skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
The empirical experience is that direct democracies move faster because the population can easily be seized by a particularly urgent desire to see some law enacted or action undertaken. The distinction with an ordinary mob is basically just a very thin whiff of law. And that too breaks down eventually.

The ancient Greeks had enough experience of direct democracy that they built theories of government cycles (democracy, dictatorship, oligarchy) to explain the instability. Eventually they were conquered by the much more stable republic up the road which practiced a slow-moving, complex form of representative democracy.

I invite you now to imagine a world where internet lynchmobs are able to pass laws. And whether you would be satisfied if you were falsely accused in such a world.
Thank you for your kind words. We worked very hard on getting it "just right" in terms of the balance of look and feel and pagespeed optimization, including the use of SPDY to benefit Chrome users.
Numpy does not depend on LINPACK, only scipy does (numpy only uses blas if you have one installed, it is optional).

The reason why scipy (and Julia BTW) need blas/lapack is because that's the only way to have decent performance and reasonably accurate linear algebra. The alternative is writing your own implementation of something that has been used and debugged for 30 years, which does not seem like a good idea.
Passwords won't die. Should they?
Except democracy has been around for at least 2500 years, and we still have it. It seems that all those other "awesome forms" fail and revert to the natural, default state of countries: democracy.

Which brings me to my second point: democracy seems to me like the natural order of a large group of people. It's natural for people to compete to achieve their goals, and democracy seems to be the only system that spreads success around.
Agda by Example: Sorting
Technically speaking, they are separate URLs that may lead to separate resources. For example, Google engine treats them as separate URLs.

That's the reason why opening http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0450 redirects to http://www.python.org/dev/peps/pep-0450/ . HN engine should follow redirect to avoid situations like this.
>>>>> the Communist Party, having starved itself of every rational input, would finally give up the ghost.

That statement really gets me thinking. Without wading down into full-blown social Darwinism, it wouldn't surprise me if human organizations are subject to a kind of memetic fitness. Maybe a trade off between ideological rigity or purity, and actual, objective inputs about their environment. When the Soviet state exiled, executed or imprisoned just about anyone who contradicted party doctrine, they systemically starved themselves of opportunities to make evidence-based decisions.

It reminded me of the Stephen Hawking quote; "Science wins because it works".
I like it. I had the same idea - not that it's a difficult idea to have. Well executed.

However, I have some criticism.

> We like to think the only way to get your image files smaller after optimizing them with Kraken is to delete them.

I only tried PNG, but that claim is false. It can be made a bit smaller. The compressed sample is 65970 bytes, I got 63885 bytes here. A few additional bytes may be possible.

> It strips all metadata found in a given image

IMO, rather than stripping ICC profiles, the image should be converted to sRGB first (and the profile then stripped). You can argue that's the users job, but not everyone may know.

> max image size 8.0MB

Probably a bit small. I also don't like that you pay per image (be it 1B or 1MB). Why not charge per pixel? Or some other similar metric, because the processing power does probably increase non-linearly in relation to image dimensions.

PS. The testimonials seem fake! :)
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8y06NSBBRtY

President Dwight D. Eisenhower's famous exit speech of 17 JAN 1961 warning of the dangers of the "military-industrial complex."
Poor practice in plotting
I read his article, but I didn't get his point, and you're basically explaining the reason why.

He is not correct in lumping all those together in his analysis. Maybe he could say "Western democracy".

I agree that these institutions existed before democracy. But you would also be hard-pressed to find democracy without them, but it's not because democracy would require these institutions to exist.

I can perfectly imagine a democracy in Islamic society with Sharia law, that doesn't have those institutions. As long as everybody can secretly vote, with equal vote, they know what they vote about, and it's impossible to restrict voting of other people by voting, it's democracy in my books. However, I don't think it would last too long. The other innovations are probably so useful for majority of people that they would very quickly (and democratically) agree on implementing them. That's why we never see anything like this in the real world (in the real world probably both things co-evolve).

In other words, I see democracy vastly more important than those institutions, because implementing democracy itself will probably lead to implementing these institutions, while the opposite is not true.
> What advice would you give your 16 year old self?

I'm 68 and I know exactly what I would tell my 16-year-old self:

1. Learn more math and science, and don't delay -- the longer you put them off, the harder they are to absorb. Math and science are the real deal -- nearly everything else is contentless opinion, much more heat than light.

2. Try to minimize time and energy spent on dating and sexual behaviors -- they're the most overrated waste of energy ever invented.

3. Learn how compound interest works, and avoid as many discretionary purchases as possible. "Compound interest is the eighth wonder of the world. He who understands it, earns it ... he who doesn't ... pays it." -- Albert Einstein

I literally spent decades recovering from bad decisions made when I was young, all having to do with the above points. If I were able to confront my 16-year-old self today, I would kick myself down the stairs.
>It's declared and defined in the function argument list

No, it isn't. No value is ever assigned to "extent" if the function gets called without a second argument. "extent" is nil just like all other non-existing objects are nil.

It is a common newbie mistake to treat Lua's nil as the equivalent of a null pointer or some kind of "nothing value" you find in other languages.

Lua's nil is not a value of any kind. "object = nil" means "delete object" not "set object to nothing value". Because of that you should never assign nil to anything unless you actually want to delete it. Delete as in "garbage collector please pick this up". E.g.

character.armor = NULL

in C does not delete the armor field of the character struct.

character.armor = nil

in Lua does.. and you probably don't want that in such situations because if you handle it this way you create countless unnecessary allocation, reallocation, and deallocation operations behind the scenes. If you just mean "nothing here right now" you should set the field to "false" or some specific nothing value.

>If the value of "extent" was retrieved from a table argument using an incorrect key, the mistake would go unreported.

That is correct and a problem indeed. However, in my experience such things rarely happen and the resulting bugs are easy to find.
You use Lua to write cross-platform apps in Corona.
Original support forum thread:

http://productforums.google.com/forum/?nomobile=true#!topic/...
Firefox 22 on linux on my box chokes on the URL too. Chromium works here. Weird.
Glasgow ice cream wars
And another option is PDL - http://pdl.perl.org

NB. And I believe Perl6 (spec) includes PDL - http://perlcabal.org/syn/S09.html#PDL_support
4-6 liters per day ... don't you get http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Primary_polydipsia ?
> Fee-only financial planners, however, are unbiased.

How so? Their bias is that they need to justify their fees, and, according to many studies, their fees can't be justified:

WSJ: "Darts Top the Readers' Stock Picks": http://online.wsj.com/article/SB1000142412788732423510457824...

Someone earlier suggested buying and holding an index fund -- that's good advice, for reasons given here: http://arachnoid.com/equities_myths
I agree feels very polished.

As an aside the 4.000 images over 4,000 on the API pricing thing is temporarily confusing;

I'm guessing you're from the EU which is cool, but then pricing is in dollars. Anyway pretty sure it's an obvious mistake so no need for me to harp on.
In my opinion Slim is superior to Haml. I used to love Haml, but Slim takes it to the next level. A syntax with less control characters and a higher performance [1] made me switch.

I still haven't heard a single argument for writing pure HTML instead of Haml/Slim. Even for static HTML I use Slim.

[1] https://travis-ci.org/slim-template/slim/jobs/9676072
Isn't that settings application the same that's included in Ubuntu which eOS is based upon?

http://3.bp.blogspot.com/-Ygmw7HeOfYw/TwfS6NXj1RI/AAAAAAAAB5...
Ah, I like better_errors as well. I will probably add that! I think quiet_assets is no longer necessary, you can just change that in the config file.

I don't know the other, but will take a look at them! Thanks!
> Theoretically, an all-knowing Philosopher King would be the best form of government.

Just as certain ciphers are mathematically flawless but can still be defeated by side-channel attacks, certain forms of government are apparently perfect but suck in practice.

The idea of philosopher kings comes from Plato's Republic. I encourage you to read it. He lays out a vision for a totalitarian state in which a specialist Guardian class governs, partly in secret, according to the highest and noblest of intentions.

But consider: you've given these folks unlimited power because you have unlimited trust in their goodness, education and training (Plato lays out a 30-year curriculum).

1. What happens if someone usurps them or there is a coup?

The population, who are used to a government with unlimited powers, might simply shrug and accept it.

2. What kind of person plans such a coup?

Freaking psychopaths.

3. What happens if there is a irresolvable dispute between the Guardians?

A voting mechanism? I guess not, since we're not using democracy. Let's appoint a single arbiter.

4. Who chooses the arbiter?

Oh please, now you're just being ...

5. So who is actually in charge?

The Guardians, still.

6. What if the arbiter bribes one Guardian to always disagree, meaning all disputes are referred for arbitration?

Well I guess you've got a de facto single philosopher-king now.

7. What happens if someone usurps them or there is a coup?

Well shit. I guess that didn't last very long. I guess we need some sort of countermeasures to prevent that. Some sort of policing body, able to gather intelligence on such plots from within the community. I guess they couldn't reveal their intentions in public.

8. What are the incentives for the people who disagree?

To hide their true intentions.

9. What does this do for everything else in society?

Creates a corrosive low-trust atmosphere that slows trade, impedes the spread of innovation, mucks up education.

10. But the philosopher-king will be secure?

Yes. Just stuck with a shitty society, secret police and an unending threat of being replaced with an even worse psychopath.
But he didn't "use any store bought racing bike". He built one himself. I can't do that. Can you?
Leica C type 112 camera, is here this fall
Disambiguation is called for in respect to what democracy actually is...

http://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic

Black's Law Dictionary says that the difference between a democracy and a republic is that sovereignty is retained by the individual within a republic. (USA is a Constitutional Republic)

The article fails to note that democracy does not preclude communism, and the DPRK (http://www.korea-dpr.com/) is a classic democratic communist nation in which the people have no individual sovereignty in lieu of that sovereignty being relegated to the collective in the name of the greater good for the nation.
I just love GitHub. Followed the link, noticed that certain links were highlighted as links but not working. Went to the README, edited the broken links, sent a pull request [1], and now it works as expected. Everything done without having to leave "browsing mode", i.e. no cloning, no terminal, no editor.

[1] https://github.com/dennybritz/rails_startup_template/pull/3
> 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%

I seriously doubt you can squeeze more than 1-2% after properly running PNGOut on an image.

This service only makes sense if you have huge images that you want to optimize. $19 for 1000 8-megabyte images is a pretty good deal. That's a rare case though. If you have tiny image, just run PNGOut on them for free.
monarchy, autocracy, and tyranny have been around a lot longer than 2500 years. don't we still have those, too?
Democracies have collapsed and transformed into non-democracies and vice versa many times. States are shaped by their conditions, democracy does not seem to be any more of an attractor than various flavours of monarchism.
Do you have PCI DSS certification ? The credit card number is going through your servers.
Qt5 is very trendy and powerful, have you tried it too and preferred Vala ?
> 1. You have ADHD and are prone to clinical depression. Both are treatable.

Actually, according to recent findings, neither of those can either be reliably diagnosed or treated. Recent meta-analyses reveal that anti-depression treatments (both therapy and drugs) are in the majority of cases indistinguishable from the placebo effect. As to ADHD, diagnosis remains a very serious problem -- it's a throwaway diagnosis that anyone can either get or avoid, depending on their tastes. And, like depression, there's no meaningful treatment.
My quick 5 minute review of this site is: nice work. The design and feel of the site itself is very polished and professional. I threw a handful of "optimized" images at it, and sure enough it did squeeze some bytes out.

In a couple of the images I did notice a few artifacts with lossy compression, but nothing obvious, you'd have to look for it like I did, and if it were a priority you could always lossless.

Overall I'd say nice work, but I agree the "per image" price might not be optimal.

Nice work! I'll be looking into this service more seriously for a project I have coming up.
Yes, because the "all-knowing Philosopher King" theory works out so well for the religions of the world, where no single person or group of people can radically change how it affects it's citizens, and everything is reformed at a blistering pace.
This Saas trend is great, dips for the Grep-api, so that you guys could pay me to do greps. The who does the date-api? /s
1-2% might be possible by using aggressive gzip encoders such as https://code.google.com/p/zopfli/

( as seen in https://github.com/sayurin/optipng-zopfli and mentioned in https://twitter.com/pornelski/status/356843309118922756 )
Perhaps it is a dry article, but I heard it on the radio this morning and really appreciated it (http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b037vb15 - may be blocked outside uk). I was grateful to see the text version. Summary is that Roger Scruton believes that democracy needs an independent judiciary, property rights and the right to free speech and opinion in order to succeed.
"Western nations have acted upon the assumption that democracy is the solution to political conflict and that the ultimate goal of foreign policy must be to encourage the emergence of democracy..

.. three ideas - democracy, freedom and human rights - are spoken of in one breath"

Ironically, thing that current liberal-democratic ideologies should have inherited from Marxism is the emphasis on influencing the people. Democrats of the last few decades give the general public's attitude and political culture a ridiculously strong presumption of innocence. The problems in autocratic countries are assumed to be institutional: bad systems, bad leaders. The People want peace, freedom and human rights. I think that's why human rights are expected to follow democratic elections.

In the middle east right now we have seen this fail in a similar way in several places. Democratic elections bringing to power strongly non "democratic" candidates. Confessionalists, nationalists & theocrats.

A more Marxist-like approach would worry more about spreading the ideology among the general public. In Eastern Europe (especially East Germany) "like Western Europe" was enough. In the middle east "lets be more western" is not going to work. We're understandably hesitant to start pushing a "little book of ideology" into the hands of 16 year olds around the world given our 20th century experience with such books. I don't know what the answer is to that. What I am pretty certain about is that if you want to see "democracy" in Syria or Egypt, you have more than just an institutional problem to fix.
Just had a thought. If I generate 8MB PNG files with noise in them and upload 1000 of such files, your servers will choke.

Maybe you should charge per MB.
http://imageoptim.com/

Similarly you can get some pretty good optimisations with the local, and open source OSX app, which is itself just a frontend for free linux utilities.
Wow, this is one of those moments I wish I would post more to get to downvote crap like this. Turnout for federal elections has never been lower than 70%.[1]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Wahlbeteiligung_Bundestags...
> When I was 16, my parents were idiots. I'm 44 now, and they sure have smartened up a lot

"When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." –Mark Twain
I second the WordPress plugin idea - I've got a few clients I'd sign up (probably only on the micro 500/month sized plan).
It's worth remembering that there are ways of achieving democracy that don't involve voting. For example, creating a Government from a randomly-selected group of citizens every few years.

In my opinion that's a vastly superior approach to having everyone vote for one a bunch of - for the most part - crooks, thieves and liars.
Yes, we are PCI DSS compliant. Our compliance was verified by Wirecard, our payment gateway.
Hardware support matters to end users in terms of portability of app data. If I use an app which is not ported to other platforms, I can't use my data in a new hardware, until the platform itself is ported.

If the data has an open format, then this problem is reduced, but many applications out there have a proprietary data format.
I'm not sure if squeezing image sizes can be a winning point for your project, pushing to s3 and cloud files was a very good feature. but if this can be extended to be a full image management solution that can easily be integrated with 3rd party CMS's like wordpress/drupal then I think it will be a killer.
real racers with real top bikes do not value speed achieved by being dragged behind some aerodynamic shield

I know you're trolling, but I wanted to point out that, except for time trials, this is the entire sport of cycling. The "aerodynamic shield" is your competitors.
> ... apparently the agents didn't know it even existed and asked me all about it.

I saw this same sort of thing from FBI agents ~17 years ago... feigning ignorance and asking all sorts of questions.

I realized soon after that it was all a ploy. They almost certainly knew more about the subject than I did.
How about finding other job?

I mean, if it is possible for "imbecile" and a "poser" to get this job, there must be something wrong with it, your employer and its recruitment process.

Why waste energy, time and your life for problems like this one?
Not a big fan of the interactive e-book paradigm in general, but it certainly has its place. long form reading is not something I anticipate going away.
This guys is a wannabe Graeme Obree - obree.com

http://obree.com/obree-news/297-ihpva-world-land-speed-recor...
This is what I don't understand at all. Imagine somebody in a different area of computing would say: oh, we solved that 30 years ago and now there is no room for improvement at all? why can't this be done at least in C?
Specialty Sites You Can Build With WordPress Plugins
How To Add Twitter's "Report Abuse" Button To Your App
I can give the evidence. In Switzerland, it took very long time to enact laws for protection of minorities. Progressive politicians in other countries enacted these much sooner. It's also empirically true that direct democracies tend to save on government budget, as opposed to politicians, who are usually interested in giving money away (often to useful pet projects).

So what's your evidence for the opposite claim? I want hard evidence, not "imagining things".

I don't consider "Ancient Greek" system to be democratic. In particular, you cannot restrict other people from voting democratically, then it's not a democracy (that would be type of Russell's paradox).

I also think that "Greek" theory of government cycles is bullshit. (Almost any theory that has "cycle" in name is bullshit, for what is it worth.) Historically, there have probably been more failures of representative democracies than of direct democracies.

I do however consider representative democracy to be a form of democracy. (There are 3 basic implementations of the democratic principles - direct voting, representation and random drawing, each having advantages and disadvantages for different things.)
You are right, our optimization workers will have a lot of work to do to optimize those images. In that case we recommend the use of "callback_url" option to eliminate the possibility of a request timeout.
and he didn't have a problem with that.
Checked my friend's dog's food: lists cereals first, “meat and byproducts” go second in a single item.
Not quite what the article was talking about, but what worries me about modern democracies is where the responsibility of government decisions lies. In theory the voters should bear it, since they chose the government. But in practice they just shrug "rotten politicians" and move on with their lives as their country wages war on millions of innocents. The politicians themselves rarely get their comeuppance, because hey, the people chose them!

Democracy only works with a politically active population. And frankly, most people don't give a shit.
You broke the Internet. We're making ourselves a GNU one [video]
Some Kindle titles have disabled DRM. its an option the author can set. obviously, few choose to do so. I imagine Cory Doctorow does.
KDE: http://i.imgur.com/TIxP1h2.png
Aren't all existing democracies republics?

Personally I think the pendulum needs to swing a lot more in favor of true democracy, and accountability of those "few" representatives in power. Because it doesn't look like the current system, where the pendulum swings a lot more in favor of the representatives, has been working very well.

We need more direct democracy, more referendums, more citizen law-making, where the representatives are only a relative "check" on that citizen power (to prevent extreme abuses of "mob rule").
FYI someone sorted this out (not sure who, but thanks!)

Thanks for the heads-up!