skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Has anyone invented/discovered a system where this can't happen?

There's that famous phrase (Churchill): 'It has been said that democracy is the worst form of government except all the others that have been tried'. But this is more subtle: it's about lying, and ultimately, corruption. Is this a solved problem in hard political science?

I know of various solutions explored in science fiction, notably by Robert Heinlein, Arthur Clarke, Eric Frank Russell, Christopher Anvil, et al. There's game theory, where cooperation 'breeds' more cooperation, in a world of defectors.

But, it seems to me, corruption is now the biggest problem facing humanity. If we can fix that, it'll cascade down through everything else: climate change, energy sources, ecological destruction, sexism, etc...
> Thus the lack of IO in a function's type assures you, reliably, that the function does not cause side effects

No. IO is not the only monad encoding side effects.
Strong crypto is only one step... but it's the no brainer softball step, it's _just code_ and it doesn't have to have any gnarly UI impact.

We won the important battle getting the regulations largely out of the way. If we can't achieve pervasive always on encryption— and at least kill passive dragnet content collection dead— then can we achieve anything at all?
asm.js was implemented very quickly, in about a month, and V8 is already implementing optimizations for it (though without "use asm").
With java 7 and java.util.Objects there is a static helper method. Nice to have in the favourites in Eclipse.

import static java.util.Objects.equals;

if(equals(myString, "foobar")) { ... }
Some other countries have also looked at this.

http://www.sita.co.za/FOSS/FOSS1.html

A policy alone doesn't seem to help, as can be seen here: http://www.itweb.co.za/index.php?option=com_content&view=art...

Legislation might be a better approach. I couldn't find the exact numbers now, but a country like RSA sends around 1 billion US out of the country for software licenses yearly.
> IEFT spec drafts are public and they're audited (as SPDY has been).
> Also, most of the specs that we love and rely on today came from "big vendors", its nice and all to say you want the little guy to be a part (and they should be) but it takes quite a bit of man power to develop, draft and finally get ratified a spec.

It's especially hard when the call for proposals period of the draft is about 4 months and there happens to be a ready made proposal from a big player at the ready to be agreed on almost immediately. It's nice to say the little guy should be a part, but in this case the little guy mostly heard about it long after it happened.
C++ walked in these very same footsteps. First by not having const, then by having it, then by allowing exceptions to constness, then by introducing const_cast and finally by allowing temporarily mutable const objects.
> Dart - obviously a way to create a two-tier web with Chrome being the only option for performance.

The performance of the generated JavaScript is okay. Typically, it's somewhere around 75% of the performance of handwritten JavaScript and it's still getting better.

Those -25% may sound like a big deal, but it's comparable to the performance from JS engines from last year.
I can't square your statement that 'government encourages healthcare providers to reveal their prices' with the following paragraphs.
Given how badly protected power stations are, they seem a soft target. this may in part explain the insane over reaction
here https://www.commondreams.org/view/2013/05/15-7.
I totally agree with you, but at the same time many countries force "top secret" level on all nuclear information to the public. It is certainly the case in France and probably elsewhere too, and there is as much responsibility on the government side that there is in the industry.

We need both total transparency and proper education on the risks/benefits of nuclear technology.
> Otherwise, when your program throws a NullPointerException you'll have no way to know where that null originated from.

Actually, it's the other way around: NullPointerExceptions are typically trivial to track down.

Finding out at what part of a monadic computation the return of a function put a None when there should have been a Some is much more tricky.
OK, maybe not better but a little more organized.
Did this used to be called Giteso? Did it just get renamed to Tree.io or it a completely different product?

I'm only asking because the bottom of http://tree.io/en/jobs mentions it. :)
The biggest threat we face is our tendency to enslave ourselves in the name of a perfect society.

"Our government has kept us in a perpetual state of fear — kept us in a continuous stampede of patriotic fervor — with the cry of grave national emergency. Always there has been some terrible evil at home or some monstrous foreign power that was going to gobble us up if we did not blindly rally behind it by furnishing the exorbitant funds demanded. Yet, in retrospect, these disasters seem never to have happened, seem never to have been quite real." -General Douglas MacArthur July 30th 1957

Eisenhower warned us.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY
For me at least it was more a time constraint than anything (well, you had to really know the material - there would be areas I knew I didn't know well enough going into the exam). I think the difficulty is set such that only the very best would ever run out of things to do in the exam, most people finish having solved the questions that they were best suited to properly, and not really attempted some of them.
People, please read the whole linked post before passing judgement. It sounds highly believable, from someone who was teaching pilots in Korea very recently (2003-2008) and makes the claims of a fantastic turnaround success story sound mostly like a very ineffective re-education campaign that has failed in the face of an entrenched educational culture.
Just because I tried to explain the point doesn't mean I believe the point.
Or not cynical enough. They no doubt say that because it's expected, and/or because they don't want to be contacted by thousands of hopefuls. It doesn't mean it's true.
Varnish shell singleliners: reload config, purge cache and test hits
What scares me most is that now that storage is so cheap, everything can be stored for later. So even though no one may be watching now (likely), they keep a dossier with all your calls, mails, visited sites, google searches, for any time in the future to look at at their leisure.

It always reminds me of a shocking fact in Dutch history:
In the Netherlands, the Germans managed to exterminate a relatively large proportion of the Jews. The main reason was that before the war, the Dutch authorities had required citizens to register their religion so that church taxes could be distributed among the various religious organizations (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dutch_resistance)

And this looks so quaint now. We can only imagine what potentially damning information a totalitarian government can now find about every citizen retroactively.

Digital networks are increasingly an intermediate in every little communication and transaction between people. And with the internet of things, in everything we do, in the future maybe even inside our bodies (what's after Google Glass?).

We really need a way to prevent rampant data collection, otherwise the internet is a large threat to civilization. I didn't go into technology to facilitate some 1984-ish world government :(
Confessd - the front page of confessions
> Our general policy is to only add protocols if we can do a better job than the alternative, which is why we have not implemented HTTPS for instance.
Will that solve things? As we are seeing, much of the value is in the metadata, who is speaking to whom. Cryptography won't necessarily hide that, as ultimately the network itself needs to know where messages are going to.

The design of the network has a role to play. Is it possible to design a network that doesn't expose where information is flowing, or better yet, doesn't even need to know where information is flowing (it can't leak what it doesn't know)? Such a network would presumably not require an address space.

Freenet does something like this, exchanging messages by a process akin to a dead drop and restricting each node's view of the network to its immediate neighbours. I'm thinking something like Freenet, but operating as a physical network rather than an overlay network. Does such a thing already exist?
Study: Bug bounty programs provide strong value for vendors
I'm on it now as a paying customer, with one project entered :) The client's struggled with the UI (I haven't figured out why) so I haven't tried with any others yet.
A Decent Theme, Please - A slight rant on blog readability.
The how and why of minimalism
> At some point they'll implement an incredibly complex binary protocol

No need to wait: http://tools.ietf.org/id/draft-ietf-httpbis-header-compressi...

Just look at that and weep. That whole document deals with how to represent HTTP headers. It doesn't define them, their behaviour and how they should interact. No. This multi-page document merely documents how these headers should be represented.

You know, things which up until now has been:

Lines of text with key-value-pairs delimited by a colon-sign.

Noticed how that didn't take eighteen pages and pressumed anything about current generation consumer DSL MTUs? Yeah. That's a nice, simple and good spec.

Obviously this HTTP2 binary monstrosity is being done all in the holy Google-name of micro-optimizing performance.

This is terrible design and quite literally obfuscation more than anything else. I cannot believe the IETF is even considering this junk.

Edit: Link to an IETF discussion on the subject: http://www.w3.org/Search/Mail/Public/search?keywords=&hdr-1-...
California inmates launch biggest hunger strike in state's history
Just a recommendation that everyone read the above link. It's incredible. Especially as its a direct quote. Has anyone else done this? Let alone live?
It will also kill most "free content" websites that live off the ads revenue. Are you ready for paywalls everywhere, even if subscription is 25 � / mo?
Objective of 2020 mission to Mars: Signs of life, NASA says
https://github.com/ggreer/the_silver_searcher
So they rebranded it to become a curated blog, what a novel idea..
Show HN: Realtime Tweets Sentiment Analysis
> It appears that the spec now says 4ms is the minimum.

I was playing with Windows timers a little while ago and I noticed that with IE11 open the timer interval sat at 15.6ms, occasionally changing to 4ms while the page was doing things. That was the first time I've heard of a program calling timeBeginPeriod without setting it to 1ms. I hope it catches on.
> Moving them away from their homes forever was a huge mistake and certainly caused more deaths than any nuclear incident. Living in temporary accommodation, you lose your job, your earnings, you are far from everything, which means overall worse welfare than living in a not-really-as-much-as-the-media-says "contaminated" area.

Many people were placed in newly erected villages of "temporary housing", and then left there. The housing is pretty good quality. But what little social provision there was has now been largely withdrawn.

It's a terrible indictment of the "Japanese model" of government provision: pour concrete, but ignore the people.
This is utterly tragic. I lived near Hillandale rd in Durham and drove there almost every day. Not sure if it had any part in this accident, but the road is really poorly lit like most roads there.

When I moved it actually struck me how poorly lit the roads in Durham were, compared to where we come from in Europe. I'm guessing it's a mixture of being much more expensive (wider roads and much longer) and the city organizers not giving pedestrian/cyclists much thought (sidewalks seem to be scattered randomly around the town).
Huh. How annoying that it doesn't just work everywhere. Annoying in two ways, actually: one, I want it to work; two, it bugs me not to understand what's going on.
> I remember the Chrome timer code of years ago was careful to only adjust the interval when needed. From reading other bugs it looks like today's behavior is an accidental regression and will likely be fixed (until the next time it regresses).

Indeed, although it seems the current behavior has been oustanding for some time:

https://code.google.com/p/chromium/issues/detail?id=153139

The original justification for lowering the resolution is an interesting read:

At one point during our development, we were about to give up on using the high resolution timers, because they just seemed too scary. But then we discovered something. Using WinDbg to monitor Chrome, we discovered that every major multi-media browser plugin was already using this API. And this included Flash, Windows Media Player, and even QuickTime. Once we discovered this, we stopped worrying about Chrome's use of the API. After all – what percentage of the time is Flash open when your browser is open? I don't have an exact number, but it's a lot. And since this API effects the system globally, most browsers are already running in this mode.[1]

[1] http://www.belshe.com/2010/06/04/chrome-cranking-up-the-cloc...
Microscopic particles of fecal matter can be carried in your sweat from your anus onto your penis. You should wash your hands.
It could be a kind of "dojo" for hackers. You could even host tech talks and recruiting events there.
More dribble and speculation
(There's a fantastic discussion and analysis in this comments thread, and I'm learning a lot from it.

Thanks to all involved. =)
I've had my driver's license suspended on more than one occasion, and either couldn't pay the fines or forgot about it until I got the letter saying that my license had been suspended.

For what it's worth, I would recommend that everybody have their license suspended at one point or another. I never really knew how to drive safely before I had to drive knowing that any mistake I made might send me to jail.

I can't speak for the man in question, but if he's anything like me, 1) his suspended license may not speak at all as a reflection of his driving ability, and 2) if he was aware of the suspension, would likely have been on his best behavior.
It seems that regulations call for 6-7 secs from idle to full thrust.

1. http://www.pprune.org/archive/index.php/t-242588.html
To be fair, the first one you cited is for Chrome packaged apps, so I feel like it's a little different than special APIs exposed to normal web page javascript. It's the difference between saying "build apps for our browser, we give you powerful features" and "build web pages that only work in our browser."

Now, if you think it's bad that Chrome is trying to entice browser app developers with powerful feature sets, that seems like a related but different complaint.

It's possible I'm unclear on the scope of the Open Web movement. When it refers to web technologies, does it mean technologies employed in the service of presenting web pages (i.e. everything you can do with javascript, html, css, etc.), or any technologies that a browser serves as a platform for? Because the latter seems like a wider scope that encompasses more than just web pages.
this is awesome - i think personally doing something totally out of my element (like dancing) crossed with learning something new (like dancing) might be double beneficial
You should tell us about it and why we need it. I don't think many people will try it until you do.
Thanks for the post! I haven't blogged myself, but am looking to start, and your post is a nice do's and dont's guide. I have a question: What did you use to build/design your blog?
According to the reddit thread at the bottom of the page, Windows 8 also has dynamic ticks.

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/10/better...
How to get over your weaknesses
You are correct in the first instance, however, the law does direct FISC to transmit records to SCOTUS upon writ of certiorari.

So at least in the case that someone wants to actually appeal one, it's not kept from SCOTUS See 50 USC 1803(b)

As for the second part, again, you are technically correct.
They cannot promote such rulings.

However, they can stay them, per 50 USC 1803(f). In fact, individual justices can stay them.
It's fairly common among a lot of developers, sadly. Linux/OSS folks are less prone to it, but I've seen kitchen sink setups there as well.

An old colleague used to joke: "Developers should never have fast machines". Point being, they'll appreciate every spare CPU cycle and byte of memory available.
Are you really confusing setting prices with publishing them?
Why do you want to pay cash? Wouldn't it be better to pay via your insurance company to 'use up' some of the deductible?
Any windows/web edition in your todo?
So, maybe new encrypted chat app should expand encrypted text by 1000x or 10000x (add random garbage)?

If the government has a very big disk, then let's fill that very big disk with tons of crap.
"You're wrong. How can the SCOTUS review a FISC decision if those decisions are never made public and if, upon challenge, the government can invoke the state secrets privilege. This is exactly what has happened in the past."

This is not correct.
50 USC 1803(b) specifically provides that the record will be transmitted to SCOTUS upon write of certiorari.

There have been non-parties that have attempted to get access to the rulings, and those have been denied.

" But if the citizenry aren't allowed to know how the FISC interpreted the constitution, then how can we possibly object and challenge the interpretation before the SCOTUS?"

The injured party would normally file a writ of certiorari with SCOTUS after losing in FISC. This is specifically provided for.
Oh wow, Duet (project management app, http://duetapp.com ) is exactly what I've been looking for. This is going to make my life so much easier!

I'm buying it right now.
It should be the law that they must provide the pricing online and via an API so that it can be easily collated and compared with every other hospital. Imagine the type of apps you could create with this information.
I frequently see people talking about an unqualified "100% test coverage". Is it safe to assume in these cases that the author is referring to statement coverage[1] rather than something more stringent like decision coverage or even MC/DC?[2]

If we're talking about statement coverage then I agree that achieving 100% statement coverage then calling it a day really isn't as helpful as it might sound.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage#Basic_coverage_c...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Code_coverage#Modified_conditi...
This account looks like a repeat offender. :( Flag and downvote the comment and move on. Don't feed the troll.
This a thousand times. Why didn't they fix this already?
Making it harder for employees to pocket the cash and pretend the transaction never happened, one of the most common techniques used by cashiers to increase their hourly wage. Just thought I'd explain a little bit more for anyone who still didn't get it.
Correction: "lacking in any realtime capabilities" should read "offline capabilities". And by that I mean offline without manually managing cache.

Also by 2-way sync I mean 2-way cache sync. Firebase is actually really good with 2-way sync, but without cache/offline (yet) it's kind of a dealbreaker for me.
Pirate Bay Founder launches Hemlis - private messaging service
A German Coffee shop is innovating with a new model where the coffee is free but you are charged for the time you spend: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2013/05/28/slow-time-cafe-germ...

This seems like an interesting way to keep the incentives more aligned.

Personally, I wish there was a more socially acceptable way to just rent space at a coffee shop. I don't drink caffeine and I often need to find a place to crash for 2 hours which means either I buy a high calorie pastry/juice that I don't really need to be eating or I feel like an asshole the entire time I'm there. It'd be far easier for me if I could just drop $4 in a jar and have that cover my time.
short, very informative and visually appealing.
This doesn't make any sense.
Constitutional injury does not occur because a judge interprets the law.
Constitutional injury occurs when the government does something to you.

If the government is the one surveilling you, you challenge that, and then you have standing.

All existing decisions i'm aware of (except the one in the past few days), even the SCOTUS one, dealt with third parties making claims that they were "likely being surveilled".

None of them could prove anything, because nobody has used the info against them.
SCOTUS held that they could not establish standing, because they couldn't show it was actually happening.
The parties wanted abrogation of the state secrets privilege to get the government to admit or deny whether they were being surveilled.

IE It wasn't known surveillance targets suing, it was "a group of international organizations, lawyers, and media personnel"

If you have a case where someone who was surveilled has been denied standing, i'd love to see it.
So far, Jewell has not been denied standing in Jewell vs. The NSA
How else would you like Google to differentiate Chrome in the eyes of a non-techie person?
Maybe Uber is different in Toronto, but in SF it's basically making use of unallocated livery, i.e., Town Cars, etc. (with a useless taxi hailing service) I'm not sure riding in a "luxury" vehicle with a private driver is a public necessity.

Poor people don't use Uber. Poor people very rarely use taxis. Poor people ride the bus or walk.

And yes, it sucks to be poor.
but it's closed source so there is no way to audit it. It's also centralized IIRC.

Wait for someone to come along and make a clone that is open-source, has solid crypto and uses some sort of DHT for peer public key and address discovery.
For those interested, Apple documents the Web Audio API pretty well: http://developer.apple.com/library/safari/#documentation/Aud...
Poll: Do you censor/self-censor? --| FUCK THE N.S.A |--
Everybody is thinking it, yet nobody is saying it out loud: FUCK THE N.S.A !

So let's see what the current state of the affairs is:

This is a poll in which everybody automatically participates in.

Why? Because everybody has 2 choices:

1. Be silent, downvote or even delete this post and my account (= you self-censor and/or censor)

2. Leave a "FUCK THE N.S.A" comment and upvote (= you still feel that free speech is protected, as it is in every democracy)

I want everybody who reads this to think very honestly for themselves about what kind of thoughts this poll provokes in their mind, if any.

What is/was your reaction? Do you think the situation is healthy? What would happen if everybody did the same thing as you?

Note: This is NOT about personal judgment! It's about the fact, that we need to become/be/stay aware of our situation. This is supposed to raise awareness.

If you already censor/self-censor, it means you urgently need to do something in order to be able to express yourself freely again - at least within your circle of friends and family. That would be total encryption (ask in the comments if you're not sure about the solutions that allow you to encrypt everything).

I know that posts can stay on the front page for 2 or even 3 days if people really do care. So let's see where we're at...

EDIT: Also note that this NOT about any anti-americanism (as certain German politicians like to say, in order to defend their actions, after having been exposed as collaborators). This is about anti-mass-surveillance which happens all over the world (unfortunately, our dear NSA champions the movement).
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sortition
Well, if you're working in a proper language with an effect system, then dofib is parametrically effect-polymorphic on the effect of its input function.
A good point; I never joined Google the first time around. I simply assumed that that data would have been discarded. It is quite possible, they have all that data in their system every time they call me for interviews or whatever.