skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Obviously Denmark or Norway have poor people.

Not really the way the US does:

Most recent available Gini Coefficients [1]:

Denmark 24.8
Norway 25
Germany 27
E.U. 30.7
India 36.8
World 39
Nigeria 43.7
United States 45
Mozambique 45.6

The biggest underlying problem with the US prison (educational, healthcare, etc.) system is that the US economic system is actively maintained to increase the concentration of wealth and the degree to which Americans don't share a common set of interests.

But, still, such broader social problems aren't the only big problems in the prison or other systems, and even though they need to be fixed, there are big steps that can be taken short of fixing them to deal with other real problems in each of those systems.

> And it's not just a matter of decriminalizing common behavior.

Ending drug prohibition would do quite a lot of to mitigate the problem with prisons, even though it wouldn't deal with the biggest underlying problem.

> The young people in Chicago joining gangs aren't non-violent offenders being out away for innocuous crimes.

No, but there'd be a lot less broken homes for them to come from if it weren't lots of resources being poored into non-violent offenders being put away for victimless crimes, and there'd be a lot more resources for the kinds of interventions that would stop people from ending up in gangs in the first places.

> That's what makes the problem so deeply intractable.

What makes the problem deeply intractable is people throwing up their hands and saying that the problem is too hard to deal with. (And, mostly, people seeing their own short-term self-interest being in not dealing with the problem.)

[1] https://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/...
I admit I haven't really traveled much on the less beaten paths. From the quality of what I have seen, I thought they must have policies for the minimum acceptable quality of all the public facing services to developers.

On the other hand, I am happy that even the big G cannot afford to cover all fronts. It means, there is still room for new players to grow and do well in those areas.
> young people who don't produce anything themselves

That's not a worthy characterization. Plenty of opensource contributors are on board with rolling back copyright restrictions to less extreme levels. There are also writers like Cory Doctorow, and a growing number of artists in a variety of fields, along with various economists and law professors.
How much developer time is wasted on Patents?
Even with an attorney it seems like I spent 40 hours getting my first preliminary application filed.

Think it's possible to spend less dev time by defining the critical points, hiring law student to to flesh it out, and then the expensive attorney for final review?

I really resent the whole process, I know we have to protect ourselves but I'd like to play the game as little as possible.
95% of developers working on iOS 7 updates
I suppose you'll need to see the published findings... Oh wait. There aren't any.
Thank you for those interesting links. I never thought to explore Renaissance Italy's dabblings in this area even though it was a commercial/financial powerhouse at the time. Thanks for the heads-up on "brevetti". Grazie mille.
Why? That's the same as labeling food made with GMOs. If there's no provable difference between the two, putting it on the label is just spreading FUD about the product.
We have actually put a fair bit of thought into this, but the pitch has to be relatively focused. Publicly speculating about things which may change is not a good way to manage expectations.

One core question is: how big a team will we need in a years time to continue development? The answer to that depends on many factors - since this is open source, it is actually perfectly OK to work for a year, ship something awesome and hand off to the community once things are a bit more mature.

However, since we do assume there will still be quite a bit of work to do in a years time, our preferred business model is actually listed in the pitch: backers are joining a community and we will reach out to them again in a years' time and ask them to continue supporting us if they are happy with the work we have done. Mailpile has a broad enough appeal that it may be possible to sustain the team using this model alone, which would IMO be ideal.

However, plan B includes things like grants from human rights / free-speech orgs that need better tools for activists in the field, corporate support from companies unsatisfied with the current crop of tools, and subscription support services (like https://pagekite.net/, SMTP relaying, etc) which help the average Joe run his own Mailpile.
Ouya gives store credit to dissatisfied Kickstarter backers
"Every operator in Perl (not just the Range operator) has six different behaviors depending on the invisible context in which its surrounding expression is being evaluated."

... and unfortunately context sensitivity of operators became much more prevalent in Perl 6 than Perl 5. It was hard to imagine the core Perl maintainers thought that context sensitivity was a feature that needed further enhancement, but that's just what they did in Perl 6.

Programming language design comes down to one word: teamwork. Software is collaborative writing. The better languages allow teams of developers with mixed levels of skill to work together and be productive, to build on each other's code.

Perl 5 had enough quirks and cute context idioms to be clever and interesting, yet it was still possible to decipher what other coders had intended and learn a few new tricks along the way. Perl 6 is a toolkit for outright hostile obfuscation making it damn near impossible for a team of developers to wrap their heads around each others' code. Not surprisingly Perl is fading into the past.
I didn't realise it was from 2004 until I got to the bottom (although I did wonder if he meant "In the fifteen years since Perl 5").
"It feels like in a world where people were generally interested in solving the issues with the drug trade the DEA wouldn't need to exist."

Drug prohibition has never really been about solving the problems society faces with drugs. In the early days when cocaine and heroin were first made illegal, the argument was overtly racist. Black cocaine users would be more accurate with a gun, would go into a frenzied state where they attack white women, and would be difficult to stop even when shot in the chest. Philipino immigrants were bringing their bad opium habits with them, and heroin was marketed by a German company. Marijuana was said to cause white women to want to have sex with black men, and good white boys were being corrupted by Mexicans who gave them marijuana.

In this day and age the war on drugs is not overtly racist (but it just happens to disproportionately affect black communities -- coincidence, really!), but we now have a host of new reasons for it. Drugs are an easy way to terrify a population that grew up with war on drugs propaganda, and politicians looking for a few more votes can easily play up their "tough on crime" stance with drugs. Deploying soldiers to arrest suspected drug dealers is the norm, and police forces wanted to build a paramilitary wing can always turn to drug crime as a justification for it. Pharmaceutical companies love the war on drugs because it inflates the demand for prescription medications; a prominent example is methamphetamine, the supposed scourge that also happens to be prescribed as a treatment for narcolepsy, obesity, and ADHD (you can bet that the pharmaceutical grade methamphetamine is cleaner and purer than the stuff you buy at a truck stop). Alcohol and tobacco companies lobby in favor of the war on drugs (ironically), for obvious reasons.

So really, to understand the war on drugs you just need to change your perspective. Do not think in terms of solving the problems associated with drugs, because that is little more than a facade. Think in terms of money and power, which are the real purpose of the war on drugs and the reason we will not see the DEA disbanded any time soon.
On a xerox 7535 I was able to recreate the problem when using the example sheet of numbers provided in the tiff image.
Investigating Firefox Security Vulnerability Report
Also consider that the US army burns the enormous afghan poppy harvest every summer while big pharma synthesises its opiate molecules at great expense.
IIR, GNUStep has always been a stepchild on Linux, with KDE and Gnome sucking up all the air in the room. The developers are great fans and all, but they are few and far between.

By the time iOS rolled around, GNUStep and Obj-C on Linux seemed completely dead and, with no pressing need to write software for a handheld on one platform and a desktop on another, it's stayed that way.

GNUStep missed the opportunity to cash in on more people working in Obj-C.
he has openly speculated if IP is necessary at all (except for pharmaceuticals)
Doesn't really surprise me seeing that in there. Nielsen is from way back in the usability community. You have to remember that it was considered revolutionary then to make buttons look 3D, like they stick out, and should be touched. Like they are real buttons. Gloss, shadows, etc.. User affordances. It's been backed up by heavy studies as well.

The modern flat movement, on the other hand, is more just graphics designers making something that looks good and doesn't work well. I've put users through user studies on converted Android apps and they have a hell of a lot harder time figuring out they are supposed to tap an understated flat icon with no label in the top corner, the new action bar pattern, instead of a big glossy shadowed button at the bottom like earlier designs.

I've brought these numbers to Googlers before at conferences, but they just shrug and say users will get used to it. So even Google admits the current flat designs are testing poorly and that they just hope numbers will improve as users learn to look for the flat hidden icons.
Remembering the Apple Newton’s Prophetic Failure and Lasting Impact
You also have early adopter syndrome where people who know about fragmentation assume you won't support their phone, even if you do, even if you later add support.

Oh, $app? I heard about $app but it didn't support my phone on launch day, so I ignored them and installed a competitor who works everywhere. Oh, $app added support for my phone 6 months ago? Who cares, I've had $competitor installed for 7 months.
NERDS!!!!
Very true. Perhaps I should have said that prior to Queen Anne's statute of 1710 there was no robust national legislation? Would that be better. I did mention there was precedent :)

Really nice video on this _exciting_ topic btw

Video talk on Hyde’s book, Common as Air:

http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/interactive/events/2011/hyde
Control-w deletes the previous word in Bash and in vi insert mode.
Kickstart Your Developer Career
It's really hard for me to imagine that it wouldn't. No matter how you look at it, at the end of the day, it can't be putting the same machine code into memory, or an attacker would just look at that and disassemble it.

But cryptography is full of things that I wouldn't have imagined, so maybe?
> Regarding production/consumption ratio: perhaps the new thing in the mix in the internet era is peer-to-peer technologies which break the hierarchical model.

How do they do that? To me, those are pretty much entirely distribution technologies.

Sure, it's easier then ever to produce more kinds of content and distribute it, but it still takes a lot of skill and effort to produce high quality content. To really get good at something, you'd need to treat it something like a full time job. And therefore, at a certain point, you'd want to be able to rely on it for an income...
Where I live in Europe (Bulgaria), the situation isn't that different from what it is in the US (I used to live in NYC with a baby and health care expenses similar to what you mention).

Here, the banks offer very limited credits, expecially to foreigners like me. Public health care and education is not great, to put it nicely. My family depends on my income but a bankruptcy would mean that I would lose my license to practise my profession, and so too my income would take a dip.

So, losing cash could mean that I would loose my profession, my home, car etc. There would be no more nice kindergartens, no nanny, no cleaning lady or private doctors for a long while. We would eat less, drink less, travel less etc. But that doesn't mean that my life would be ruined.
I don't even see that as a problem. If we accept the use of upvotes to signal agreement, it is only natural that downvotes will come to signal the opposite.
I share your feelings in re to LE; however, wouldn't any prosecution that came out of this activity be a fruit of the poisonous tree??

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

Can some lawyer/knowledgeable individual elaborate?
That's what the FreedomBox Foundation (started by Eben Moglen/Software Freedom Law Center) is trying to make: http://freedomboxfoundation.org/learn/
You think maybe you should try to realign your emotional reactions with reality then?
WordPress + Vagrant + Chef = Magic
10 Ways to Get Inspiration as a Programmer
Let's say a DEA agent is testifying and I ask him, "why did you stop the truck?" If he gives me a bunch of malarkey about a unreadable tag or a broken tail light instead of telling me about the NSA intercept, he has committed perjury. Pure and simple.
Thanks. I've got the same processor but the default 4GB RAM and 1TB 5400 drive. I think I may need to upgrade them...
The Backspace key had the same scan code as Control-H, so ^H is what you would see when you typed Backspace on a misconfigured TTY (instead of it deleting the previous character).

Control-W is what you use to delete the previous word (Edit: word, not character), so ^W is what you would have seen on TTYs/Editors that didn't support that command.
Heh-heh, this comment of mine has the most interesting history. First it went straight up to +12, and now it has come down to -4. So it has my personal record of minimum 16 downvotes. There were some bumps when it went up, so it is certainly more than 16, only i do not know how many.

Anybody has collected more down's for one comment, or is this some kind of record?
The core is open-source and available on GitHub [1], but seems to be scattered across a number of repositories. Not clear if it's buildable purely from the repository currently (I haven't tried).

It was previously an independent open-source project, AndroVM [2], which Genymobile acquired, but they agreed to keep the core open-source [3].

[1] https://github.com/androvm

[2] http://androvm.org/

[3] http://androvm.org/blog/blog/2013/05/16/androvm-moving-to-a-...
This isn't that far-fetched - I wouldn't bet my life that this technology will still be undeployed in, say, 50 years. Academic research is about those discoveries too - even everyday stuff that is now taken for granted, like memory garbage collection, was considered impractical in the beginning.

Regarding DRM: "In Functional Encryption, ciphertexts encrypt inputs x and keys are issued for strings y. The striking feature of this system is that using the key SK y to decrypt a ciphertext CT x = Enc(x), yields the value F(x,y) but does not reveal anything else about x".

You can take x to be the code of the computer game you wrote, and F to be a code simulator. This sounds like the type of DRM game manufacturers want.
"When a post goes viral, I get a hardcore adrenaline rush. Straight to the brain."
You need to get out more. This site is so scene whore it's hilarious..
I've started tuning out the negativity in comments. I look for the constructive criticism or relevant links.
"First: Larry is insane."

As cdoxsey says, this as uncharitable, however it's not without a grain of truth. He's a bit of a loon, but a lovable loon.

That being said, what he helped add to the technology ecosystem is as important as GNU/Linux. Perl is remarkably expressive, and I've found in my 18 year IT career that no other single tool has paid me back as much for investing my energy into learning it, both in better "kung fu" (than you Ringo Langly), and also in plain old cash-money.

It's worth adding to your bag of tricks, even if you feel, as the article's author does, that the docs are unwieldy, the community is filled with zealots and cults of personality (to Larry himself, as well as to Merlyn and his ilk), and the syntax is irritating. It's still worth your time. If you invest enough in it to grok the language, you __WILL__ be a better overall developer.
I believe, at least in Linux, the canonical line disipline also does ctrl-w. Pretty sure that behaviour isn't POSIX though.
"The trials are public."

Actually, there mostly are no trials at all.

As the article states, "most drug-trafficking defendants plead guilty before trial"

One has to wonder if a "justice system" in which the majority of convicts have never even had a trial is worthy of the name.
I really liked this part “The goal is not glasses. Glasses, clearly, are just a bridge to the goal. And that goal may be to embed a computer in your eyeball.”
Free app lets anyone remotely hack some smart toilet models
That's great and all, but my RSS Service has SSL by default, no support queue, and is only $2/month or $16/year. Everyone is a user, and everyone is treated the same. No ads, ever.

https://www.bulletin.io
there is hope that the decision in Oracle vs Google[0] on API's not being copyrightable might change that

[0] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oracle_v._Google
Don't hold Java against Go :). It is all a matter of perspective I guess. Go requires 2 environmental (GOROOT, GOPATH) variables and you are ready to Go (zing). go run foo plus near instant compile times makes it feel extraordinarily script-y for small stuff.

Hugo adds some external dependencies which can be fetched with `go get` (fsnotify, fsync, pflag, hugolib). One command deps are filled and you still have all the Go goodness.

Jekyll requires (or generally expects) gem and requires at runtime (classifier, colorator, commander, directory_watcher, kramdown, liquid, maruku, pygments, redcarpet, safe_yaml) and for development (activesupport, cucumber, launchy, rake, rdiscount, rdoc, RedCloth, redgreen, rr, shoulda, simplecov, simplecov-gem-adapter)

So, it all depends on what you value.
At some point people need to wake up enough such that they recognize the equivalence of being surprised and being naive, which is an important reason they've trusted government to its own devices for far too long.
There's a lot of unnecessary trolling, which I try to tune out as well. However there are some genuinely great debates that happen in the comments .. often better reads than the original content.
JBIG2 [91] suggests using OCR to verify that you didn't mangle anything. If the compressed result has a lower success rate in matching words than the original, then you did something wrong.

[91] http://jbig2.com/
I'm pretty sure they will have to test it by feeding it to animals for a long time before they can even think about selling it to humans.
How do you know you are a Turing level genius? I'm genuinely curious.
Because it doesn't scale to feeding 7 billion people for one. Because most people in industrialized countries don't want to be farm labor for two.
It's insane how much leverage you get with a modern web stack. I was approximately 1000% more productive using knockout, bootstrap, zeromq and websockets as I am using the in-house non-web platform I'm programming on data to day at the moment.
I really think it is scary though!
In light of the "Three Felonies a day" phenomenon, and given the sweeping nature of the surveillance, it seems likely that the number of cases that are prosecuted represents only a small fraction of the number of potential cases that could possibly be taken to trial.

This gives the criminal justice system considerable latitude to select and prioritise certain cases over others.

How are these decisions made?

Can we be sure that political considerations and/or racial / sexual / gender biases, (conscious or unconscious) do not play a role in the decision making process?
Computer Science, What Is It?
I agree, Perl has a funny way of just naturally rolling off of the fingers in a way other languages don't. With a little care it's really quite maintainable.
The worst kind of arms race. Let's all just take up more space and burn more fuel on the road to be bigger than the next guy.

Did her father consider that SUVs are easier to roll? Also, while his point about momentum may be correct, its one datapoint among many when it comes to crash safety.
When you consider the real costs of unsustainable, industrialized agriculture† a very different picture emerges. The convenience of industrialized, globalized, corporate food infrastructure doesn't outweigh the long-term costs.

This basic misunderstanding of how food gets to your plate was featured prominently in a recent NY Times piece claiming the McDouble was the "cheapest, most nutritious" food ever.

The upfront cost reflects the way the food economy is structured. The food economy could be, and is being, restructured in small steps to bring the price in line with industrialized agriculture, if people would make the rational choice for health and lower long-term cost over convenience.

I can buy local pork for the same price as industrialized grocery store pork if I buy in bulk, but that does require a chest freezer. (Patchwork Farms, Columbia, MO)

† e.g. lower nutritional value, centralization, fewer jobs, lower wages, taxes for subsidizing fast food, questionable human rights and environmental practices, reduced biodiversity, etc., etc.
Ahh yeah. The idea behind that was that you could just enter the URL with the password and skip a screen.

If you'd like to implement a better password authentication system, I'd be happy to accept your pull request.
A partnership is more work and harder than marriage because you have to:

- get on and stay on the same page

- agree on both of your live's direction and commitment to a path has to be the same for the next 2-3 years

- have the ability to defer to each other in your area of competence

- have to be skilled at learning and getting anything done, whether its business or tech.

- know that your entry and exit goals have to be compatible. Some people want to get rich quick, others are happy with organic growth that scales as well.

- be able to have a disagreement and move on for what's best.

- remember it's not about who's right, but what's right. Have a overarching vision, mission and values that you agree with so you can test any idea against them to see "does it fit how we're trying to do?"

- understand that it's about creating value for your customers, not making your own lives easier through the latest technology that makes something easier for you in development

- remember building channel to a market is more important than anything you build.

- building a financial engine early is the biggest indicator of whether your partnership will last

- building a partnership that grows in to friendship is easier than the other way around. Build things with people who you have experience building things with, and if you're new to each other, see if you can build something small together before taking the plunge.
> They even have the father of JIT, Lars Bak, working for them. But he's focused on the V8 JS engine and doesn't provide any assistance with Android.

He's also one of the leads on the Dart VM [1], but that likely just leaves even less time for involvement in anything Java/Android.

[1] http://www.dartlang.org/
Detecting and infering mood from your smart-phone routine