skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
>And you do that, IMO, by attaching punishments to actual harm, not to an increased likelihood of harm (which must always be an estimate only).

If you restrict the basis of decision-making to certainty rather than "estimated likelihood", you would have to throw out pretty much everything mankind has ever learned using the scientific method (where evidence can support, or inrease the likelihood of a theory, but never prove it).

For example, the link between smoking and lung cancer. It's impossible to say of any specific case of lung cancer that it was definitely caused by smoking, but there is enough evidence for increased risk, so that deciding to quit based only on a likelihood is a reasonable thing to do.

>the legislator who drafts the speeding laws and the bureaucrat who sets the speed limits for particular roads can't possibly know as much as the driver

In the case of speed traps, that's irrelevant; the limits there are not abnormally low because the legislators and bureaucrats are using unsound information, but because they intentionally ignore (or don't even bother acquiring) recommendations which indicate that a higher speed would be safe.
I think:

-the cost of innovating has become higher.
-it's unusual for lawyers and accountants to determine the intensity and speed of relationships between customers and products/services.
-since 1984, semiconductor companies have focused a large amount of resources on building patent armories rather than innovating.
-a world without patent law would allow for competition and products/technologies to reach the entire world faster at viable prices.
-that the world can function and entrepreneurs will be fine without IP protection.
Public nudity has been taboo since long before we had governments and laws. Even uncontacted peoples generally cover their genitalia even if they are otherwise totally naked. Regardless of first-principles freedom-based arguments, US legislators did not create proscriptions against public nudity and they are not going to be able to eliminate them.
To the former, everyone who uses an Android device (Dalvik).
> "If police are arresting people without probable cause or even reasonable suspicion, then it is the police that are acting illegally here. You are not required to identify yourself to any police officer just because he asks, and if he asks without reasonable suspicion or probable cause (it depends on the state which one is the threshold), and you refuse to state your name, then he can not arrest you for that sole reason. If he attempts to do so, it is false arrest, and you have the right under the law, upheld by the supreme court, to use any necessary force to resist illegal arrest.

What constitutes whether a police officer has the right to "stop and identify" someone varies quite widely from state to state[1]. Before attempting to do so, it's a good idea to know the explicit details for the current state one is residing.

Some states actually have claims that you must identify yourself when stopped if the police officer asks. Failure to do so can lead to arrest under laws of the state:

"Five states’ laws (Arizona, Indiana, Louisiana, Nevada, and Ohio) explicitly impose an obligation to provide identifying information."

"Seven states (Arizona, Florida, Indiana, Louisiana, New Mexico, Ohio, and Vermont) explicitly impose a criminal penalty for noncompliance with the obligation to identify oneself."

"In five states (Arkansas, Florida, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island), failure to identify oneself is one factor to be considered in a decision to arrest. In all but Rhode Island, the consideration arises in the context of loitering or prowling."

"Virginia makes it a nonjailable misdemeanor to refuse to identify oneself to a conservator of the peace when one is at the scene of a breach of the peace witnessed by that conservator."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_and_identify_statutes#Obli...
The actions of Lavabit actually caused me to cancel my account with Google Play All Access today (proof: http://i.imgur.com/KbmaBnS.png, if anyone cares), that I've had since day one.

It's not that I didn't know that Google was ok with the spying before, but seeing the difference between the reaction of Lavabit, to the non-reaction from Google -- well THAT gave me the final push to stop doing business with the company.

I really like Google's products. I really like All Access, but I don't think I'll be supporting the company financially anymore.

It probably won't matter much, but it's still something.
Show HN: Free, Open-Source Weather Icons
These are all great points. Rather than put shoes on some kid's feet, why not fix the U.S. foreign policy that is leading to some other kid losing his shoes tomorrow? Trying to fix disastrous economic policy by mailing shoes seems really short sighted.
Oh no. This may have automatically triggered the Snowden dead man switch doomsday dump.
I doubt it's under the NDA to say that most apps (that I use) work fine under iOS 7 (and these are iOS 6 apps). Of course there are some that crash/break, but overall, it's okay.

In short, the app situation feels more or less just as 5->6 beta did.
NSLs come with gag orders, and it's possible that the government would view shutting down a service entirely as a violation of the duty not to disclose. It gets fuzzy here, because we're speculating on how a secret court will rule on a body of secret law while working hand in glove with the NSA.
When TOMS first came out, I loved the idea. But now that I have lived in a developing country for the past two years, I've realized the damage something like this can cause.

One of the biggest issues is the displacement of local business. There are much better ways to empower and provide aid to the poor.

Also, I don't know if TOMS does shoe drops in SE Asia, but in Cambodia I have been apart and seen endless groups give families/kids shoes only to see the same kids walking around without shoes the next day. Here most of these aid gifts end up at the local market.
This is truly stunning. Reminds me of Soviet Russia from the 1970s and 80s not America. Wow
From the official FAQ [1]

>What to Submit

>On-Topic: Anything that good hackers would find interesting. That includes more than hacking and startups. If you had to reduce it to a sentence, the answer might be: anything that gratifies one's intellectual curiosity.

[1] http://ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
"It has given a return to it's investors. Up 655% in the last 10 years and 17,000% since inception."

Only if you sold the stock at that price.

OK, Amazon is clearly not Pets.com. It has growing revenues and some profits.

But Amazon famously has a higher P/E than many other technology and Internet companies. This is only justified if Amazon has a clear path to greater profits and dividends than those other companies in its future. The article points out its not clear what this path for Amazon might look like.

This also makes me think of Facebook. As we waited for Facebook to go public, many speculated that Facebook was still in the stage of rapid growth, and it didn't matter that revenue and profits were low because eventually huge profits were guaranteed with so many users. Facebook is a profitable company, but since it's gone public, revenue and profits haven't grown the way people thought, and the stock is still below its IPO price.

My point is lots of users, lots of customers, and lots of revenue are necessary preconditions for a company to be worth investing in. But at some point, growing profits has to be a concern, too.

Maybe the best way I can phrase it: Do you want to be Apple or Amazon? Apple found a path to high profit margins, high growth, and a business generating lots of cash, and now they are both buying back stock and paying dividends to share holders. With Amazon, the profits, cash, and dividends seem always in the future, yet Amazon has usually had a higher P/E than Apple. Which do you think is the better model?
In my naivete, I don't know why this is true. What is it about staying at a place for a long time that makes a person less desirable?

I ask in part because I've been at my current employer for 9 years -- should someone in my spot be looking for a new job?
I haven't written anything in Rust yet but one of its most interesting aspects is its support for linear types. I expect that will share the same kind of perspective enriching attribute of learning logic, array or functional paradigms. While it's certainly not the first language to support substructural types, it looks the only one with a decent chance of developing a meaningful ecosystem.

The linear logic of J.-Y. Girard suggests a new type system for functional languages, one which supports operations that ``change the world''. Values belonging to a linear type must be used exactly once: like the world, they cannot be duplicated or destroyed. Such values require no reference counting or garbage collection, and safely admit destructive array update

http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/wadler/topics/linear-logic.htm...

An interesting bit of trivia about linear types is they are in some sense the closest thing to programming a quantum computer this side of qubits (where no cloning dictates qubit variables can only be used once in a function term).
In particular, look at what the hams have done with cheap, low power radios. Many take it as a challenge to see how far they can reach on low power. This is called QRP.

The QRP hobbyists regularly communicate over hundreds or even a thousand miles on a few milliwatts of power. The record is 1650 miles with a 1 microwatt (micro, not milli!) transmitter.
Light turns orange? I hit my brakes hard if an intersection has cameras. Who knows whether the light is set to stay orange for the required X amount of seconds, or if it has been lowered to Y seconds to try to make money off people.

The people behind me better hope they weren't tailgating me AND have brakes just as good as mine ...
This ‘big data’ app drives big sales for big retailers, instantly
Not their strategy, but the protocols used to handle email. There is simply no way to send emails using standard protocols without leaking information.
Public service announcement before reading my comment: Do not Google "Guinea worm." Do not Google "Guinea worm." Do not Google "Guinea worm."

If given the alternative between two courses of action, one of which puts shoes on peoples' feet through "imperialism" and one of which results in them getting Guinea worm, morally serious individuals should not have one iota of doubt as to which is the correct course of action.
Montrealer launches city space rental startup
Email service Lavabit abruptly shut down citing government interference
> The problem with finance is that we didn't have the right regulations in place because big banks lobbied to get them taken off the books

But they have lobbied to keep all kinds of regulations that they benefit from. A half-regulated industry is likely to be worse than either a fully public or fully private one (especially if we take American insurance/healthcare as an example).

A good example is Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac, which were implicitly guaranteeing financially irresponsible mortgages, and various home ownership encouragement policies pushed by the US federal government for decades.

> Progressivism and fascism are on the opposite sides of the political spectrum

They're both fundamentally moved by the idea that we need big government to get to some kind of "better" society, which is anathema to freedom and individual rights. They just disagree about the specifics of that "better" society.

Technically, you're right to call me out, because I shouldn't call the entire thing "Progressive," as that's just a a part of it. The whole intellectual trend actually comes from the anti-Englightenment German philosophers who taught that individuals are unimportant, and only society and duty matter.
IPython 1.0 is finally released, nearly 12 years in the making
Snowden’s Alleged Email Provider Shuts Down, Warns Against Trusting U.S.
Tuteable prepare to come out of BETA
The original form of my comment was:

(...)

(...)

(But for the sake of ideology.)

(...)

As demonstrated by the argument that blink deserves elimination because of the past, the big rationale is punishment - premised upon anthropomorphizing an HTML tag.

What I remember about the days of blink is fucking amazing the web was. The driving ideal was connecting everything to everything else - not creating gated communities of cul-de-sacs. What was far more annoying than blink was auto-playing music.

Now in fairness, if the web has ceased to be a source of annoyance since, I must not have noticed. Was there a memo?
The pill that texts the doctor - from inside your body
The Empreror of All Maladies [0]
Guns Germs and Steel [1]
The Price of Inequality [2]
Inventing Money [3]

0: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/7170627-the-emperor-of-al...

1: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/1842.Guns_Germs_and_Steel

2: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/13698866-the-price-of-ine...

3: http://www.goodreads.com/book/show/249231.Inventing_Money
A Fugitive With a Cause
What do you think of Bitmessage? https://bitmessage.org/wiki/Main_Page
16GB - the maximum supported on my current hardware. Ideally I'd like 32GB.

I develop SharePoint solutions on a two-VM configuration locally (DC - 1GB, and app server - 8GB), both off a second drive (SSD). RAM utilisation are always ~90%.

Note: When the VMs are off, it hovers around 6GB usage. Each instances of Visual Studio 2012 I run adds an extra 500MB - 1GB to overall usage.
DHS just got another budget increase for you...revolutionaries and secessionists are major concerns of every government and are classified as terrorists. Check it out.
Microsoft’s Windows Phone App Builder Saw 30k Projects Started In First 48 Hours
I don't believe the displacement of local business idea. Let's say Toms didn't shoe drop. Fast forward ten years. How is the local, artisanal shoe maker going to compete with the chinese shoes that are now in the market? By sending shoes in to these locations it is equally acting as a signal that this is not a market worth trying to capture and their best efforts are spent entrepreneurially in other directions.
New video product (MixBit) from YouTube founders
maybe it's getting upvotes because it does belong on hacker news.
Interesting. I tried to view both articles and the are no longer on site. I did find them via Google's cache.
Supposing that one believes that U.S. foreign policy is the primary cause of people not having shoes [+], the relevant question would be "Does putting shoes on some kid's feet make it more difficult to change U.S. foreign policy?" If yes, then one could sensibly go to that child and say "Sorry kid, you're going to get Guinea worm, but it is in the service of preventing more Guinea worm in the future." If not, then there is no competition between attempting to fix U.S. foreign policy tomorrow but putting shoes on that kid's feet today. Which is great, because we profoundly don't want that kid to contract Guinea worm.

Is there a mechanism by which US decisionmakers become more hostile to your preferred policy if we increase the number of shoes in the world? If so, can you identify which decisionmakers those are and, let's say for a minimum, how they measure the number of extant shoes as their KPI for "must increase the extent of our damaging policies?" How sensitive to that KPI are they? Can we maybe get a thousand shoes without them tightening the screws? How about a million? Where is the red line where "one more shoe causes unnamed policymaker to adopt my disfavored policy?" If we can find that red line, that would be great, because we should produce shoes right up to it.

+ I tend to think that the reason people do not have shoes is that Mk 1 humans are not born equipped with shoes and that shoes do not exist in the state of nature. The state of "I am a kid, I have no shoes, WTF" predates the existence of the US, imperialism/capitalism/etc, by thousands of years.

(The newfangled innovation from capitalism isn't lack-of-shoes-for-poor-people, it is presence-of-shoes-for-some-poor-people. That's not as optimal as presence-of-shoes-for-all-poor-people but I have not heard a convincing rationale on why abandoning capitalism gets us that transition.)
The author of the article is JWZ:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jwz

And there's a history:

https://groups.google.com/forum/?_escaped_fragment_=msg/comp...

https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=213625
Oracle being intentionally malicious is unlikely, but Java has had well publicized security issues lately.

(1) I'm not sure that the JVM is actually less secure than JavaScript engines, but it's unnecessary enough in the modern web that many users like to turn it off entirely. Requiring it to be on is a step back.

(2) The applet is trusted. So if it's backdoored or exploited, the adversary gets your entire computer rather than "just" your email. This is par for the course for native apps, Java is harder to exploit than native code, and in theory email should not really be much of an attack vector (plain text and maybe basic HTML); but this app is not well-known and is thus more likely to have simple programming errors (not that popular services are immune from those either!), the browser security model is easier to screw up, and webapps are expected to be sandboxed. Again, a step backwards.

(3) The choice of Java may be an indicator of inflexibility, thus poor programming skills, thus insecurity. This is speculation, but far from improbable.

Off-topic, their claim to be (effectively) protected against rogue CAs is dubious, never mind the claim that they are the only provider with such protection.
Optical Tweezers Deliver DNA Inside Cancer Cells
NSA program codewords reveal workflow details
When I read the post, I thought the same thing... It's almost as if I felt like I was reading my own blog (if I kept one). I have always strived to find meaningful work where I feel like I can have a positive impact on the world. About 3 years ago, I took a job at a startup where I was sold on the story that it would have a meaningful impact on the health/wellness of others. I took on new roles and responsibilities easily as I really wanted the idea of the company to succeed. However, as I learn more and more about the true intentions of the founders, I realize that it has nothing to do with impacting the health and well-being of millions, but all to do with making money.
I've had a lot of fun there.
For me, the same thing that's wrong with #222 on #222 - harder to see. In seriousness, it's easy on the eyes but doesn't seem nearly as clear as green.
Blink was a non-standard tag added to Netscape. Presto supported it because Opera tried to support everything. Trident and KHTML/WebKit/Blink never supported it.
Bigger Meals Earlier Can Help Weight Loss
And those are not even the biggest group. Most of them will never see someone in your position and just wander the streets spend one night or another in jail, but mostly on the street.

There are several documentaries about that. It's worse in the US because of the left over from the eugenics movement, when sanatoriums were deemed unnecessary.

i'm trying to remember names but i can only recall one: skid row. When watching remember that eugenics was very strong around LA. specially in the Pasadena area.
I also find the entire idea disingenuous. Do these "artisan shoe makers" actually exist? Or is the author just creating a crappy straw man?

If they do exist, why haven't the poor people in their area purchased their wares? It's not like TOMS is giving shoes out to people who have them. They're probably not wearing them because it's not economically feasible. So, the author thinks that the vast majority of the population in their area should be shoeless so that one person can keep a probably struggling business afloat? Makes no sense.

Even further, it seems having shoes would lead to positive economic effects. The recipients will probably be able walk further, stay healthier, and generally lead better lives. That seems like a longer term net positive than someone's small shoe shop that may or may not exist and may or may not have actually been impacted by this.
It's a tiny bit more than morals (e.g., sanitation) but either way, I'm not commenting on whether law should deal with it. I'm objecting to the use of the word 'tyranny'.
Thanks! I didn't see anything about that on his site. That makes it a tad more personal
Why not? And why stop there? Why can't providers be compelled to break into peoples houses or perform assassinations?
I work at a social enterprise in Melbourne, Australia, and our model works in a similar way to TOMS. So I really appreciated a couple of the points made here, particularly regarding how it impacts local industries. Our SE constructs water/food/hygiene aid projects and programmes, so it probably doesn't apply directly to us, but I'll look into it further just in case.

Social enterprise is a relatively new concept so its understandable that not everybody has got a full grasp on it. And there are others who have got a good grasp on it, and don't like it, and that's fine too. But let me emphasise one point which underpins SE for those who haven't heard it before:

The commercial success of a social enterprise directly controls the amount of the funding they can give. A lot of people criticise that they use the banner of charity to make a whole lot of money - which is half true. They inform consumers that a portion of what they pay for that product will help in some social cause, hopefully ethically, and if that brings about more sales, then great - that's more funding available.

If you have five dollars to give, then please give it to a charity! Never be under the impression that you have to buy these products because it is the only/most efficient way to help the world. It isn't. Your five dollars will go much further in the hands of a charity, and every social enterprise should be transparent about that. However, in the example of my social enterprise, the other fifty dollars you spend a week on food/sanitary products/bottled water (if you're a bottled water buyer) - we give you the option of having part of that additional $50 go to projects also.

Please fire any questions you might have about social enterprise my way :)
I've been following along on golang-dev, and they seem to be making progress on precise stacks.

See https://groups.google.com/forum/?fromgroups#!topic/golang-de... for example.
Silent Circle follows Lavabit in closing its encrypted email service
Is it really? I mean in terms of the impact a single business can have upon the entire U.S. foreign policy machine vs. what they reasonably accomplish, I'd say this is pretty big.

Having shoes throughout childhood will have longer term effects than just giving a kid some new kicks. I think probably living in a society where having shoes is rarely questioned it's hard to understand how not having them can negatively affect your life. I don't mean to insinuate that you're not empathetic to their situation, but likewise, I think it's hard for any of us to really understand the impact that something like that can have.
Yes. Toms did not come up with the designs for their original shoes. They are called espadrilles and are a Latin American tradition. He got the idea when he was on vacation in Argentina I believe.

These shoes are made in Argentina, for example.
http://www.paezshoes.com
I think Silent Circle saw an opportunity to kill a service that made little money, had heavy maintenance and is now making hay.
This is a horrific attitude.
This may alert FISA court interdiction. Shutting down a potential `compromised secure' channel frustrates total information awareness and the boundless informant.