about the Virginia ABC's habits, but if California's ABC had officers like this[1], it wouldn't surprise me at all to read an article about them behaving like this. They seem to see themselves as holy warriors defending society from the inevitable total breakdown that would result if people are allowed to drink.

[1] California ABC has "investigators", but from what I can tell, "street" enforcement is all done by or with local law enforcement.
Here is an alternate dimension too.

If both left and right political wings are full of dubious people, then don't bring them both to power. Create an alternative political party of your own and then compete in the next elections. Vow to kill all the FUD such as mass surveillance, Gitmo, SOPA, PIPA, bring in transparency, bring youth to power etc.

I mean fight 'em with the system, and fight outside the system too as more and more people, I noted, have been suggesting the latter on HN here.

This is how India is currently planning for the 2014 elections. The ground reality is so intense that one cannot describe in words.

We have a legion of corrupt assholes both in our Government and its opposition that is called the congress and BJP duo. These guys have a history of carrying out some of the biggest scams on the planet. Shamelessly. They are known to have killed thousands of innocents, like Congress done away with Sikhs in 1984 [1], BJP done away with Gujrati muslims in Godhra in 2002 [2] and so on ...

Not much of a choice w.r.t democracy, you know!

So people lately have built a third political party called the 'Aam Aadmi Party' AAP [3], meaning common man party, whose president is Mr. Arvind Kejriwal [4] (A young engineer from IIT and an ex-diplomat of Indian Government.) Ground is swelling with support to put the new face into power, give power back to youth of our country. And yet traditional and powerful media continues to sleep with the incumbents, so a similar situation of dimwit reporting too.

I don't know how the elections in the US work, heard it is complicated and messy, but this is one angle that perhaps you guys could look at: form a party of your own. Call it something else, like a pirate party, and then fight the elections.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1984_anti-Sikh_riots

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2002_Gujarat_violence

[3] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aam_Aadmi_Party

[4] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arvind_Kejriwal
Why Software Brains can not feel pain
Christ, what a terribly written article.
You can find endless streams of startup gossip elsewhere as well. Just saying.
I also think that warrants should detail the crime and only that crime can be charged with evidence gathered. Anything else for different crimes should be fruit of the poisonous tree, insofar as criminal proceedings are concerned. This would help prevent fishing expeditions, and the granting of warrants until there was reasonable strong suspicion to grant a warrant.
One of my favorite books, but the chicken and egg problem is substantial. Hitting the "tax dodger" tipping point requires a huge number of people to break the law before it 1) has any impact at all, and 2) becomes unenforcable.

I think that there's a clever missing step.
I don't remember where I heard this, but one journalist/investigator compared crime reports with hospital admissions and bodies in the morgue. They didn't match, eg underreporting.

The most extreme example I've heard is Disney World in Florida, where the body is removed from the premises (jurisdiction) before a report is filed, so they can keep the fatality counts down.
data needs to be converted to sql/sqlite?
http://www.forbes.com/sites/venkateshrao/
Agreed, the article was perfectly readable.
You know what, this is silly (except for the part about Obama's record on civil liberties and security).

First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet. If the web was decentralized, as it was meant to be from the beginning, there wouldn't be such outrage. Remember all the outcry of privacy on facebook, no government involved? I do. Or how about companies like Path sucking up your phone records from your phone and sending it to their servers?

At the end of the day, it is we who choose to have an account with a large company running web software so they can "take care of" our email. Giant data centers delivering our movies to our doorstep instead of P2P. It wasn't always like this. People used to run desktop software on their desktop.

It will be like this again, but it will take a long time. My favorite example is how git and mercurial have eclipsed svn a long time ago, and github / bitbucket are way more popular than, say, sourceforge. Bitcoin has gotten a lot of attention over currencies that can be controlled by a central authority. Adobe Cirrus and WebRTC are growing. The same kind of revolution is going to happen in multi user communication platforms. Once that happens, and everything is encrypted end-to-end and there is off-the-record messaging, those using it will take back control.

We can already do almost everything in a decentralized manner except good social networking. Privacy "nuts" can run their email, etc. on a VPN and store encrypted backups in other places. To make it more mainstream, however, we will need friendlier clients. And social networking!

Finally, the web itself was built to be client-server, which kind of indirectly encouraged this sort of centralization. Clients were easy to install -- netscape's business model even involved giving it away for free -- but not many people ran servers. And so it led to this. The long and short of it is, we need more user-friendly opensource servers, standardized protocols, and encryption. Those who care will then run their own servers.
I just saw a newspaper headline today, a photo of Snowden saying "would you hide this man?". I didn't buy it, so I don't know if the article was pro, contra or informative; but it got me thinking... I know it would never happen, but why shouldn't Germany give asylum to Snowden? Oh, because we're full of shit ourselves.

What about other so-called first world countries? Any offers so far? How many non-offers? So, is it really the big American lie?

It would be easier for rest of the world if the US were more free, sure, and the US kinda has it in the mission statement. But it would also be easier for the US if the rest of the world was more free, and it's idiotic to just follow in the shadow of the "market leader in freedom", and then complain when that market leader has a bad day, or a bad decade, or several, and runs off into a ditch. Don't ask what freedom can do for you, but what you can do for freedom, right?

And hey, I'm sure Putin Polonium also tells the Russian people they're free, too. That just as a sanity check. Not that I want to belittle any of it, but realize that in the US you have freedoms of speech and organization others wouldn't even dream of. Use them! Don't fall into the trap of being like Germans, who tend to moan how bad it is, with being content others have it worse... do that other thing, that American thing, where you roll up your sleeves, kick ass and distribute chewing gum :P (those stereotypes are not meant seriously, but well)
Tommy from cityswig.com here - been dealing with Virginia ABC for about 2 years now, and their uncooperative behavior and insane bureaucracy essentially killed any chance we had to survive as a company. Not only that - but stories like this are the norm in Virginia. They're in constant over-reach mode.
Full Google Reader Backup
I can sort of see the relationship to the greater security/liberties debate.

But, ultimately this is a story about a series of escalating mistakes by both sides based on assumptions they were making about the other actions.

It may be the fact that I have been in the parking lot in question, have dealt with VA ABC before, or have too many friends who are Cops. But, ultimately this reads as mistakes were made by all sides, predictable consequences, and ultimately a relatively reasonable resolution with no real relevance to the greater security/liberty debate.
I see a lot of disillusion in Europe about the US. It's been going since the Iraq, but now it's a real wake up call. What's more alarming, it's slipping into anger and open opposition. This is not the change we've been anticipating.

Americans are in a tricky situation now. Who do you elect at this point to make things right? Does it even work? I think we've reached a major milestone here. I'm both frightened and curious as to what will happen. I believe what we do now will define our lives for decades to come.
They pull you over any time you look like you might be underage. It's bullshit.
Why is it beneficial to subsidize people having the same neighbors?

Roots cause unemployment, since they make people less likely to move to a new job. If anything, we should be taxing the stationary rather than subsidizing them.
...rights aren’t ‘rights’ if someone can take ‘em away; they’re privileges. That’s all we’ve ever had in this country: a bill of temporary privileges. And if you read the news, even badly, you know that every year the list gets shorter and shorter.

—	George Carlin, “You Have No Rights"
To be perfectly honest, I wasn't saying exactly that. Yes, you got the point right: if you don't like the services a private company provides - stop paying. It works. With government it has historically been impossible to do, because it controls money supply and extracts taxes with the threat of force (don't want to pay? Go to prison). Bitcoin offers a simple non-violent and effective way out of this, because it would be prohibitively expensive to collect taxes if people used Bitcoin. It would only be possible when they converted it to fiat or physical things big enough to be noticed and tracked (like houses or cars). Thus, my point: use Bitcoin as a unit of exchange and don't pay a cut.
I started programming when 'ed' was the editor of choice, then vi (not vim or even elvis, but plain old vi).

It did not work out the way the author thinks it would.

You don't refactor. Because refactoring is a pain in the ass with a terrible editor.

You use terrible variables like r, rr, a, t, ... because typing is a chore and typos are frustratingly hard to fix. With autocompletion those nice, descriptive variable names are just a few keystrokes.

The better my editor, the more likely I am to refactor. If my IDE allows me to update a method name everwhere at once, I'll update it as soon as the old name doesn't make sense.

Modern IDE's are a boon, but bad programmers are bad; blaming it on their editor doesn't make sense.
We think we have been enlightened, empowered, and liberated, but really all we have done is concentrate our activity in to one nice easily monitor-able state, which means we can now be more controlled than ever before.

Chat in a park? Good chance its private. Chat on line? Good chance its recorded. I could go on...

Your "reality check", I'm very sorry to say, is exactly the lie we are being sold.
To bad that it is not working with a background canvas.
http://codepen.io/FWeinb/pen/0378ed8ad8a56f4f989ed8085baf5cd...
"It's a club, and you ain't in it."

—George Carlin

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wV1lZMTCqf8
NYC May Track Your Car's Activities for 5 Years
> First of all the problem, as it often is, comes from centralization on the internet.

No, the problem comes from the maliciousness of the US military.

Centralization on the internet got us Google and AWS and the iPad.

(The iPad wouldn't be the iPad if it wasn't locked down with a centralized App Store.)
Karl Marx maybe be wrong most of the time, but he is probably right on one assertion: in any society there are mainly two classes: the ruled class and the ruling class. The small numbered ruling class controls the majority ruled class by controlling what they believe. Here are a couple of examples:

There is no ruling class and ruled class.

The ruled class has freedom beyond control from the ruling class.
In the scientific computing environments that I have in mind, hardware is often fixed: you have your several-million-dollar supercomputer on site, or a fixed compute budget at a supercomputer center. Now, do you want your result in one day or 100 days? Because that's the compute time ratio we're talking about.
The big problem is that fear is such an effective weapon to use again any such campaign. The establishment would have to spend barely a penny to totally crush such a movement before it got off the ground given the general status quo of relative comfort for most Americans.

The two party system, as alluded to in the article, really is a huge problem for getting momentum on any movement that has any kind of easy sound bite rebuttals. However I think a good place to start would be to proclaim strong support for congresspeople like Udall, and start going after the NSA shills like Kerry.
Would a retaliatory lawsuit be out of the question here? Much as I dislike the idea of suing police officers for doing their jobs, she should at least be able to sue the state.
Circos: a software package for visualizing data and information
Over $5,000 for headphones
This game is great, I'm really enjoying it.
I can't really agree with this. I get the point, obviously - sometimes, IDE or text editor features end up curing the symptoms rather than the disease. That's valid, insofar as it's probably a bad sign when a coder has to enter loads of boilerplate, or struggles to remember the correct method to call from a sprawling API.

But good coders solve these issues regardless of having tools that make them easier to ignore - and I don't think that making it more time-consuming to write code, for the 99% of the time I'm not doing that, is worthwhile.

I want to enter a few lines of messy code, and have my editor automatically format it; I want to be able to find all uses of a particular function across my codebase; I want my linter to pick up syntax errors or unidiomatic code before I get to the point of running it; I want to be able to autocomplete tokens; I want to easily select and move blocks of code without fiddling with a mouse. These are all features which make it easier to refactor, and not more difficult.

Perhaps this is more valid in the context of people using IDEs rather than text editors, and I'd argue that when working with a new stack it's always worth having a crack at using a text editor/command line environment over an IDE to get a better feel for the environment. Whatever works most effectively for you, at the end of the day.