skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> I'm not saying technocracy is a wonderful system of government either, but it won't be hard to do a better job than democracy.

My objection to that statement is that designing political systems is not about doing a better job (on average). It's about not doing a worse job (ever). Rawls calls this "maximin": you choose the option that maximizes the minimum possible value. The maximum possible value is irrelevant, and the average doesn't matter, either. When lives are at stake, you always choose the safest option, the one with the lowest chance of descending into tyranny.

I'm sure technocracy has the potential to soar higher than populist democracy under many circumstances, but unfortunately it also has the potential to crash just as hard as, if not harder than, most democracies can ever dream of. Without giving others the power to overrule technocrats, it's only a matter of time before technocrats become autocrats. Anyone in a position of power who can't be fired is a Stalin in the making. I don't see how that's "not worse" than any democracy. A populist democracy has a reliable way to throw a political leader out of his job or at least get him to change his mind: throw up a shit storm like we did with SOPA. It's dirty, it ain't easy, but once you manage to do it, it works like a charm. And in the end, keeping little Stalins at bay is all that matters.

Power tends to corrupt. Any political system that depends on trusting a group of people to do things right will invariably fail because of corruption, and technocracy is no exception. The only solution is to design a political system that harnesses the power of distrust. When all alternatives are necessary evils, you choose the most controllable option because a controllable evil is almost always less bad than an uncontrollable evil. Of course, evils aren't easy to control even under the best circumstances, but do your best to find one that you can at least put on a leash.

So the best government isn't one that is not subject to control by any political interest, because objectivity and neutrality in politics are never going to be anything more than daydream. Rather, I think the best government is one that is open to control by so many conflicting interests in so many different ways that the vectors eventually balance one another out. Politics is meant to be dull, boring, and utterly predictable. Because when politics gets exciting, people die! It's OK if you want to give up your own life for a cause, but don't put others' lives and human rights in peril.

tl;dr for technical readers: the performance benefits of putting a bunch of spinning platters in RAID 0 ain't worth the inevitable data loss. Especially if your data == human lives.
I totally agree. Unless we decide to leave the field of rational numbers (with exponents, trigonometrics or nth roots), there's little reason not to keep the exact rational number around.

Fortunately Haskell does this too with Data.Ratio!
I also have to wonder how much of this is posturing for the German public. As long as they stomp their tiny feet a little, who can blame them, right? They have nothing to do with this, they're just as outraged as everybody. And then they can use all this for new, even better election promises.

Am I too cynical? I think what I am asking is, does she demand an explanation like Obama demanded Guantanamo to be closed and whistleblower laws to be strengthened?
The pinnacle of inefficiency.
Common sense would dictate that leaked information can no longer be considered "Secret," and as such needs to be dealt with in an expedient manner. (disinfo campaign, discredit leak source[s,] etc.)

To stick their heads under the sand like this is shameful.
Angry European Union demands answers over alleged US bugging
> they can't help it

Bullshit. They have a brain, it is capable of higher brain functions. They can learn manners and behave themselves.

All this is, this 'they can't help it' is a reason for justification. "I'm a mindless animal, I can't help it." It is nothing but bullshit.
Wait… The Patriot Act is passed and reauthorized by Congress first. So you're suggesting that if Congress passes a reauthorization, and Obama signs it, then that same Congress should go back and impeach him? This seems… Unlikely…

The Patriot Act is a law. The buck stops at Congress. They passed it the first time. They reauthorized the parts of it that are still around the subsequent times. Trying to redirect the blame to the administration, which has, by the way, done plenty of things wrong, is a misunderstanding of the system and a distortion that does no one any favors. When we concentrate responsibility in the executive, we support the concentration of power in the executive, as well.

The Patriot Act is Congress's responsibility. And unless we send a strong signal as a nation, from sea to shining sea, to our representatives, that its powers are no longer acceptable (if, indeed, they ever were), nothing will change substantively. Congress is where the blame lies, no matter which administration the act was passed under or which administration it's being administered under now. Congress, Congress, Congress. They pass the laws, no matter whether or not the administration helps write them.
If in Asia, that means Karaoke!
> This is little different from restrictive corporate firewalls, which are commonplace.

Conceptually, the filtering is little different. This policy, however, is very different in the severity of consequence. The superficial story is that the filters have been implemented. No different than Wikileaks, really. The memo and basis for the filters is a very different story.

The memorandum distributed to address the policy mentions sanctions for soldiers found proliferating the Guardian material. Most concerning is that the filters are described as preexisting filters that prevent the mixing of classified information and unclassified systems. In other words, the Army is classifying Guardian articles as TS level content. This is unauthorized for unclassified systems and to be read by soldiers who lack the appropriate clearance. By unauthorized it is meant to mean punishable under UCMJ as a security violation; it's a criminal offense.

The memo also charges leadership with accountability for establishing a vigilant command climate to underscore the secure handling of classified information. Very likely, this means leaders are empowered to implement local measures to ensure unclassified systems operated by soldiers do not house classified information. This is essentially treating a soldier found with an article from Greenwald the same as a soldier who transferred data from a classified system.

The criminal conduct aspect here is, to me, very different from restrictive corporate firewalls.
I feel compelled to point out that all of Browser Pong’s sounds were composed specifically for it by a Mr. Dominic Matar who is not only a multi-talented musician, earnest with feedback, and strikingly handsome—he’s also a breeze to collaborate with. So if you’re looking for that sort of person for a project do check out his stuff and drop him a line: http://dominicmatar.com
If you'd ask me a week ago who the U.S. is spying on the most in the EU, I'd told you without hesitation: France. One can only wonder...
> Germans are pissed (We take privacy serious [1]). They're expecting the EU and chancellor Merkel to do something or she's going to have a really tough time being re-elected in the fall.

How is this affecting the Pirates' poll ratings? If they hold the balance of power in the Bundestag, it's likely the next German government would have to do something.
Selling Haitian Coffee to American Hipsters
Bookmark Manager is now available for Opera Next—as an extension
Show HN: Kite - Create and share Django and Rails applications in seconds
This is complete misinformation. Even Java apps on Android are first compiled to JVM bytecode, and then converted to Dalvik bytecode using the dx tool. Clojure and Scala go through the exact same process that Java does in order to make Android apps.
I have a bog standard shared hosting account with hundreds of sites and only pay like $10/month. I can run Rails as well without issue. Never do any server/OS maintenance. For people who write a lot of sites, only some of which hit it big, it's clueless to pay Heroku prices.
nice idea but this service would be vulnerable to abuse via false reports. there should also be a simple way to verify the correctness of the reports to realize this idea.
users can be given ID numbers regarding their stolen/lost accounts from the actual provider of that account where this ID number is is provided from a central application.
so this boils down to persuading actual firms to cooperate. this would require lots of effort imo
London attracts a lot of internationals because of opportunities for education & employment. That's why the ethnic English population is less than 50%. It's important to note that the >50% of internationals are not all muslim, at all.

When it comes to birth rates, they vary a lot depending on a family's country of origin. Take Pakistan: in general first generation Pakistani immigrants do have more children than Europeans - but after a generation or two, the demographic pattern is very similar to that of the host country.

There is a radicalisation issue, but it's dangerous to start implying that all or most muslims are "hostile to the US" or "Jihadi". It's a very small minority, and especially in England. Almost a quarter of the world's population is muslim, they're just regular people. It's xenophobic to assume that they all hate you.
Do you work for NSA? Is it really your interest to discuss technicallites instead of story itself? Do you also think the main story and focus should be on Snowden instead of espionage?
Advisers
During Kim Dotcom coverage, some news articles mentioned that Germany does not extradite German citizens. Any chance the Bundestag can grant Snowden German citizenship?
Am I missing does something, or does "threshold of 51%" sound awfully like "false positive rate of 49%"? Imagine that with a spam filter. Just wow.

The only way that makes sense is that they whitelist the people they like, and simply don't give a flying fuck about anyone else, American or otherwise. Spy first, deny it later.
Show HN: Freader, an open source RSS Reader built with Node.js and Angular
Singapore is a constitutional democracy: they have regular multiparty elections. Sure, there's only ever one party that realistically stands a chance of winning, but that has more to do with them being competent at government than the rather half-hearted intimidation of opposition candidates through the legal process. That, and the fact the media, civil service and government are all basically the same set of interests... it's actually the extreme case of "everything bad people predicted about democracy" coming to pass.
Simple. A significant portion of long-term, powerful congressmen are in on the story too... They VOTED for it.

Remember too. Since the Cold War, certain amounts of spying are "necessary" that's why we have the NSA and CIA in the first place. The purpose of those organizations is to provide the President with information that cannot be obtained timely and/or legally to use against our nation-state enemies. They find spies and/or people working with spies committing high treason, show up at their door and shoot them in the face... These are not "police", they don't have trials, they act by the rules of war.

It all comes back to the misguided Patriot Act. These two organizations operations don't generally produce evidence legally usable in court. As their purpose was military court wasn't really an issue. But the side effect is that no matter what they spy on they don't have time or executive direction to enforce "civilian" laws. The patriot act was a crybaby act local police wanted to fight drugs. The FBI DIDNT want it, because it put them right back in J. Edgar days they didn't want to repeat. But enough other agencies cried about not getting NSA and CIA level intel Congress felt bad let them have it. Even though they didn't really have the ability to use such information properly for criminal investigation or in courts.
ReactOS: operating system implementing the NT kernel with a win32 subsystem
Better power management for Radeon driver in Linux
Thanks.
The paying option would be coming if there is some interests in it.
If there is people interested in it, please let us know in this thread or at info@stamplin.com.
Or fighting for those positions.
Protip: Consider using FB Connect.
little brother style
Show HN: Nightweb, the anonymous P2P social network, now runs on the desktop
I'm not sure you read what I wrote regarding the first point. There is this movement (ukulele or metalworking machines regardless), and this movement does not inherently imply nor guarantee spiritual growth.
Conferência Internacional de Engenharia Civil e Materiais - ICCEM 2013
Why does my curiosity about the wording of someone's comment imply that this is more important than the story itself? I presume you too will at some point today have a conversation with someone, whether online or offline, about something other than the NSA. That's the beauty of being a species capable of thinking about more than one thing at once.

I wasn't complaining about the original comment, I was literally curious to check whether I had misunderstood the publishing schedule of the magazine, or whether it was just worded in a way that didn't quite make sense to me.
If you want a really good and really easy to setup mail server I would recommend SmarterMail. It is also free for 1 email user. I have used their product for about 10 years. Note that it is Windows server based.

http://www.smartertools.com/smartermail/mail-server-software...
Tor --- HN 
It appears that HN is accessible via Tor, as I'm posting this through Tor.

Thanks for this accessibility to HN pg.
a shprakh iz a dialekt mit an armey un flot

(A language is a dialect with an army and navy)

-- Max Weinreich
Based on your experience, what level of proficiency would you expect from 1.5 years of 3hrs/day study?

3000 actually tracks about right from what I know. Here's some information with little backing: I've read somewhere that children pick up around 10 new words a day, and at the peak of my full time language studies, that was what I was achieving as well. Considering that it takes a few months to ramp up to that speed (I've read that it takes about 10 separate exposures to a word for it to become memorable), his 3000 characters for 1.5 years is pretty good.
German Federal Prosecutor's office gets involved in the NSA data scandal
I'm in! Currently taking a summer course while starting a startup. Social motivation definitely helps.
Have you contacted a journalist about your experiences? If not now is a good time to do so if you really have first-hand knowledge of tapping within ISPs.
Don't use cloud services if you care about secrecy of your data
Inbox management for RSS and Mail
At least not by law http://translate.google.com/translate?sl=de&tl=en&ie=UTF-8&u...

And yes, the US army bases in Germany are left overs from the allied occupation after WW II
My answer to the Stack Exchange question. (Never 100% sure what discussion to add in a post which points to another discussion site...)

There's a good article to answer your question on the Washington Post website [1]:

All those jokes comparing Snowden’s case to the Tom Hanks film “The Terminal”? They have a distinctly unromantic basis in the life of Iranian Mehran Karimi Nasseri [2], who lived in Paris’ Charles de Gaulle Airport for 18 years after Iran expelled him.

[1]: http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/worldviews/wp/2013/06/26...

[2]: http://www.csmonitor.com/2004/0621/p11s02-almo.html
Those people also spray male genitals and homosexual porn. They normally aim to be annoying (trolls, griefers, etc). That has nothing to do with the word raped though.

Your second answer goes off in a tangent so I won't bother with that.
Wow, congratulations, somebody just found out that teenagers can suck sometimes. Here we go nobel prize.
How to trick Twitter engineers and have the highest quality profile photo
A fan might be counterproductive, drowning too much current.
I bought a pack of 400 little round black stickers only for the purpose of covering blue leds... For most of the devices I have with blue leds it takes 2-3 stickers on top of each others to dim them enough for me to still see them but not feel blinded when the light in the room is dimmed..
Credentials still matter. Qualifications act as positional goods in some markets.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Positional_good
I did not downvote you, only verbally if you will. But I will elaborate, to me it sounded as if you were saying that the NSA is only ever going after terrorists [whatever that even means, considering activists also seem to fall under that umbrella], so no matter what they do, it must be required to fight terrorism. By definition. [that's a great way to create fiscal black holes, but rather shoddy reasoning]

So why was COINTELPRO not required to keep the US from being destroyed by, uhh, black supremacists? The CIA did it, it's concerned with "criminals", that's in the name -- good enough, no?

The cell planned and coordinated with AQ while they were living in Germany and the BND did not detect their activities.

Yes, and as I said elsewhere, I can totally see why they wouldn't leave anything serious that could possibly be a threat to the US to German intelligence. But I still don't see how 500 million messages per month could figure into this, unless they are spying on everyone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who knows someone who visited a jihadist website...?

If guessing how much it costs to wash all windows in Seattle is a normal job interview question for some, maybe they can help? I wouldn't even know where to begin, myself. But 500 million seems like a lot no matter how I look at it.

Since then the US intensified their activities in Germany.

Oh, so they "intensified it", and that explains everything? 500 million messages, or 500 billion, who cares?

To me that sounds like chocolate rations are up 5%. And I don't mean you, either: without anything to go by, no solid ground to stand on, both of us are pretty much guessing. You inherently trust, I inherently distrust, but I can't see a way for us to find out who the NSA is spying on and why. But even just the acceptance of that annoys me :/
This is almost unthinkable, but a very exciting proposition :) However, there's a problem of extensive CIA operation in the EU and history of kidnappings. Can be a little tricky.
For adults as well. Might even work quite nicely.
> That reads like you have simply bought in to the media smearing. Sound familiar?

I wish it was just that. But you don't need the media to get the full drama experience. Their twitter flame wars are famous and the fall-out from certain actions (like devastating a congress centre and blowing up the bill to over 20k eur where initially 1700 eur were planned as expenses) can be read in their official wikis.

I was a member in the SPD party (some of the bigger German parties) some years ago and quit shortly after becoming a member because it was all about internal power struggles - even with a local 'branch' in a 30k pop town. I decided politics wasn't for me. I had better things to do than wasting them on bullshit.

Then after I got invited by a friend to come along to one of their meetings (for a 250k pop city) I decided to give politics a second chance. And I swear - it was the same like what I had experienced before with the SPD. Only there were significantly more mobile computing devices around. It was 90% about administration (who and how should do what and why that someone was a bad choice mixed in with some feminism/sexism debate) and the real issues (data retention, privacy, etc) weren't even discussed.

In politics I think there are many people who do care about the core issues - but there are far too many egomaniac assholes around destroying every constructive discussion with their bullshit. And after what I've seen I don't believe that the pirate party is immune to that.
I put some college websites up on 000webhost before and they are still there. I didnt have any issues. I know this is just anecdotal evidence of my personal experience.
When I was checking out neocities about page http://neocities.org/about It seems the business model is to pay for the server space with only donations. I was concerned that this service might not last so long.
He's probably in this hotel an AP reporter experienced:

http://www.adn.com/2013/06/28/2956661/trapped-in-transit-orw...

If so, he could stay there a long time assuming he has sufficiently wealthy backers. $300 a night + food etc. isn't exactly cheap...
You can't use custom types without defining them first. Sure, you don't have to decleare where you use them usually, due to type inference, but for type inference to work you actually need to define a type.
>don't expect that they know which sounds you are correcting in their English when you repeat the word for the tenth time.

This phenomenon is probably the most interesting thing I've found out in my life. The fact that some people simply cannot hear certain sounds goes against everything we would like to think.

When people talk about varying tone inside words (such as in Chinese or Thai), while I obviously hear that something is happening, I cannot for the life of me reproduce what I hear or even retain the tonal information. For me , tone is a separate aspect to vocabulary and I can't assimilate the two.

Inversely, seeing the plight of poor Japanese people, who get taught English from an early age through the limited japanese syllable system (not sure the exact name), unable to repeat words properly, and sometimes going completely off the mark.

This just accents the need for everyone to be exposed to as many languages as possible as a child.
Wow this library looks great. Some of the widgets like the image cropper and schedule look amazing. Thanks fot he post.

Edit: Wow, I really like the diagram builder. I've been looking for something like this for almost a year.
It would be nice if all these disclosures resulted in Eben Moglen's "Freedom Box" project getting a boost:

https://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn/
Cartoon inspired by NSA leak
Aww geeze. Thanks folks :) Always makes my day to read unexpected comments like these.

See you at DEFCON 21!
> We definitely need to support someone who actually has a track record for this.

Ahem. Russ Feingold is best known for his collaboration with John McCain on campaign finance reform, but was the only senator to vote against the Patriot Act the first time (joined by a few others the second time). Voted against the Iraq war. One of 3 Democrats to vote against Geithner as Treasury secretary. Fought pork, returned his raises to the government. Voted against dismissal of impeachment charges for Clinton, brought a resolution to censure George W. Bush for illegal wiretapping. After losing his seat to a Tea Partier, he formed a PAC, Progressives United, which has opposed Citizens United, Wall Street and SOPA, and calls out the Democrats when their spine softens, but was just shipped off to an African ambassadorship.

Etc. I love this guy. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russ_Feingold
Newsblur is also written in Django - https://github.com/samuelclay/NewsBlur
This is a throwaway account created by someone who, as the name implies, thinks this sort of thing is acceptable but is afraid that people will disagree. Almost certainly male, he's an insecure coward, bizarrely valuing his approval by strangers here (his karma score) so much that he creates new accounts when he wants to say something he knows people will disagree with, so that he can continue to feel good about how much people like the false persona he routinely presents.

If I made this up, you wouldn't believe me.
Human language & behavior are not Turing-recognizable.