skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
I'm astonished by the total lack of conversation around the actual data here. Both the article itself and the discussion below are predicated on the assumption that this is a rampant problem in the USA, but not a single subthread on the actual incidence of this.

I'd expect better from Hacker News.

For what it's worth, Wikipedia has a complete list of people killed by US Police Officers and the police reports from them. In 2012, there were 587 people killed by police [1]. This is much, much larger than in Germany, even accounting for population difference.

I would argue that more relevant than pure population is differences in homicide rate. By the data you've given, approximately 1-2% of all homicides in Germany are by police officers (6-12 officer killings, 690 homicides in germany [2]). It's worth noting that in the USA, approximately 3% of all killings were by police officers (547/14748[2]) which seems in line with what my understanding would be -- it's worse in the USA but not ridiculously disproportionate.

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_killings_by_law_enforce...

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_intentiona...
We do become incredibly fat or incredibly skinny over time. Or our diets change at various points, changing the net trend at times, and our weights fluctuate around a mean.

The degree of "incredible precision" it takes to maintain weight is akin to the incredible precision it takes to ride a bike, a.k.a. not particularly incredible but challenging to some.
Oh, and I should also point out that Armadillo Aerospace originally considered rocket-only recovery. I don't know if they posted any numbers on the necessary fuel reserves; I did look briefly but didn't see anything, and don't remember any specific numbers. May or may not be any published.

They have lately been working on parachute-only recovery, apparently having decided that the mass/complexity penalty of parachutes was better than that of retro-fire fuel. They've lost several vehicles already to minor parachute problems. Parachutes aren't easy.

SpaceX, working at a different scale (though not a different flight regime, at least for the first stage) still thinks retro-rocket landing to be the answer. I imagine an Armadillo-size rocket is less likely to have its various parts crushed at a parachute-speed descent than an F9 stage. Armadillo does occasionally get a STIG back in one piece, and parachute-into-water F9 stages are known to be completely trashed. Dry weight would seem to make a difference here.
No offense to the author or OP, but I think most people on HN know that you can use your hosts file for adblocking. It's not something I like to do because it's not very flexible, especially if some sites block ad-blocking users.
At On2, we open-sourced Theora (initally called VP3) partly because I (the CTO at the time) worried that if the company failed, all our IP would be locked up forever due to complex legal obligations to investors and customers.

The other reason we did it -- the reason that convinced the CEO and board -- was that we figured as we developed better products (VP4, VP6 etc) it would be preferable for us business-wise if the N-1 product was free to everyone. Otherwise, inferior competitors would continue to profit by undercutting us on price. It's impossible to undercut free.

I guess I answered the opposite question -- why do companies EVER open source their old products? The culture of VC-backed and public companies is not especially conducive to making the decision to do so, even with old products.

One argument you will hear against doing so is simple: old, free products might compete with new, profitable ones. There is no real business incentive to take that risk.
> there are now over 4 million active clearances, nearly 1.5 top-secret clearances, that's twice the population of DC

Clearances simply represent that someone was screened for access to national security information within the past 5/10/15 years. They are not all actively in use, and due to compartmentalization even the active ones do not mean that they are actually doing work that involves national security.

For instance, the cook on a submarine? He has a SECRET clearance since he may come across information of that classification in the course of his duties, but frying eggs and standing "sump" watch does not mean he is personally oppressing the populace. :P

Likewise, merely having a clearance doesn't eliminate oversight. That depends entirely on the job being done, and in any event has a simple answer: Just give whoever is providing oversight equivalent clearances.

Now, you might be thinking that means the whole public can't provide oversight that way, and you'd be right. But remember the division of responsibility rule: If everyone is responsible for providing oversight on something, then no one is responsible for oversight. It's easy for evil to lurk in plain sight when everyone thinks that someone else is responsible for spotting it.
I wrote the post thinking about the not-so-expert users, it may be some help for them :)
is it 1st of April?

I'm a bit lost on words so "WTF?"
It is reasonable to say "why would they build the capacity if they don't intend to use it?" In fact it is reasonable enough given the cost that the onus of "they won't use it to it's fullest" is a claim you have to defend with evidence.
just want to point out: if the reason for holding it back is almost entirely because she wants to get paid for it, she should actually explain how open sourcing it excludes her from income. after reading it, it sounded like she was concerned about the sunk cost--which would be irrational.

so I'm curious, how is she earning income from it? it does she know she'll find people to licence it?
Agreed. If ABP starts sucking, someone will make a not horrible version which lets you turn it on and off. I'm not editing a hosts file each time a streaming video doesn't work.
I was wondering too so I found the kickstarter. It's some kind of personal feed reader server: http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-rea...
If you really want to keep building Fred, you could use something like IgnitionDeck (http://ignitiondeck.com) to raise money over a longer duration.

We've had a lot of people come to us after successful and non-successful Kickstarters in order to keep the dream alive.

Edit: I get it, blatant self-promotion. Look through my history and you'll see I rarely mention my company, and when I do, it's appropriate. In this case, I'm trying to help.
Indeed, although some of this is the luck of timing. E.g. Richard Feynman would likely have been one of the great names in quantum mechanics ... if it weren't for the fact he was 8 years old right then. Linus Pauling, born 17 years earlier, became the 20th century's most preeminent chemist in part because he was a fricking genius and writer (many of his books are still useful today), but key was that also in 1926 he got a Guggenheim Fellowship to study under some European physicists like Bohr and Schrödinger for a couple of years, and was therefore one of the first to apply quantum mechanics to chemistry, a very fruitful approach.
> departments justify bigger budgets by using personnel and equipment on more and more trivial tasks. What used to be routine enforcement and arrests become full SWAT takedowns.

Seems that all that DHS money spread all over the country has put local police into the mindset of pork barrel spending and big government largesse.
I know it isn't the point of the article, but I can't understand people getting upset at a bank for foreclosing a house. Pay your mortgage and they are unlikely to foreclose.
Then get arrested. What ever happened to civil disobedience?
It's very much a "blame the victim" argument government apologists & partisans always run to. It's the same as the redneck's "love it or leave it" choice. If the government is violating my rights I can either elect a different Democrat or I can live as an illegal alien in another country.
It seems like every day, more and more political posts about the US are made here. It's getting to the point that it seems that 35% of the point of HN is about getting opportunities to make political statements about the US. There are so many, so so many, places to have on-going political arguments.

I'm of the mind that any place that allows free commentary ultimately becomes a political discussion board, and HN is proving this well. It used to be that HN was a place to get away from that - but it looks like these days it's becoming not much different than the comment section on any political newspaper.
Additional things to not do:

6. Write 'disturbing' material (for any definition of disturbing)

7. Own a permanent marker

8. Connect to an unsecured WiFi

9. Use a fake name on the Internet
Is there a public list of FOIA requests? In other words, can I check if my neighbour has filed a FOIA request?
I think reality is somewhere in between. Spend some time browsing the issue tracker on a good OSS project. Then, if you're feeling brave, head over to a bad one.

I don't think any of this negates your argument, but I understand the apprehension involved in open sourcing a project one feels is sub-par.
http://www.abelhadigital.com/hostsman

A decent hosts file manager.
Raw, Mossad, NDS behind terrorism in Pakistan
There were a lot of reports like these that were complete assumption based on the fact that one witness said the airplane had flipped over. It actually hadn't.
This is a great observation.

If the title of the post was longer it would have been "10 Things You Should Shout at Brilliant Web Developers Who Are Building a Product for Financial Independence"

Once you have financial independence or don't want a product of your own you don't need to be a business person.

The great thing is, once you successfully get past this ugly bit of doing business you can start ignoring this advice and making products that are better in your eyes.
I had a very charged discussion with friends just the other night about this very idea. I argued that even if a defendant has the resources to get to a jury trial, the jury is prejudiced against the "criminal" from the start.

It turned out, however, that each person in the room had either been wrongly accused of a crime or knew someone that had been railroaded by the system. They knew that the prosecution wasn't perfect. My sample size is 6 people, myself included, and we are all fairly educated.

Regarding the media, everyone in the room agreed that the Nancy Graces of the world are actively harming our society...
Great response! I would like to suggest that as people choose to go down this path (and if it interests you - do it succeeding at challenging things is rewarding), a great way to contribute to the world of "open *" is to codify your lessons into better amateur tools. One of the problems robomartin lists is the lacking quality in amateur tools - and the obvious solution is to increase the quality of them!
NYC cases show how crooked officers misuse FBI database for cyber snooping
The diagram is horrible and doesn't really explain anything. I want to know what it is, not stare at some cryptic diagram for ten minutes.
How easy is it to move to Germany as an experienced software developer and get a job there? I know Berlin has a large startup community, but is it large enough to absorb as many software developers that show up there like it is in Silicon Valley?

Do you already have to know German or can you get by with learning the language after making the move?
Maybe they are planning 100 years in advance. Point is, evidence please.
You can request the FOIA log via a FOIA request. However the names of the individuals making requests are generally redacted as per privacy laws.
I've been using Ember-data for the past few months on side projects and it's getting a lot more stable. I've rarely had issues with it in the past few weeks.
There used to be, a few years ago, an onion site relating exactly to this topic, they had a wiki-style setup with everything you would need to get this operation done and even where to obtain the resources needed for it.

OR so I heard..
> What happened to 'protect AND serve'?

The breakdown of community happened. Now citizens are just the environment from which an officer can harvest points for his record.
Your fear is generally misplaced, here[0] are police misconduct stats (granted they don't count every single episode of police misconduct) and here[1] are crime stats. Certainly one episode of police misconduct is too much, but it's not nearly as high as crimes the police weren't involved in.

I think sites like HN and reddit showcase police misconduct and this leads to an exaggerated view of how prevalent it is compared to other dangers. It's similar to the MSM and sexual abuse/stranger danger.

[0]http://www.policemisconduct.net/2010-npmsrp-police-misconduc...

[1]http://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/crimestats
Personally I'd rather they just didn't try instead of faking it. The latter is disingenuous and belittles the customer.
We (US residents) haven't posted annotated lists because this is in our face via newspapers and TV news and viral videos passed around on the Internet.

http://hiphopandpolitics.wordpress.com/2012/04/06/29-black-p...

Here's one take, which is focused on black folks shot and killed over the past year. Note how many were armed.
I can't just help thinking that if this software was truly both non-trivial and useful that it would be relatively easy to pick up $30k "after" open sourcing it via consulting or customization work.
Happens all the time dude. I worked for a financial institution a couple of years ago and was involved in a data center move. The IT guys took care of moving/replicating the servers and data, and it was my job to move the applications and services. You have no idea how many console apps and windows services I had to decompile in order to change the connection strings (they were hardcoded previously ... well before I started working there). Thankfully, they were written in .NET, so decompiling changing and recompiling was trivial ... But, this kind of thing is par for the course in some large and old organizations.
What fascinates me about this is that the SWAT team and the spies are people too. Which sounds obvious but it isn't. Take a guy off the street and he believes about himself, and the government believes about him, that he needs to be surveilled constantly and if he acts suspiciously, violently confronted. But what if that guy is a bureaucrat or a policeman himself? What happens in the recruitment/training process to turn a person from one of the watched into one of the watchers? Does he flip back whenever he clocks out for the day? Are the cops happy to know that they or their families could find a SWAT team on their doorsteps one day for no apparent reason? Are the spooks happy to know that another spook is reading their families emails and judging them? The whole situation is so surreal as to defy easy comprehension.
Hi all, If you would be interested in the development of this, the source code of it: http://github.com/azer/7min.io
IvyConnect, The Social Network That's Too Good For You
It would be interesting to put those industry-standard compressors on the graphs to see how far behind the frontier they are.
Early devs to a startup should always be ready and able to sell. It's not just enough to hire a dev expert in their discipline, but rather all early startup employees need to be well rounded enough to help in the sales process. All things being equal, dev that can sell > dev that can't sell. Startups fail most often from market risk vs technical risk. The early sales process is a key component to finding product-market fit.
I consider becoming unhealthy as irrational, because it leads to a diminished quality of life for me and the people I care about.
Not to mention the heroic worship of characters who break every law and human right going to get the bad guy. Well, I say get, I mean kill.
Unfortunately you still can't fill out your own prescriptions diagnosing your own problem, so you'll still end up paying for a doctor's visit if something is wrong.
'cos the other guy got there first and it would have been pointless repetition, Though the 'thank you' was pretty pointless really.
That is the POV of many in the US.
Hey, this is neat! One note: Hitting "reset" doesn't immediately reset the move counter; I have to hit "undo" afterward to get it to actually go back to 0.
Except when this happens : https://www.google.com/search?q=bank+of+america+wrongful+for...

You're right in that paying a mortgage will make foreclosure "unlikely", but it's not impossible. Also note, BofA was among many predatory lenders. I.E. those institutions that have outright lied, misled or otherwise duped borrowers into mortgage deals that were woefully unfit for their financial situation. They continued this practice in renegotiations for loan modification after the market crash.

This was revealed by several BofA whistleblowers: https://www.google.com/search?q=bank+of+america+whistleblowe...

Which makes payments to prevent foreclosure unlikely as well.
Blame our compulsory state education? http://school.neocities.org/
Not wanting to proselytize on a failure but presumably 15 minutes of graphic design input on the video thumbnail would have helped the Kickstarter pitch?
I mean, looking at the Kickstarter, I'm having a hard time understanding exactly what Fred is.

www.kickstarter.com/projects/2000892040/fred-feed-reader-extraordinaire

There's a vague description of being an RSS reader that you have control over. There's all kinds of talk of the various technologies that Fred sits on top of, but very little talk about what Fred itself actually does. There's a single image on the Kickstarter page, which isn't the product itself, and looks like something whipped together in Paint in 5 minutes time. There's a link to a demo site, but, again, it's not entirely clear what's going on when you get there.

It's not that people are unwilling to pitch in or that $30k is necessarily even too much for that, but it has to be something people want and you have to give them a reason to want it. The lack of any kind of compelling pitch seems to be what killed the Kickstarter in this case.
I think the biggest issue is that software/technology isn't "trickling down" the way that many other resources do. It's proprietary, region restricted, and short-lived.
Remapping my AltGr layout has done me wonders. I can press AltGr with my right thumb, and then I get {}[]()_= as the no-motion home row. Colemak has nothing to say about AltGr.
So much for getting anything done this morning . . .
This is a somewhat ugly and self-aggrandizing view. It's easy to let people you don't know and will never meet become sub-human, but it's dangerous and harmful. The relevant xkcd is of course, http://xkcd.com/610/.

I don't presume to know why most people are not particularly vocal on these matters, but it's certainly not because they lack critical thought.
Colemak provides a Capslock-intact version.

Colemak was designed with the aid of a computer, to find the optimal layout.
Just remap it within the FPS (don't they all have this option?), or press Alt+Shift when you enter the game.
My comment was more along the lines that only being angry when one country does it is very thinly veiled nationalism.
because there's a Big-Brother wannabe conspiring to destroy the constitution

"Yes we scan"
Obviously. We were in an acknowledged but undeclared global war with the Soviet Union. We're not with Russia.

To me the more interesting change is that Ellsberg believed (correctly!) that a story like his could go to US media and would get out. Today nobody trusts the US media to report critically on the USA. (Hrm. If the 2000 election were to happen today, once the Guardian began digging up evidence of concrete, massive, and clearly illegal suppression of black turnout in Florida, would that get reported in the NY Times? Or on something that big would they maintain silence again until it was a mere footnote months later about the state of Florida having admitted to it, been sanctioned, and having promised to not do it again?)
> To them, it's excusable for rights to be violated if they feel enough justified anger.

I don't think this is specific to young people, or to the present time. Everyone will be very noble when talking about rights in the abstract, but they quickly throw that away when it's the rights of a specific group they don't like. I was struck by it after the London riots last year, when there were loud calls for looters to be punished beyond what the judicial system normally allows. You can see the same attitude to terrorism.
Let's say you find the backups. They're likely in some obsolete tape format, and you would have to reconstruct an ancient Novell/NT/Unix environment to recover them. That's assuming you even know the source code is on a tape labeled something like "Server03".
Because someone else could update that old product and start competing with the newer version.
I was one of those hyper skinny people. There are only two reasons for it: 1) a temporarily very high metabolism that will fade with age 2) how many calories being consumed in relation to how fast your body burns

I couldn't gain a pound of weight no matter how much crap I ate, right up to about the age of 25. So I ate anything at any time, all the time. I then proceeded to gradually gain 40 pounds over seven years, from 150 to 190 (at a 6'2" height), as my metabolism slowed.

I lived off of sugar, all the time. And pasta carbs.

You'll find that some of the formerly skinny types that keep up that rubbish diet, will end up remaining slightly thinner than most except for some out-of-place looking weight gain in the mid section. That's the lucky scenario. The unlucky scenario is you give yourself diabetes or your metabolism really lets out and you just explode to twice your size.
My point was more about the redundancy rather than an attempt to be pedantic or politically correct, but go ahead and downvote...
> "How dare you suggest that I would ever ship a product that wasn't web standards compliant and passing every accessibility standard."

As long as some web developers feel that accessibility is optional, even for a minimum viable product, they will continue to discriminate (howver inadvertently) against some users. In some cases, these users will then be barred from completing some task that is required, because they can't use a particular application, e.g. an application that's required by a particular job or course. Please don't contribute to this problem by suggesting that accessibility is an optional nice-to-have. For users with disabilities who need to use a particular application, it isn't.
They are allready out there.

http://projectsentrygun.rudolphlabs.com/
http://realsentrygun.com/
http://paintballsentry.com/Videos.htm

also, with OpenCV, cheap hobby servos, webcams and 35$ Raspis, and 40$ AKs, the parts are pretty easy to come by.
What Lies Ahead
We are based in Germany, not yet popular but at least, it feels good to be here and have our server also hosted here with a German company (hetzner) .
I would take these figures with a grain of salt because I doubt any accurate statistics of police misconduct are kept.
A few don't, but most politicians run on a platform of being tough on crime and tough on terror, then do exactly what they said they'd do.
> ...find their info on the internet, which isn't perfect, but at least there are many perspectives presented

But how many people will actually go out of their way to look for those perspectives? The down side of having a thousand voices speak is that you can easily listen to twenty you agree with, and ignore two hundred opponents. I know I do that a lot of the time.
"Pshaw, even the most dimwitted individual should understand this, provided they have a BS in physics, were accepted to grad school, and are in their first or second year."
By reading through it, it helps everyone stay "on their toes" about who the shitheads are, too. So, yeah, thanks for your submission!