skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Socialism is such a harsh word.

All it really needs is a welfare program for the general population that doesn't punish those whose jobs have been automated.

A system how to solve that has been discussed in Germany by left-leaning parties. The idea is simple: give everyone a certain salary per month that allows them to rent a flat, buy groceries, and have a social life. Without the fear of losing their job, not being able to afford food or just becoming poor, people will do whatever they like: some will continue their job (which earns them extra pay, obviously), some will try out a business idea they have, some won't work. Or that's the idea, at least, with the assumption that people aren't lazy by nature and thus must be punished if they neither work nor actively seek for jobs (i.e. the current unemployment benefit system in Germany), but instead would like to work, except working on the stuff they like working on.
Once it comes out that the chemical attack was really done by one of the 57 or so US and Al-Qaeda backed + funded insurgent groups operating in Syria, I really hope that Obama keeps his word on punishing those responsible (for crossing the red line).

Though the best info I could get is saying right now that the rebel group that launched the attack didn't know what they had, and thought they were launching conventional rockets. So I'm not sure you can blame them the same way you could blame Bashar.

The funny thing about all this is that if the US just came out and said we are doing this to secure the next 50-100 years of US energy needs and geo-political strategy - I'd be all for these middle-eastern wars because I understand the need for it. But I'm not sure the general public could shed its moral supremacy desires, nor understand complicated issues or how the world really turns.
What does the Syrian government hope to gain from using chemical weapons? Is the edge that they gain from using chemical weapons worth the increased potential for military intervention by other countries?
Maybe someone can put together some sort of losethos filter bot to automate the hoisting.
I would think that contractors need to dig a deep hole to ensure the foundations of the building are secure - get into the bedrock, especially in earthquake zones

Not necessarily, spread footings or piles can work if designed properly and the soil can support it.
As is touched on in the article, one of the problems with parking quotas is that they shift a major cost of owning a car in a city (parking) on to everyone, rather than just car owners. If all the external costs of driving were priced in correctly then driving would become far less attractive, increasing demand for public transit and hopefully improving service to the point where it is a realistic option for more people.

FWIW, I've lived in Seattle and can understand your frustration --- the system there isn't great. When you live in a city with a good transit system you use it for your commute to work and day-to-day things and rent a car (services like Zipcar have made this easier than ever before) every once in a while when you really need it.
Congress shall make no law ...
> The idea that it was was as you can imagine very popular with Marxist historians. Which doesn't make it false of course.

Then why do you make this quip? It reads as if you are only including it to sow doubt about the claim by association. Maybe I'm overly cynical, if so I apologize.

> The rise of international trade, which depressed agricultural prices in comparatively unproductive Europe, was another huge one.

The idea that productivity of Europe was challenged by international trade was/is also wildly popular with Marxist historians - the rise of well-developed international capitalism as a pre-requisite to reaching the productivity levels required for a socialist revolution to be successful is a key part of Marx ideas. The rising competition from increasingly efficient US agriculture and industrialization was even explicitly called out for its effects on Europe in at least one of the prefaces Marx and Engels wrote to translations of the Communist Manifesto.
I think this vision is shared by some of the town councils in big european towns.

For example in Paris, the current mayor (who has been in office since 2001) has made it his mission to make the city as unfriendly as possible for cars to discourage people to come to Paris in their cars.

This includes massively removing parking spots, making parking expensive all over the city, removing lanes wherever there are roadworks (to add sidewalks, bike or bus lanes, trees...) and banning cars from some of the most important streets in the city (most notably the embankments).

So far it has stopped the growth in car usage in Paris. I don't think people are ready for an outright ban on cars yet, but this surely seems like an effective strategy to prepare them for it. Maybe when the Supermetro is done and suburbans can more effectively use public transportation the city will move in this direction.

However : do you consider taxis as public transport ? What about Autolibs (shared electric cars you can pick up all around the city) ?

Edit with some stats :
Parisians overwhelmingly use public transport (63%) and not their cars (13%) to go to work. More people walk than take their cars (14%). So that would be an indication of success, however a brief walk outside at 6PM will help you see that suburbans still massively come to Paris in their cars :)
Ask HN: What's wrong with my security model - and where can it be attacked?
I'm working on a little personal project where security is very important, and I've thought for a while about the best way to do this. Now I am looking for a little outside help on good practices. The goal is to store personal text data on a server (like wifi passwords, etc) and be obtained through a password. I wanted to make user accounts for a few friends so that we each could securely store text snippets and retrieve them without the others knowing them. Here's my data structures:

// Account
- Username
- Password
- Salt

// StoredData
- Title
- Info
- User

Okay, now the fun part. Here's how I'm obfuscating the data. When a friend creates an account, their username is salted with a salt in the server config files (this is Rails btw, so ENV['SALT']) and then SHA256'd. The password is generated via BCrypt. The only thing I'm not sure about are how many rounds to do for BCrypt so the server stays snappy; right now it's at default for ruby's bcrypt library. A random salt is also saved in the Account for the next step.

Username = SHA256(username + SERVER_SALT)
Password = BCrypt(password)
Salt = BCrypt.generateSalt

When a friend saves their data, it is encrypted using AES-256. So for this, an AES Key is generated using a combination of their plaintext username and password, as well as the salt generated in Account creation. That key is never stored on the server, but created on device at runtime.

PBKDF2_HMAC_SHA1(secret, salt, rounds)
AESKey = PBKDF2_HMAC_SHA1((usernamepassword), Account.Salt, 20000)
Title = AES-256(AESKey, title)
Info = AES-256(AESKey, info)

Also, the whole thing is sent back and forth over SSL, though after the recent revelations I'm not too sure how secure that is anymore.

HN, what did I mess up?
I've never done anything illegal ( not even a speeding ticket). All my documents are clean and valid. Yet, I've been called a 'dog' that needs to be 'kicked out' by an 'immigration officer'. I am not sure how that keeps America safe.
Patent nonsense. The 'specific socialist doctrine' of Social Democracy is what the countries with the highest quality of life currently run.

If you mean 'communist', then say 'communist'.
Just for the record, this site is a conspiracy theory site. It is definitely not anything close to a reliable news source, and really should not be on Hacker News.
Sure, it can be done. People do a lot of crazy things. But it's not sustainable.
Why is it so hugely expensive to dig holes? You would think this'd be the kind of work that would be easy to automate.
Capitalism has been given a bad reputation

I'd argue that what's generally called (and self-describes itself as) capitalism has largely earned that reputation.

fundamentally it just means people engaging in voluntary exchanges

Well, that's the free-market aspect of free-market capitalism. Which, as Adam Smith notes, isn't particularly easy to attain. And as many observers since Smith have noted, especially as amended, focuses on efficiency to the sacrifice of equity or sustainability. Markets also, it's become very increasingly apparent, have very substantial externalities, both positive and negative, which lead to increasing distortions of underallocation to behaviors in which positive externalities are prevalent (e.g., free software, public education, universal healthcare) and overallocation to behaviors in which negative externalities are prevalent (e.g., acute pollution, tobacco, addictive drugs, processed foods, greenhouse gas emissions).

wealth is accumulated, and invested

That is the heart of capitalism: capitalism itself concerns itself with the accumulation and investment of accumulated real wealth. That last is often shaded to include financial wealth accumulation and investment, which need not itself be net productive (see "rent-seeking" and "catabolic collapse"). A problem of capitalism is that the same self-interested motives which can be harnessed for productive activity can equally be harnessed for activities which provide private benefit but social costs (see negative externalities above).

voluntary exchanges are the basis of all economic activity ever

Written by someone who's either never heard of, or is unable to admit, slavery, coercion, blackmail, forced options, and other circumstances in which decisions are made under duress or lack of any feasible alternative.

Flatly false.

Every single one of us is out to benefit from voluntary exchanges, but that's alright because so is whoever you're trading with.

Not if the game is structured to explicitly benefit one side or the other. E.g., "contracts of adhesion", monopoly provision of communications or broadband services, toll authorities, agribusiness conglomerates structuring "intellectual property" laws to forbid saving and planting of seed grain, eternal copyright extension, etc., etc.

that doesn't mean Capitalism itself is problematic

Identified problems in one area of a practice doesn't mean a freedom from problems and conflicts elsewhere. So your conclusion is largely moot and void.
I find it interesting how many smart people seem to truly believe that things will just work itself out. Kind of like the idealist libertarians or communists, only with technology as the solution to every problem.
2000 character limit, so here's the rest:

My first thoughts are on SSL - if that's secure enough. Because usernames and passwords hit the backend code in plaintext, and then are transformed, a MITM attack that knows my ssl key could render it useless. Another thought is that if someone knows another's user/pass, they get access to everything - but that's kind of unavoidable.

The whole goal is to never save anything as plaintext either. So that's why the username is SHA256'd, and the password is Bcrypted, and the data is AES256'd.
Concision is a virtue.

Can be.
Well, the whole point is that the populations for successful hunter gatherer tribes would be stable. Barring drastic ecological changes and (more commonly) attacks/displacement from technologically superior outsiders, aboriginal tribes have continued living as they have for centuries (even millennia).

Of course that type of society wouldn't be able to support a population of 7B people, although based on the 2.4B in poverty you'd be hard pressed to argue that technological society is really doing much better (ignoring the whole carrying capacity question entirely).

As someone enjoying typing on the Internet right now, I'm by no means arguing any return to the past, but it'd be silly not to acknowledge how much longer we work than our ancestors.
Well, there are incentives. Unfortunately history suggests that, unfortunately, wealth and the wisdom to share enough of it to avoid bloody revolutions rarely go hand-in-hand. There are more 1917s and 1789s than Bismarks.
Thanks for the feedback. Can you elaborate further on what you mean by not buying into the maker vs thinker dichotomy? Do you mean to say that everyone is a little bit of both? If so, then yes I would agree. I just look at it with myself as being a test subject. I would love to be more prolific at delivering and producing things, but I find myself reading and 'dreaming' a lot more.

As far as rights go, everything you produce and post will be completely owned by you. Frankly, I don't see this being in either person's interest. I don't want to own the rights of content that I wouldn't know what to do with and be held liable, and you don't want to hand over ownership of your creations.

At the moment, I am thinking you will be able to browse other people's creations without needing to sign in, just like Tumblr or Pinterest, etc. But if you want to create your own profile, then obviously you will need to sign in, either through FB/Twitter/natively, etc.

Hope this answers your questions!
I haven't seen anything written by this guy. Can someone explain why people on HN seem to conflate mental illness with writing an operating system? Is this just the HN attitude of having just learned js/ruby yesterday and being afraid of low level details?

I used to work on a small kernel just as a fun hobby project. I haven't had much time to do much with it lately but it was a lot of fun. I would think that this should be encouraged instead of mocked.
One thing I thought was funny was when he suggested that perhaps the information desk worker might instead work remotely via video chat. She laughed at the suggestion, saying that was a long way off. I saw this exact use case, and I mean exact use case, in Japan a couple weeks ago. It's technically trivial at this point.
I'm not sure this can do BT4-LE - maybe the HackRF can fill the gap?
What differentiates this service from either a) just throwing up a Wordpress or SquareSpace site or b) using a service like Launch Rock? Having to pay $99/month just to have your logo displayed seems pretty steep.
If you define worker processes as workers, virtually all software is creating little socialist empires. This is basically a premise of jamesaguilar's comment.
How does it feel to be using NoSQL so old it came back into fashion? :-P
I think the concept owning your car will become mostly a thing of the past. Most of the time, I just need a car to get me from point A to point B. When the car is not performing that function, it's just sitting, taking up space.

Rather than making a car payment, I'd rather pay for a car-on-demand service. Whenever I need a ride, I make a request and a car appears.

Coupling with an electric car makes sense, too. The car will always be charged, or alternatively, only a charged car will pick me up.
I hand-assembled machine code for the 6502 for a couple of years in my youth.

I was 12, couldn't afford an assembler, and my school wouldn't pay for one. I wasn't exactly writing VisiCalc, so a notebook and a pencil were plenty good enough.
I don't think it's a quip. That it fits a popular narrative is evidence that motivated cognition was going on when evidence for the claim was gathered.
Most engineers/technologists probably never see the inside of an ethics or philosophy course.
Who should I contact, to get some more information.
well done sr
Yes? How many examples are there of anything similar [succeeding] ?

(answer: a few, but not enough that I'm not enormously skeptical of each claimed additional example)
Kevin Spacey on the potential of Netflix to disrupt traditional TV [video]
This already kinda exists in the United States, except not in the salary form. Food stamps + subsidized housing + disability pay.
Okay, that puts this into perspective:

>> This has nothing to do with socialism.

>Redistribution of wealth is a core concept of socialism, and that's what this program effectively achieves. The resources come from heavier taxation from the federal government on the bigger economic centers of Brazil. So I'm not sure what you're trying to say here.

You two are arguing around two definitions of socialism, the OP is using the standard definition and you are using your own heuristic.

>I believe that a state that taxes and redistributes wealth is enforcing some level of common ownership, so acting under socialist principles.

This doesn't follow. If they were abolishing property rights, then yes you might have a point, but this is nothing new. It doesn't erode away any of the problematic power relations in a pre-socialist economy.

It's like equating the following:

>There are many ways to spend tax money that aren't directly related to welfare: military, infra-strucure for the private sector (docks, airports), industry, research...

with fascism.

It bears a resemblance but upon closer inspection is absolutely nothing of the sort.

I'm also curious as to why you don't classify the above corporate welfare as socialism as well.
I'm not sure there's enough substance buried in the racist drivel to be worth bothering in this case. More than a few of us here are old enough to have spent afternoons typing in BASIC programs with lots of DATA sections from the back pages of computer magazines.

I'm struggling to understand how an anecdote about that brings much that is 'relevant' or 'salient' to a discussion of truly oddball languages like BANCStar.
Encouraging people to lie to the government shouldn't be illegal either. Lying to the government perhaps should be (though that's debatable), but encouraging or teaching how should not.
No, no, he really is mentally ill and he really did write an impressive-looking operating system [1]. Also the post quoted above really is packed with racist vitriol. Take all of that literally.

[1] http://www.templeos.org/
The cause of concern is what appears to be lack of moderation combined with disregard for others. Using smartphones in public? Fine. Using smartphones in public such that you bump into other people/things and disrupt others? Not cool. You can replace 'using smartphones' with 'reading' and it works the same way.
#1 won't happen - there's too many people who want to toss unproductive people aside like so much dead wood. Unproductive people cost money and there's a whole school of thought in the US that really, really (and I do mean really) resents that.

#3 is already being done and it's working as intended (not that it is a good thing by any means), although it seems to be inefficient as far as that first group of thinkers is concerned.
> We charge the equivalent of 2 hours from a professional developer.

I would say 1 hour, i.e. $99/hr, is a more accurate statement. This would also help make the product appear more affordable, and as a better investment.
They don't 'primarily' use golf carts. They still use mostly cars. I lived there for several months. Golf carts are definitely part of the culture, the city encourages them by building paths, but the vast majority still drive cars.
Seen from China this debate becomes at the same time epic because of the proportion and in a way easily solved. Here if you have no salary you just borrow a few tools from a relative and choose a street corner where to fix passers by's bicycles.
Instagram Hotel Features Selfies and Digital Murals
> I saw lighter magentas as being more distinguishable than darker ones.

How do you know that? How do you know you are looking to equivalent distributions of lighter and darker magentas?

I have some uncommon kind of color blindness, I have problems with blue and green. I don't even know what colors I can't see, I'd love to know the procedures for that.
> The cheapest parking I could get on Cap Hill was $150/mo, and it was in one of these subterranean garages.

I always guffaw when I see American prices, which are so much lower than the rest of the world. The cheapest spot I could get near my apartment in Beijing is around $400/month, and its not available. Switzerland was even worse. But when I was at UW, it was only $50/month (back in the late 90s). Why is the USA so cheap?
Well he did push it on his blog and on twitter?
They generally also believe in the invisible hand of the capitalist market.
There was a text-based GUI but the application programmers never used it. It was too limited and wouldn't let them accomplish what they needed to do, at least through the GUI. That is an interesting point: the underlying VM mechanism was more capable than could be exploited through the GUI. The method of working with text files described here had been established prior to my arrival. I was given training on the GUI, and then advised not to use it.
> Deng Xiaoping took office and yet the remedy of the government at that time was to increase population growth even further and spur on the youth in some sort of whack job ideological frenzy.

Can you clarify? Wikipedia does not seem to support your statement:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deng_Xiaoping#Re-emergence_post...

Thanks.
You're way off base here - consider turning on showdead and reading some of his posts, or even just googling the guy, before making wild assumptions. Nobody is snarking on losethos and designating him mentally ill because he wrote an OS. losethos is genuinely mentally ill.
What facts? You mean the fact that he is telling HN that it is a technical marvel to block such a large attack and then he doesn't even understand how the attack was done as was explained in the article he told people to read?

This is a clear example of how the signal to noise ratio on Hacker News is going way down.
>"there should be one — and preferably only one — obvious way to do it"

Oh. Well. OK.
Yea, it is weird. The dream was probably inspired by an X-Men trailer I must have seen, but I don't know why Storm was singled out. Though I've had enough practice with dreams to know the recursive detail-filling manner in which my brain makes them, so the answer is probably mundane, like maybe I saw two bright things and my brain knew that Storm's eyes glow bright so it filled in the rest with Storm.
I know this may a bit off topic but the Sears catalog was also how some young kids got off the pictures of women in bras. As a Frenchman this was ridiculously funny to me.
You did a very good job of making it sound as though it is someone else's fault, even intention, when someone fails.

Of course, calling failure "euthanization" is ridiculous fallacious bullshit.
It's all the same data and the same address space, though. The first half-gig or so of memory is all flash ROM, so the separate bus just gives the CPU an extra load per cycle (so it can load data from ROM without a wait state). This doesn't make it a Harvard architecture, it just makes it faster.
Why would people even be necessary in your view of the future?
I guess I figured it was a logical place to have a ferry. Wikipedia says it was created the same year as the bridge opened (1936), so a totally bridge dependent island does make sense.

Googling for "treasure island ferry" has a lot of results. Apparently some would suggest there is one planned?