skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Security cameras don't typically record sound, which I'm guessing makes them not illegal under such statutes. Or they're plainly obvious, at least it's plainly obvious that they're recording video, or at least in commercial spaces there are signs up mandated by law, or something. Anyway, you can't surreptitiously record a conversation you have with somebody on your own property in many states.
I'm replying to a review, so this is perhaps addressed in the book.

1. Couldn't public research simply be crowding out private research?

If you're a company and you can use research someone else paid for ... why wouldn't you? Once that model is established, what incentive do you have to spend above your peers?

2. Is the finding stable across time and different countries?

Public funding of research grew enormously in the 20th century alongside the growth of the state and in reaction to various wars (hot and cold).

What did the mix look like in the 19th century? The 18th? What did it look like in Qing China or in late Republican Rome? What differs between Venice at its peak and the glory days of Islamic civilisation?

3. Is much research simply more expensive now?

Requiring funds that only super-profitable companies and governments can muster?

4. How does research vary between industries and problems?

Some kinds of research are more difficult or expensive than others. Is that why there's a surfeit of software companies appearing in the private sector while almost all biomedical companies grow out of government and university laboratories? How does a small business invent a supercollider?

I guess if I combine all these questions, my underlying question is:

5. Is the current configuration causal or just a surface feature of the current background environment, from which it is problematic to extract generalist statements meant to hold true for all time?

My own suspicion is that some kinds of intellectual output are just not very highly demanded in a general market. Patronage, whether by medieval nobility or modern states, is a form of demand that has given us a lot of public goods.
You could also have clicked "Try It Now", solved a captcha, and continued without having to log in.
I'm not sure they can release a video showing a named person walking around, and this thing collecting information about that person's likes, and to then claim that it's not personally identifiable.
OK - I respect you. I find myself not infrequently disagreeing with your positions, but you more often than not argue them cogently and with objective evidence - as above.

Actually, I take your point, in its entirety. I can be quite the little shrike when it comes to political discussions, and I often manage to undermine my own point with my approach - although I think you have just managed a pretty great "the worst of" collection!

That said, just to provide you one recent little counterexample -

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6180222 - looks, there's me responding to your actually also reductio ad absurdum comment (it's an acronym so he's scared of it), in a balanced fashion!

But more often than not I don't feel the need to go "let's agree to disagree", in part because I loathe the phrase, and in part because even if I get and appreciate someone's counterargument, if I don't agree with them I'm unlikely to laud it.

But... I think you're right about the last few months. The Snowden affair has bought out the raving pareidoliac in me, and I've slewed from largely discussing engineering and science to, as you say, almost purely politics.

https://news.ycombinator.com/x?fnid=HnDzLnVwDzevzYJN1zt8QU - different dude, although I'm still a cranky old man.

Either way - thanks for providing an adjustment to my outlook, as it was evidently needed.
They didn't mean "is Democracy overrated" in a hypothetical way. There are no "all-knowing Philosophers" to be made kings, and even if there were, there would be no reliable mechanism to find them. And if there was, there would be no reliable mechanism to ensure the former reliable mechanism is used to actually appoint such a philosopher and make them yield actual power.

In short, Democracy is superior to this method, because it can be made to work.
hahahha yeah that movie was really nice!
But I'd prefer 1618 first ;)
As noted above, when everyone rolls their own object system, integration gets messy. I think it's easier to stick to the basics of using functions and tables.
> We will have the first real democracy in Europe at the end of 2015 and it will spread quickly.

What are you referring to ?
I think the real problem is we don't really have democracy: once every four years we are allowed to pick between Coke or Pepsi and then we hand over all our power to a bunch of people until the next election.
I'm not sure I'd called M2Crypto a much better API. It more or less exposes the OpenSSL API which is also notoriously hard to get right. Further more it hasn't seen an update since 2011, the SSL certificate for the bug tracker expired in 2011, and it does not compile without patches against any modern OpenSSL (1.0+).

The state of crypto in Python is horrendous, hence the new library.
Whilst I agree that the state is often wasteful of resources, it is often more efficient and able to fund riskier ventures that result in longer term results.

As for a "little bit of innovation": the Internet alone is not what I consider to be a small innovation.
Absolutely. Mob rule is a terrible idea. People have been brainwashed into thinking differently.
> However, new libraries are sometimes added to the standard library, which means the reasons you listed can be overcome by even better reasons for inclusion.

Or overcome by bad judgement.
1. Couldn't public research simply be crowding out private research?

It depends. There are plenty of examples of research that private companies don't want to do that the government is prepared to do.
I clearly tought of Steve Jobs while watching the video. But not in a copy-print way. You took elements and added yours.
Also I know you were using Vala to develop, is it a good part of your productivity ? It seems you were free to think about solving the problem the best way. Or maybe you're just all very good..
Is he talking about democracy as an ideal or democracy as commonly implemented? These are two very different things..

The ideal is to give everyone the same say in what laws should govern the society. In my view, that ideal isn't overrated. It's just basic fairness.

If you have two kids, that argue for a toy, what do you do? You force them each to have it for half a time, fairly.

The societies that evolved the ability to implement such fairness spend less resources warring about who should get how much power (arguing about the toy), and so spend more resources on productive activities (playing with the toy).
Among others it can lead to heart problems, as experienced by a relative of mine after 20 years of drinking coffee.
So good luck with that.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Health_effects_of_coffee#Risks
this is imo a much more interesting endevour - here's a video https://vimeo.com/69901706

really does not look at all promising right now and personally i think there's a good chance it could come to nothing.. but he has a pretty decent past record having developed a couple of bikes and riding positions that proved superior http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graeme_Obree
Although Unix was not designed for multi-processors originally, its main run-time abstraction (process networks) is easy enough to port to any platform with a common store. So there's not much to discuss about single-core vs multi-core, it's either one VN or multiple VN machines connected to a single abstract memory.

Remove the shared memory, then issues start to rise.

You say "radical ideas tried" but I believe that is not relevant. Radical ideas typically don't fly because they are radical. However you can already see things happening that are not radical but are breaking the Unix machine model very hard:

- "accelerators": these are really fully fledged co-processors with their own local memory. There is no easy way to conceptually delegate Unix threads to accelerators precisely because they don't share the memory. (Now with recent GPUs the architecture was modified to actually share the memory between the CPU and GPU so things become possible, but not all "accelerators" have that feature)

- on systems-on-chip you now have scratchpads next to cores on the architecture. Some cores may not have access to the "main" memory of another core (eg the radio controller in telephones) although they are fully-fledged cores as well. Because of this lack of shared memory, it is not conceptually possible to envision a Unix system where processes access these extra processors transparently.

tl;dr there are already hardware architecture with separated memories and Unix can't cope with that easily because its main abstraction requires shared memory.
It sounds like a really bad killer virus.
I'm curious exactly what the legal sanction is for telling the world/press.
The website looks extremely professional, very well done.
There are DRM-free e-books but most aren't. The dominant e-book providers use DRM. That's why you need specific software to read e-books such as iBooks (soon to be available on the Mac, that wouldn't be necessary without DRM!), Kindle and Adobe's DRM-infested e-book reading app.

DRM can be removed in theory but most users won't make it through Calibre and the necessary scripts. In addition, in many countries, removing DRM is illegal, and in almost all countries, offering software, knowledge etc. on removing DRM even for legal purposes such as personal use is illegal. Removing DRM is therefore not an approach compatible with a mass market.
Doesn't ":set spell" already work?
Aww, would you? Would you please ask, if the paper could be posted here? That would be really nice!
It would be great if one could use Lua as general purpose language. The missing part is the lack of a bigger official standard library. Several addon libraries that try to fill the gap are outdated, unmaintained and/or not of the same high quality code as Lua and it's official libraries. The Lua community would also benefit from an website that has unified documentation and comment functionality like php.net and Ruby Gems or Node.js NPN repository functionality. (I know Lua has a Wiki and repository ...but sadly, they look very dated, its features are from last century).
Using Lua as embedded language is great though, especially with LuaJIT2 it is top notch. Interfacing with C is easy. C++ requires a bit of research as there are several possibilities (e.g. third party wrappers).
Looks great, nice work. But where can we find a more technical overview? I wasn't even sure whether it was Linux or BSD based or something else until halfway down the front page, and had to check the Developers section to find out it's based on Ubuntu. But which version, and what big changes did you make under the hood?
This reminds me of Pope John Paul II's reply when asked why the church was not more democratic:

The church is not a democracy and truth is not established by a show of hands
Honestly, this just looks like yet another linux distro with yet another DE. The site doesn't really talk about what all it does, and it's pretty vague.

Am I missing something here? Sure, the design looks nice, but I don't see what compelling reason I have to use this, nor do I know how compatible it'll be with anything.

Downloading it to try in a VM, if only out of bewilderment and lack of detail.
Well, they wouldn't be working very silently if he just went and told you, now would they? ;)
I've been using ascii.io for a while - I would be interested in a comparison between the two.
It's better to have the labels outside the control itself:

ON [--O] OFF

But that kind of defeats the purpose of the design in the first place.
I assumed it to work like that. I use Lokaltog's EasyMotion for Vim [1]. He also features a GIF that explains it which, on the other hand, is almost too slow.

[1] https://github.com/Lokaltog/vim-easymotion
Yep. Just like in 1933
We could call it Diaspora!
No, it would not. The all-knowing philosopher (AKA enlightened dictator) would basically amount to democracy.

Let's say this philosopher wants to do something which is undeniably correct, but majority of people still disagrees with it, and they are willing to protest and risk lives. Then what is he going to do?

Is he going to kill those protesting? Or beat them up? Then I would submit he is not enlightened in any way.

Or is he going to back down with his proposal? Then here you have it. He basically let the people decide.

He also may have a third option, deceive the majority of the population. I would not consider that enlightened either. It's a slippery slope - he has to know what is good for you before _you_ know it, if that's possible at all.

I also don't think democracies are _designed_ to move slowly. In fact, the more direct democracy, the more slowly it moves - common people are much more conservative than people who want power. You can actually observe that empirically, and it is arguably a weakness of democracy.
If you - and apparently many others in this thread - actually read the article, you would know that he is not talking about ideal vs commonly implemented democracy at all. He is talking about other institutions of free society that are in his view as important as democracy, but are usually lumped together with democracy in political speeches of the leaders of the West.

These other institutions that can exists with or without democracy are judicial independence, property rights, freedom of speech and opinion and, finally, legitimate opposition. In his view, all these can exist independently, and often existed before democracy in Western European countries.
There are so many more 'Apple users' using iPhones than actual Apple users (OSX) these days and they're buying apps.

The big reason is Android has marketshare but some Android users don't buy Android because of Android, they buy it because it was a free phone or because it was the only thing they could get it.

You can't look at phone marketshare when simply determining potential app market.
Ah, well. I just noticed it was a one-post account.

I was asking myself what could be going on regarding EU laws or constitution or sthg in 2015.
Email should have end to end encryption via a peer to peer system.

* Problem with message encryption solved, as long as the OS is not compromised. I currently use GnuPG but very few of my friends do.

* Header information
The "topic" of an email can be encrypted without problems. We still have the problem that a sniffer knows WHEN, HOW MUCH and with WHOM you communicate. Encrypting this information just for the next knot will make it harder for a sniffer. Also such a P2P email client could randomly send out stuff and connect with random other clients. Basically a special form of spam that gets ignored by the receiving client. The idea behind this "spam" would be to lower the singal/noise level.
Just a quick note: before you buy a "self-encrypting drive" (SED SSD), do your research and make sure you get one where you can control the keys.

A couple of months ago, I spent almost $400 on a Crucial M500 480GB SSD to put in a new laptop only to discover that apparently the drive itself handles the generation of keys.

Thus, technically all of the data on the drive is encrypted but you can take the SSD out, put it into another machine, and access the data without any issues. Total marketing ploy.
I used GIFBrewery a couple times before and it works great [1] [2] [3].

It is easier to understand now, but I think you should stay on the last part a bit longer before looping it to make it clear that the animation finished.

[1] https://github.com/fphilipe/PHFComposeBarView

[2] https://github.com/fphilipe/PHFArrayComparator

[3] https://github.com/fphilipe/PHFRefreshControl
Hello, I'm also a developer. Vala is one of the best parts of our productivity. Despite being a young programming language, I believe it has a bright future ahead. It feels "cozy" to both C/C++ and Java/C# developers and it has great documentation (valadoc.org). To write GTK+ applications, there's nothing better, Python is too slow and C would be too much work at times, so we sticked with Vala.

>Or maybe you're just all very good..
We have some great programmers in the team accomplishing the seemingly impossible every now and then, I'm still amazed at some of the things we've pulled off.
I'm very impressed with the responsiveness of Elementary's Pantheon when compared to Unity on Ubuntu 12.04. I've been using Ubuntu for over 5 years and I have to say, I haven't felt such a polished user experience.
> Thanks to internet we are getting closer to a new Era where citizens will have direct control on the governments.

This is a very old idea indeed. And direct democracy still has the same problem as representative democracy: you need some ground rules about the limits of the democratic decision-makers or the whole thing will come unglued.
Or he could just allow them to protest peacefully but implement his plan anyway.

A truly wise and benevolent leader (if such a thing were possible) would also be skilled at assessing public mood around a proposal and would weigh that into his plan.

Of course the difficulty is in knowing what constitutes a "good" policy. Is it something that makes the majority of people happier right now? Is it something that rewards desired behaviour? What about weighing long term factors against short term? For example if we can increase greatly quality of life right now at the cost of massive environmental destruction that won't be felt for several generations.
Very nicely done, kraken-io! Just threw over 500 images at it (mainly PNGs, but a few JPGs and GIFs as well), virtually all of which I had optimized beforehand. For the PNGs, I had used 4 different optimizers (PNGCrush, OptiPNG, AdvPNG, and PNGOut), but almost all images saw size reductions in lossless mode ranging from under 1% to over 50% (the latter for a few of the GIFs).

This massive job queued up quickly, and the total savings figures updated in real time as the job progressed. Really appreciate the "Download all kraked files in a ZIP archive" feature, as well as the "Keep directory structure" option.

Very clean site, service, and documentation - reminds me of the classic Slicehost service.
During the install process, you're asked to tick a checkbox to download proprietary codecs.
>In short, Democracy is superior to this method, because it can be made to work.

I'm not sure how that makes it better. Democracy has failed much more often than it has succeeded. Many a revolution to Democracy has been tried, with only a few succeeding. And even where Democracies are lasting, they can still be cruel and brutal to minorities, by the hands of the majority.

The main reason there is no protests in the street of America, despite the abysmal approval ratings of Congress, is that most Americans have reached a point where their day-to-day lives operate with almost zero visible interference from the government. Out of sight, out of mind. That's basically the best we can hope for.
> DRM can be removed in theory but most users won't make it through Calibre and the necessary scripts.

I really hate Calibre, and I can't understand why someone hasn't forked it and released a limited set of tools just for DRM stripping. Obviously this is legally difficult but certainly do-able.

> In addition, in many countries, removing DRM is illegal,

It's weird that I am committing a criminal offence if I buy a DRMd ebook and rip it to a format I can use, but I'm not committing a criminal offence if I just download a DRM-free version of the same book.
They aren't interested because they don't have a real influence.

Imagine you own a company, but you can only change anything once every 4 years. And even then you only choose between a few groups of people from which to hire.

When the people hired don't do what they said they would you can't do anything till the end of that 4-year period.

I am all for more direct democracy (something like liquid democracy). We have the technology to eliminate middleman, but middle man doesn't want to be eliminated.
"The internet" was hardly created by government funding, yes, DARPA funded TCP/IP and CERN funded Tim Berners Lee, but if you're going to ascribe the entire internet to the government because they funded the initial R&D that led to fundamental pieces of it being developed then you might as well ascribe the internet to Bell Labs because they invented the transistor.

Why not say that ordinary people are the funders of all this tech because if they didn't pay taxes, the state would not exist...

As with all things all these achievements were possible because of the giants who came before.

That's what's so stupid about the entire article. You could just as easily make a case that everything we have today is the result of gentlemen scientists from the renaissance. Or that Alexander the Great is the inventor of all of western civilization.
> In addition, in many countries, removing DRM is illegal, and in almost all countries, offering software, knowledge etc. on removing DRM even for legal purposes such as personal use is illegal.

It's "illegal" while it shouldn't be, since it bans fair use (format/device shifting). So in practice people simply ignore nonsensical "laws" like these, since they "place unrealistic demands on reality" (the way Cory Doctorow phrased it). So removing DRM should be compatible with mass market no matter how many nonsensical laws will try to prevent it and tools to remove DRM are distributed through services hosted in countries which don't have such nonsense like DMCA 1201. It applies even to such elementary things like libdvdcss which one needs to play DVDs on Linux.
>From the comments I see here so far, I don't see evidence that people have read the article

That would be because the Article is bland and devoid of interesting or original content, but the title is provocative and Democracy is so frequently taken for granted.
Cool stuff. What's your opinion on the keyczar tools ( https://code.google.com/p/keyczar/ )?
You could probably argue that in a technical sense but it's a person who works with HTML/CSS but not say JS etc would probably be considered a designer more than a programmer.
SAFE 2013 - Segurança e Proteção na Construção
Here is more info about the paper's background and ramblings on twitter.

http://tjm.org/2013/08/08/proposal-experiment-to-compare-ope...

DOI:10.1126/science.1240466
Fingerprint in hex at the bottom of the business card is something I've done for the past 15 years -- pretty much the only reason I even bother with business cards these days.
For development I have become cracked out on these for all of my apps

group :development do
gem 'better_errors' #literally what it says
gem 'binding_of_caller' #adds REPL to better_errors
gem 'quiet_assets' #prevent asset pipeline log doesnt go to console
gem 'guard-livereload' #adds live reload
gem 'rack-livereload'
gem 'meta_request' #chrome rails panel extension
end
numpy is quite portable, I am not sure what you mean by not nearly portable enough.

The reason why you can't do pip install numpy is pip's fault, there is nothing that numpy can do to make that work. Note that easy_install numpy does work on windows (without the need for a C compiler).
IBM’s Smarter Cities Billboards Campaign
What would be the difference from tools like http://tinypng.org and http://www.jpegmini.com/main/shrink_photo ?
Amazon may be revving up its own Android game console
1. How does it compare to JPEGmini?

2. You need a (good) Wordpress plugin.
You have obviously never tried Firebase.
To be honest, I'm just jealous.