skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Ahh, if only we had a 'national cadastral database'...

No, instead we have a very limited series of copyright-protected maps by a company called Sanborn that was hired to do this style map from 1867 to 2007 for fire insurance companies - but not in every town and city, not regularly, and rarely for rural areas.

On top of that we have 3100 county-like bodies which will each tend to have a local plat map of who owns which properties (which will occasionally mark buildings), in varying stages of digitization and privatization (some of them charge ridiculous amounts, some are public access).

We also have an irregularly updated USGS quad dataset that is not very precise, and doesn't attempt either building shape or urban areas.

Lastly, there are modern aerial-collection LIDAR returns that tend to produce high accuracy building corner references.
I was surprised to see LevelDB (https://code.google.com/p/leveldb/) was missing from the list of storage solutions you tried, because it seems optimal for your use-case. Were you aware of it?
English is now what Latin used to be in times of Newton or Leibniz. All scientific works back then were written in Latin. Today English plays that role...
>> the function may also throw an exception if a dns lookup error occurred for example.
> What's wrong with (DNS Lookup Failure, -17), as long as it is documented? why doesn't 404 NOT_FOUND merit an exception, yet a DNS lookup failure does?

Because then every function that could potentially cause a dns lookup failure needs to have that error code documented. Then ask yourself this, what's wrong with having (Out of Memory Failure, -1234) in addition to DNS Lookup Failure and HTTP Status codes?

Think of yourself as a http function. You know about the http protocol and therefore from your perspective a 404 NOT_FOUND is a valid result. However, you do not know about DNS lookups or memory allocation therefore if a problem occurs in those areas it is exceptional -> exception.

On the other hand, if you were a memory allocator function then returning out of memory instead of an address to the allocated memory would be fine. Because memory handling is your job.

> But open() in C does return a valid result on any of those billion reasons: (fd -1, errno reason).

Syntactically valid, but not semantically as -1 isn't a valid file descriptor.
Ah, thanks! You filled in the final piece of the puzzle.
Nonsense. I am proposing QA teams and tools in addition to all of the other tools that a development team uses. If you, as a developer, are having a hard time testing something, ask QA how they would test it. Make sure they will be able to test it.

If after that interaction (or before) there is an easy way to construct your model such that this can be fully automated, do so. But, essentially, make sure you are working with QA.

This would be akin to a football team ignoring the special teams and not considering them in any decisions. Sure, if you have a perfect offence this will work. Most of us do not.

Edit: So, not sure why I began with "nonsense." Apologies for the tone on that.
I don't expect all the jobs to be productive. Some will, some won't. The productive jobs will generate returns, while the unproductive ones (e.g., digging and refilling holes) will merely serve as a disincentive for people to use the BJG.

The disincentive is important - the goal of the BJG is that ideally, no one will use it. Unlike a BIG, laziness is no longer an option.
I did a similar thing for Romanian identities [1]. Then I discovered that some are way more extensive [2] [3].

[1] http://minimul.ro/identitate-falsa

[2] http://fakenamegenerator.com

[3] http://www.datafakegenerator.com/generador.php
> Hacker News is indeed the internet's watercooler.

A watercooler in a very passive aggressive, argumentative office perhaps. HN should be more like a watercooler, IMO, with more common courtesy and less flamewars (and less devil's-advocate-for-the-sake-of-devil's-advocate). But at the end of the day, the internet is the internet. (Just a side note: I'll still come on HN every day despite this :) )
7 Management Myths That Need To Be Busted
Another reason why I think we really should steer clear of politics is that the discussion level isn't all that high. Actually, some of the arguments are the kind that 4chan laughs at[1].

There's so much that libertarians ignore that you can point out, criticize, even mock but their answer to "No lifelines, no backup plans, no connections" is well known and straight-forward. It's "charity" and it is far from obvious that this is somehow a worse plan than "massive bureaucracy to administer welfare funded by confiscating 40% of people's incomes."

If every system is corruptible then this argument cannot be really used against any system in particular. We know democratic institutions are sometimes captured, officials are bribed, public funds awarded to friends and family... but democratic governments limp along. They do better than many alternatives. Pure libertarian government may be utopian or theoretical, that does not mean that moving in its direction wouldn't make governance better.

If this was all that took to convince you to move away from libertarianism then either you were never one, or you're rationalizing a change made for other reasons.

[1] http://i.imgur.com/3F501i3.jpg
And liberalism is about feeling guilty about your success when others suffer and trying to absolve for your sins by shaping the state in a way to redistribute wealth, regardless of how effective that might be in actually increasing economic mobility.

Do you see how it's kind of dumb to make wide sweeping statements about political groups based upon basic strawman arguments?
Try "kickstart2" where you'll get it for $5
Gabe's stated several times he's not remotely interested in selling to Microsoft.
Is this an argument in favor of the practice? Because, honestly, drugs should be legal to sell and to purchase. If all drugs should be legal and if the trade in drugs should be legal, then how can any program like this designed solely to enforce drug laws be justified? In that event, who cares what drug "pushers" and users know?
>This is also why we won't automate, say, barmen, or waitresses.

For rich people, obviously not.

The direction of the economy is to eliminate the middle class. Has been for multiple generations. A horde of middle class machinists and bean counters can easily financially support a waitress at a lower class level of income. What happens when all those middle class jobs go away and they're unemployed or people greeters? There is no way the same people, now much poorer, will be able to support the waitress unless her income also shrinks by more than half, which can't happen given the fixed costs of living. Therefore either most restaurants will go out of business other than those serving the few remaining rich, or the now poor ex-middle classes will be served by robots aka fancy vending machines.

One other remark you may have missed is there is a huge, and growing segment of the population who can not and never will be able to afford a smartphone. And this fraction of the population has been growing both as a quantity and as a fraction of the population for generations as the economy permanently declines.
Hack your flight: how to prevent the person in front of you reclining
too bad it doesn't accept statements, I would be glad to get its take on a Duff's device.
lol - I love how he defends it then writes "What I miss the most from other programming languages are features like public/private variables/methods, objects/classes + inheritance, type-checking, first-class functions, etc."

The etc. is the killer for me :-)
Review: PyCon India 2013
Do you really know libertarians that are in favor of corporate welfare? They or you must be confused.

Many libertarians want to get rid of the corporate income tax both because it is inefficient and because it is a sandbox for corruption.
I don't want to agree that all political systems are doomed to not work. But I agree that it applies to all the currently known systems. There is no proof yet that stable system is not possible.

All the current systems has one property in common - a build-in reliance on someone within the system to be honest and nice to others. Would it be honest ruler, honest politician or judge or honest voter. The difference between the systems is that they have different degrees of reliance on honesty and that reliance put in different layers. If there were a proof that it is possible in certain conditions to shift the reliance of honesty away from people to say P != NP, that would make the system bullet-proof. I would call it a pure system. That would also mean that there is more than one pure system possible, in fact infinite amount. We can already see that things like currency can be made and sustained without governance, I want to believe same will one day be possible with government itself.
The initial stages of the industrial revolution were not so good for the workers. However, the mass production phase, did increase the standard of living.

The best example is "The five-dollar workday": http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Ford
That only applies if there's a court order to reveal the data, not at random border checks.
Corporate security/intelligence or geopolitical analysis role in London?
From Wikipedia:

>The first Five-Year plan focused on the mobilization of natural resources to build up the country's heavy industrial base by increasing output of coal, iron, and other vital resources. Despite approximately 1,000,000 deaths this process was largely successful, and caused long-term industrial growth more rapid than any country in history.

>From 1921 until 1954, during the period of state-guided, forced industrialization, it is claimed 3.7 million people were sentenced for alleged counter-revolutionary crimes, including 0.6 million sentenced to death, 2.4 million sentenced to labor camps, and 0.7 million sentenced to expatriation.

>While undoubtedly marking a massive leap in industrial capacity, the first Five Year Plan was extremely harsh on industrial workers; quotas were difficult to fulfill, requiring that miners put in 16 to 18-hour workdays. Failure to fulfill the quotas could result in treason charges. Working conditions were poor, even hazardous. By some estimates, 127,000 workers died during the four years (from 1928 to 1932).

But you can find material on the forced industrialization in all historical books on the USSR.
As a counter-anecdote, I'd like to mention that I've grown into many small "l" libertarian ideas as I've grown older (~40) and started to raise a family, and I've led a life that's very far from sheltered.

Traditionally, I've leaned toward bleeding heart liberal with a strong emphasis on civil liberties, but having seen what our government has done with its power over the past decade+, I'm starting to place much more faith in the promise of small communities and local markets than in big government and corporate cronyism.

Nothing more than a personal anecdote, but that's all I'm responding to.
Technically Sweden gives you a choice as to whether you want to send your kid to a private or government institute. Of course getting into one of the few decent private schools is somewhat non-trivial, making it slightly less of choice.
I agree. There was Debatepedia (http://dbp.idebate.org), but it seems dead. Unless the arguments are in sort of machine readable format, any filtering will be difficult. The problem is the format - I believe AI researchers still struggle with that one.
That doesn't make sense.

Sure, when you leave a comment asserting something, you don't need to provide a full bibliography of references, but if someone asks for it (ie, someone follows up with [citation needed]) then the onus is on you to show that your facts have a basis in reality. I don't see anything wrong with that.

You can't really disprove something which doesn't have any factual basis.
IOS And Android Design Guidelines
It's flattering to oneself to be contrarian; Not only have you already considered what has been presented, you've also thought about it and have a counter-argument. You're cleverer than the author of the article; she still entertains that idea while you have long ago dismissed it.

Thought that's rarely the case. What usually happens is someone will read a clever article, get upset that they didn't come up with it and choose a narrow interpretation or a minor nitpick to attack the piece, thereby making themselves feel better.
With regards to "the Poor", let me add a 'reply from Mises' with regards to "the Fight Againt Poverty" (although I think poverty in the US has risen sharply after he wrote this) : http://mises.org/daily/4652
Artist develops gesture-based payment technology
No, but I think should have something to do with "hacker", at least.
Testing client-side views in Rails apps
Which other configuration management can bootstrap itself?
When you are bootstrapping an infrastructure, you may first want to bootstrap a configuration management system to configure all other systems.

To bootstrap a cdist configuration management system (http://www.nico.schottelius.org/software/cdist/),
you can use an existing cdist installation, add

case "$__target_host" in
newcdisthost)
__cdist /home/cdist
;;
esac

to ~/.cdist/manifest/init and run

% cdist config newcdisthost

and you are done (cdist uses ssh to configure the new host).

I am wondering if any other configuration management system can bootstrap itself like that?
1) If I have $0 and you have $100 and we both get $1000, you are still $100 richer than me. Also, if you say that purchasing power of the rich decreases, you are admitting to inflation. If I have $10,000 and can buy 20 laptops, but after the $0 guy gets $1000 he of course feels better, he can now buy 1 laptop - however I can only buy 10 laptops now. The value of the dollar dropped by half :/ that's what you are saying?

And about pegging, if you say you increase the payout according to increasing inflation, then wow, you now have a hyperinflation (that's when prices go up 100% in a matter of days, each week).
Marines.com DNS hacked
8. All political ideologies/systems have the solution to problems in others.
I'm baffled by the choice of using the GNU autofools chain just to include a Doxygen target in the Makefile. The whole thing is essentially straight up C with just 1 library dependency.

The command line argument processing is also quite haphazardly done, it's not like it using getopt or whatever that poses compatibility issues. Is writing and packaging with a Makefile that difficult?
No, actually, your depiction of liberalism is mostly accurate except for the motivation part. I don't think it's about absolving sins. I also don't think that economic mobility is the main objective. This again speaks to the unrecognized entitlement: When all you strive for is your own economic mobility, you project the same on poor folks. Most of the time, they would like to be on the scale of economic mobility to start off with, not advance on it.

I pick my strawmen carefully.
JavaScript Static Security Analysis made easy with JSPrime
I'm not sure you want to get my point. I'm sure I do want the median: if half the people on the planet are doing much worse than you, then the term poor doesn't apply ... yet the term "poor" keeps getting revised upwards into historical levels of luxury.

If you're at the USA "poverty line", you are doing better than 87% of people on the planet. That. Is. Not. Poor.
> This is the world libertarians envision

I almost can't hear you over the strawman klaxon.

EDITED to add (@1h):

Sorry, I hate these one liners, I should elaborate.

First, there is the grinding irony of highlighting the doings of a government body as a libertarian vision. I'm not sure exactly what a libertarian fire brigade would look like, but it must likely wouldn't have a monopoly over the high-density, thus profitable, city and indemnity to screw over the less profitable rural areas.

Second, you speculate on the victim's hypothetical poorness. However, in the article it's stated unambiguously that they had made a conscious decision to forego the fire brigade subscription. I see the practicality, but I struggle with the ethics of forcing them to pay for a service they've made a conscious decision they don't want.

Finally, and a little off-topic, there's a the question of contents insurance. If you've decided that the fire brigade isn't for you, you most likely did not take out insurance for the contents of what looks like a mobile home. A fire in a mobile home, even when doused with water, is unlikely to leave you very many useful possessions. Never mind the structure itself, which is likely to be a write-off, even if only half burned down.

Given this, I assume you are as vigorous in campaigning for universal contents insurance as you are in blaming this family's fate on libertarians? Or are you happy with people loosing all their things, as along as the government makes sure to pour water on them (for free) first?
Well the average income would be ~43000USD (bls.gov), which is not that bad. Also you should consider that communism would turn the world upside down, to stand on it's feet. Meaning a lot of professions would simply fade away, mainly the ones created solely because of the fetish of "making money." And the true product would arise. Science and technology could flourish as government grants, and so on would be of no use. Everybody could study without thinking about the useless dept. Financial bubbles that cost so much would simply be eradicated. But then again, it is the simple thing, that is hard to realize.
From my visits to Paris, I'd say the biggest detriment to driving there is other drivers. It's common to see parked cars completely blocked in (cars in front and behind leaving literally a centimeter of space between bumpers), and an obscenely high percentage of cars have all sorts of scuffs and bumps (presumably from having to force their way out of parking spaces when blocked in). I'm no car nut, but I wouldn't dream of taking my own car there.
>Does everything on HN have to be laid out as an academic paper?

No, but a personal anecdote about libertarianism as a political ideology is the sort of thing that breeds argument, but no debate.

EDIT: So I went ahead and looked up "debate" in a dictionary and it apparently doesn't mean "principled argument", I'm not sure what the word for that is, but basically a post like this generates a lot of noise but produces little to no signal.
I don't pose for anything, I'm just saying what is logical. 2+2 != 5. And sorry for this heresy I committed by not writing Karl's surname properly - force of habit, this is how we write his surname in Poland. Now does it change the discussion in any way? I don't think so...
Thank you. I think the quota has been reached.
I never ever want to see a subscriptions home tab. Youtube is fundamentally broken. At this point I have it bound up in muscle memory to:

1) click the arrow next to "filter subscriptions" and set it to "new activity" instead of absolutely useless "Most relevant"

2) Click a subscription I'd like to watch

3) immediately ignore the useless home tab and immediately click the "Videos" tab

4) click the video I haven't seen before

oh yeah, and I have "youtube options" installed in chrome to turn watching the videos from squinting at an index card from 3 feet away to filling my screen automatically.

My favorite is the list of "Featured channels" that shows up in the right sidebar which of course includes channels I'm already subscribed to. And the only option presented is to subscribe anyways, which I'm absolutely not going to do until I've watched their channel for a bit.

Filter subscriptions is also useless because the username of most of my subscription is not anything close to the name of the channel the producers use or the title of the channel itself. So filtering becomes useless (and it doesn't work right even when you use the name of the user

Youtube is dying for a "mark watched" option. I have a few channels I'm subscribed to with hundreds of videos, 90% of which I will never watch. How many are there exactly? I have no idea, youtube doesn't tell you how many videos a given channel has. I think one channel in particular has a couple thousand videos. If I could just mark the entire channel watched I would actually know when there was real new content. I also have a couple channels that haven't updated in months, and I didn't watch the last couple videos they put up. So they stubbornly sit high in my "new activity" queue even though I swear on my children's souls I will never watch those videos and am aware of them and they are most certainly not "new activity" in any possible meaning of the word "new".

Why isn't there a "start playing newest uploaded videos until all unwatched videos in this channel are watched?"

Why isn't there the meta-option "start playing newest uploaded videos across all your subscriptions until all unwatched videos are watched?"

Youtube is indecipherable. Bizarre useless feature bullshit that doesn't work with glaring obvious interface omissions tied to a stupid CDN system that doesn't work right requiring people to do this kind of crap (http://mitchribar.com/2013/02/how-to-stop-youtube-sucking-wi... it's down right now).

There are moments, brief moments, where youtube is glorious, like a completely personalized on-demand television channel with original content. If I could go to youtube and hit "start playing new subscribed stuff" and chill out for a few hours, I would. But the insane interface completely prevents this.

Oh, and fast forward and rewind have recently become frequently broken as they've rolled out yet again new and entirely useless videoplayers that break basic video watching functionality.

ugh, you'd think nobody who works at youtube actually watches things on youtube
I'm tired of seeing the errors that prompt most of those comments. The comments themselves are often very much legitimate.
Google cached the 'Hacked by SEA' page:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:http://...
Seo Panel: World's first open source seo control panel for multiple web sites
This calls to me on so many levels.

I was contracting all around the UK traveling up to 5 hours per day with a 5:30am start and home around 9pm and even living away.

Now I've gone permie locally. I get up at 7:30am, walk the dog, make breakfast for the family, walk/cycle my child to school and then cycle off to work.

If my daughter is ill I can even shift work and start at 2pm (wife works to 1pm) so we don't lose holiday.

In theory I could work 8am-4pm and be home by 4:20pm. Most nights I'm home by 6pm after going on a long cycle ride.

Money isn't as good as it was contracting, but my god, is my home life better, and not just for me. THAT needs repeating, NOT JUST FOR ME.

I smile a lot more these days.
Why is this prefixed with "Startup"? Unless I'm missing something... while working at a startup might be more inspiring than a large corporate job, it doesn't seem to be AT ALL what the author is talking about. Leaving your job to become a cartoonist is a LOT riskier than working at a startup.
That's why it's an income guarantee - so you don't have to invent an activity that looks like work in order to receive money.

So in your case under a BIG, they would get some money and pursue leisurly activities. This in contrast to someone doing a task that needs to be done (say dispose of garbage), who would get some money from the BIG and a substantially bigger sum in actual wage. The service (getting your garbage disposed) would have to be priced accordingly.

Some activities (such as musicians) would be a gray area, but it's not a problem - people can make music and if someone buys it the musicians get extra income.

If there are services needed which are very unappealing, they will be priced high. Also, the incentive to automate them (and thus reduce human suffering) will be high as well.
Cause you're accepting 4-year vote. This can be changed. More things like this will happen in the future. Let's find a real solution and not just patches when the inevitable already has happened. Jeez Western people...