skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
How did the government not figure it out?

This has been a theme. Unfortunately, I expect it to continue.
I live close to this neighborhood and walk through it frequently, and I have very mixed feelings about the whole thing. Besides the general principle of justice/policing not being the same as trash pickup, the article's premise is flawed; private security won't have any power to make arrests, so whenever it calls on official police resources (which I anticipate that it will) it most certainly does whisk those away from other neighborhoods.
>"If people are crowdfunding law enforcement, if people are allowed to spend money on security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude wandering around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization. We've given up any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters, morals are something that matters: if I can pay for it, I can inflict my will on others to increase my own convenience."

If people are voting for the leaders of the law enforcement, if people are allowed to vote for security to effectively make being a poor homeless dude wandering around on their street a crime, we've failed as a civilization. We've given up any aspiration that hey, justice is something that matters, morals are something that matters: if I can vote for it, I can inflict my will on others to increase my own convenience.

Lest you think that is a silly thing to say, THAT IS HAPPENING NOW. The City of Berkeley gets a DHS-sponsored Armored Personell Carrier. Cops in New York stop and fisk people of color. In no less than 10 cities in america, it is illegal to feed the homeless (I've broken this law in my own city, many times). What makes the group of people known as the "wealthy" any more or less suspicious or despicable than the group of people known as the "popular"?
Google: Crushing dreams since 1998
I wouldn't consider a codebase acceptable unless it includes comprehensive tests. Tests can serve and validate a spec.
Power Quotes, happiness requires kindness, not religion Ziglar & Dalai Lama
Ask HN: Curated Google Play Alternative?
Can anyone recommend a source of proven high-quality Android apps, that are human-tested and does not contain any spammy/broken apps? If not, is there a desire for such a resource?
I thought the spin problem was a non issue: they just wanted to see if they could relight the engine when Falcon is falling back to earth at speed. When it's relit they can compensate the spin and take control.
I hate to be negative, but the formatting of these scripts make them unreadable: http://www.springfieldspringfield.co.uk/view_episode_scripts...

Are these even scripts? Or just subtitles?
To the majority of commenters: the article never says, "every anglosphere action and belief was always perfect and in mankind's best interest", it states that the commitments to certain basic tenets allowed the highest peak of human personal freedom, equality, and safety in history. Saying, "some points along the path to that peak were not that high" is obvious and useless. Likewise saying, "the peak could be higher" is also obvious and of no value. We should be instead trying to determine what else should be combined with these tenets to produce an even higher peak, a system of government that will allow for greater safety, freedom, and equality for all humankind.
Works out at about $7.66 per hour - less than the Californian minimum wage of $8/hour.

And that's assuming there's no overheads to pay for like tax, health insurance, paid leave, pension contribution, social security, unemployment insurance, worker's comp, uniform, car, gun...

So I'd agree with your assessment that $8000 isn't very much.
I am curious about the implications actually. Wondering how much is the impact of crowd-funding / public micro-funding on deal quality and deal flow for these traditional VC firms (Mattermark anything?)? Why are the VCs lowering their fund size so rapidly? I know it's still early on to even ask this, but a discussion went on those lines in one of the hallway conversations recently.
I realize that Elon speculated that would be the case, but I wasn't neccesarily buying his explanation.

Two things need additional color, one being given the lack of atomosphere at the altitude where the first stage separates (tapes put it at just over 3 minutes into the flight), and two structural integirty of those struts making the atmospheric transition.

So you need to get the retro burn off while you are exo-atmospheric or you risk melting off the important bits when you re-enter. That suggests that you need some sort of RCS to cut rotational dynamics so that you can stage for retro, then re-enter at less than hypersonic velocity. Further you can't do you retro burn until you've allowed the upper stage to clear.

Another interesting bit is that the first stage appears to have cameras, they were showing video from them during the launch, but we've not seen the post separation video. I hope that video surfaces at some point as it could help design something to mitigate the whole roll thing before it got out of hand.
I think there is demand for this, a ridiculous amount of my android games just come from HumbleBundle.

There are some blogs like http://www.droidgamers.com/ but nothing really appeals to me ala http://toucharcade.com/ for iOS.
I didn't make a false dichotomy. Read my post again. I think the firing was about 90% of what they should have done. Do you disagree with that?

'Swept under the rug', to me, sounds like doing close to 0%.
Yeah, I don't think this is a fair metric either. If anything, I think it illustrates that Linux users, on average, are more generous than their compatriots. It doesn't say anything about whether Linux is "ready" (for some value of "ready"). That said, as an Arch user, I'd love it if more games were ported to Linux (or developed there first, then ported to other platforms). I dislike having to boot to another OS just to play a game...

However, from a pure market standpoint, the Humble Bundles do point out that there's money out there to be made from Linux gaming. Niche markets can be lucrative, and it's even better if the people in that niche have money they're willing to spend. Whenever I see games on Steam that are multiplatform (that includes Linux), I'll buy them over anything else. But, I think that's also something of a confirmation bias--and the fact that I buy them on principle. (I'm not really an avid gamer, and I don't bother much with AAA titles, either.)

Of course, there is one major downside. The Linux market is relatively small compared to Windows and OSX which brings with it other disadvantages.

On the whole, I think this is a positive development. At least someone in the industry seems to be recognizing the need to embrace platforms beyond Windows or consoles.
Too late to edit, but as pointed out down-thread, I'd like to note that my use of the word "convicted" in this post was inaccurate, as this was a civil case. The correct wording should have been something along the lines of "A federal jury ruled in favor of Microsoft and ordered Google to pay 14 million in damages."
The challenge was that with the stage spinning they couldn't feed fuel to the engines to finish the retro burn. That is an issue. They need to work around that in the next attempt (either by not spinning or by allowing for it with a different fuel feed mechanism)
> Numbers is a good, platform-locked spreadsheet editor for simple uses?

Numbers is not just a spreadsheet editor, it’s a full-fledged spreadsheet creator. Its features are sufficient for all but the most demanding users.

> Dropbox+Excel seems like it would do the same thing

For me, it doesn’t. Just using Dropbox and my stock OS (and providing I don’t use Numbers), I can view Excel files on my phone and tablet but I cann’t create or edit them. I still need to use a third party app and Microsoft doesn’t have an appealing Excel offering for mobile platforms.

> even with more flexibility (including version control, document sharing)

Numbers has version control and document sharing.

> supporting even more platforms.

Numbers is available as native apps for iOS media players, phones, and tablets. There’s also a native app for OS X. For Windows, Linux, and every other platform that can run a modern web browser, there’s a very capable web app, available for free.

Excel is available as native app for Windows and OS X. For Windows Phone it has a very bare-bones app, the Android and iOS versions are a disgrace.

> I don't think you can ever consider spreadsheet software to be 'user friendly'.

Maybe you should try Numbers, especially on a mobile device, and then compare it to Excel.
I've been using names from the Mr. Men series of books, so e.g. tickle, grumpy, topsyturvy, daydream. Easy to remember because the characters are each so unique and different, and gives each machine its own personality: "Oh crap, grumpy is acting up again", etc.
One of my biggest pet peeves is when people name a host after a product, say 'mysql-prod-101', then later they decide to switch from MySQL to Oracle. I worked in an environment where a number of hosts contained 'tomcat' in the name but they were all running weblogic. Better to name based on the role, as you say, so the mysql-prod-101 would be better named db-prod-101. However, I've come to think that nowadays with configuration managment it's not really necessary to give hostnames at all. People usually don't like that suggestion when I bring it up, but if you are using something like puppet's 'facter' to run actions only on hosts that match certain 'facts', what do you really need hostnames for?

Edit: I just reread your paragraph about using positional hostnames. This seems like a good use, because the main problem I see with role based hostnames is that hosts can take on multiple roles. But in general the hostname seems unimportant if you are tagging your hosts with roles.
I always had the idea, but never enough machines to name.
Wide Matcher (Python  Clojure)
Something like the Porsche 917k30 was capable of close to 1500hp. (I can't imagine you'd actually run on race day with that setup) My dad and his friends commented on watching that car many times, and specifically the amount of noise that it made.

That car was illustrative of a few of the problems with the "let's just allow the teams to build the fastest cars they possibly can!" notion. Teams didn't pay as much attention to safety in general as they should have in the seventies, but more to the point: the performance differential between some of those cars - racing on the same crowded track - was just too extreme. There is no safe way to run when that extreme difference exists.
I don't buy this logic.

Renaming machines is a pain, and they inevitably end up with more/different stuff on them than was originally intended, then your "helpful" name like pukweb01 (production, uk, web, 01) is worse than "pikachu" (as it's incorrect).

the correct way to do this is to give the machine a name with no meaning (maybe pikachu, maybe box005) and have a list of the services running on each machine, and use DNS for those (say www1/ns1 that CNAMEs to the actual hostname).

personally, I'd argue that anyone that calls machines things like "pukweb01" has had little to no experience with a rapidly evolving system...
You're an idiot! Have a nice day.
Pretty neat, but the kerning on the font is awful: http://i.imgur.com/ssPu5J9.png
Research Finds Outright Grants of Cash are an Effective Form of Aid to the Poor
It's possible even in NYC.

Around Jamaica you can get a room for $400-$500. Although it's not an apartment, just a room in a big house, so you can't make parties and stuff but is otherwise quite comfortable.

Going to Manhattan also doesn't take too much time. E train goes directly and is express so it's a 45-60 min commute.

As for food, cook at home. If in Manhattan, there's a great $1 pizza on Bleecker St. Lots of free coworking spaces in Manhattan - Wix for example.

I wouldn't call it a luxurious life by any stretch of imagination, but it's doable to live in NY for $1000 a month and not really feel poor (or it could be just a story I tell to myself to feel better).
They say it isn't the truth. They aren't trying to censor it, they're trying to get the truth out. How is that censorship?
It's hard to imagine a scenario where this would result in worse overall law enforcement. They are going to get 60 hours of patrol per week. Police don't really drive around upper middle class neighborhoods at all much less 35% of every hour of the week. I live in a fairly nice area in San Francisco and I go weeks without seeing a police car, and this is a denser area than Rockridge (obviously parking enforcement doesn't count, and if they do count I don't see any reason they would be displaced by security officers since they have to continue doing their jobs there no matter what the crime rate is).

It doesn't really make sense to pay for expensive personnel that are authorized to write tickets, perform searches, and use deadly force to patrol your streets when the main benefit is mostly (a) the possibility of witnessing illegal activity while it's going on, and (b) a visible presence that dissuades potential criminals from their activities. Neither of these requires nearly the level of training or expertise.

I'm not sure what the exchange rate in terms of hours is where I'd rather have the police officer patrolling rather than a security dude, but we can get a handle on the relative cost. Indeed.com says security officers in San Francisco have an average salary of $35,000, and the starting pay for police in San Francisco is $89K-$112K. If you fully burden the security officer with benefits, and fully burden the police officer with their dramatically higher level of benefits and pension, it's not difficult to imagine that the security officer is 5-6x as cost effective. So would you rather have 12 hours of police patrols or 60 hours of security officer patrols?

I suspect there is a tipping point in terms of presence past which a neighborhood gets known by thoughtful criminals as being well-patrolled, which causes a significant decrease in crimes committed there.
cultural isolation is painful, even for introverts (I'm with ya).

It's bizarre to watch people, and see them as fundamentally different, separate, and other from you. The chasm is tough.
So as I thought, you were completely misinformed. The story for that link has been updated:

> Correction: We miscalculated the expenditures related to the healthcare exchanges established under the Affordable Care Act, and incorrectly attributed the total cost of these expenditures.

Another link in that thread (as noted below), contains the actual amount of money:

> The U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded CGI $55.7 million to launch Healthcare.gov, its central Obamacare health exchange website. Over the full five years of the contract, CGI could receive as much as $93.7 million.

$650m turns into $55m real quick and I'd bet a lot of fixed costs for things like hardware and software licenses made the actual figure even smaller. That was for two years, so $28M a year or $2.3M a month. Considering the cost of developers alone that doesn't seem like a ton, especially when developers are only a small part of the challenge.

I'm glad I didn't get the contract. I sure wouldn't want to build an exchange to handle many billions of dollars worth of transactions (and be responsible for millions of tax records!) on that kind of budget. Doubly so with talk radio , Fox News and the WSJ watching my every move.

If a startup came up with a way for any American to buy health insurance in one place it would be valued in the billions of dollars (even with a fail whale on demo day).
I thought that maybe the Romanians pronounced the letter J similar to its original use in Latin; that consonant made when the letter i brushes up against another vowel, as in iudex, like an English Y. But no, I look it up and they pronounce it as [ʒ], almost like we do in English.

Therefore, I will make my corny joke: you don't want your software written in a place that sounds so similar to "kludge". :-)
Full-OT: pandoc requires ghc, which takes about 1GiB of disk space, which I found very odd, given that gcc is about 75 MiB.
Yes, but the article (and the "sponsored comment" at the end) also say that before the CAFC happened, it was a different, though equally painful, patent mess.
Show HN: Buckets for Mac
Exactly.

The culture of the judicial system works in a wholly different way in developing nations than in the West. They don't practice laws like we do. When you cause trouble in Thailand, they'll find any law you might have broken, just to get you, but when you don't cause trouble, most of the times you're fine, even if you might be breaking the law in official terms. I heard it's the same in China.

Sure, it's a risk, but please tell me why all these co-working spaces everywhere are filled with foreigners without work permits and growing rapidly.

Remote working is a new reality, and it would be highly counter-productive for these countries to start striking down on people working there. Every single foreigner I met in Thailand was working on projects either focused on their own country or internationally, thus not threatening local jobs. In reality, many of the Thai learnt from the foreigners that'd teach them about their tech stacks. That's exactly how they're building their own startup scene in Bangkok now. Learning from foreigners.

I'd argue it may increase a developing nation's level of innovation to have remote workers around and governments should embrace this new reality asap.
Interesting. Thanks.

Coincidentally I just signed up for Ullman's Automata course at Coursera. The description makes it seem pretty basic but I'm interested to see what he does with it.
The killer app probably wouldn't be a steambox exclusive but a steam exclusive. Which means that you'd be able to play it on practically anything you can throw at it. PC, Mac,Steambox, and it won't surprise me if you'd be able to pair up your steam controller to your tablet and be able to stream the feed from your PC ala nvidia shield. In terms of convenience, tying it to steam will do way more than it being exclusive to other systems.
Just a question, how do are laws that make feeding the homeless illegal enforceable? Do they require people to provide proof of residency somewhere prior to purchasing food for others?
Days of the week could get a bit confusing and possibly creating a "Who's on First" situation.
Coming from a country where private security and completely private healthcare, and living in secure 24/7 guarded enclaves is how you secure for yourself the kind of lifestyle most Americans enjoy, I'm not sure dismantling government is the solution.

This kind of stratification feels very familiar.

The privileged forget the hidden costs of civilisation, the little safety nets ensuring misfortune for the few should not be a life-ruining event, forget their own massive position of safety and security, therefore, what is government but a useless edifice impeding profit and efficiency.

Are we not all self made men who raised ourselves from the cradle, catching our own food, building our own cabins, driving on roads we made, teaching ourselves from first principles?
I thought we already had crowd-funding for public services and it was called "taxes", no?
Most of the time I would agree with this sentiment, I don't think you're morally wrong to work on your own project while living in other countries without a proper visa; it's definitely not breaking the spirit of the law. Heck, you're spending your money here, all the better. It's obviously less of a risk if you work from home than a co-working space where you could be easily targeted if a random check does happen (as its meant as a "working space" and not a casual coffee shop.) Then again, I've also not heard of people being hauled off just yet.
So you say people would port the necessary Linux userspace, and thereby Valve's platform over to other operating systems.

How would that not be a huge win for the platform? Unlike Microsoft or Sony, Valve is mainly in the business of selling games not platforms.
The issue seems to be about avoiding deportation rather than ethics.

The real question is How much would a bootstrapper need to pay off local authorities?
Just out of curiosity (and the fact that I'm totally going to build this if I can validate it) would you pay for such a service? I would assume the way to go would be a submission fee for app developers.
Of interest is how circular it all is. At various points in history police forces were funded in this way, affluent people paying for security in their neighborhoods. (cynically thought to be intended to "keep the riffraff out")

Over time we moved towards a taxpayer funded police force which theoretically applies equal protection to everyone and forced all the wealthy people to pay in. (taxes) Then we gradually expanded tax burdens downwards so people with lower incomes (at least the middle and working classes) increasingly bear the burden of funding of this police force (radical viewpoint: forcing the poor to pay the salaries of their oppressors)

Leading us to a profession of law enforcement whose implementation is unsatisfactory to many people for ideological reasons (being "forced" to pay for it) and pragmatically unsuitable for others. (because in many cases the practices of law enforcement do not directly reflect community values, i.e. war on drugs)

It is a cool thought experiment to imagine a system where it comes full circle, all local law enforcement is directly answerable to the community, as its employer, and to federal agencies, in cases of alleged civil rights violations, or to help with larger crime networks.

Which is IN THEORY what we currently have, but, clearly if a community feels the need to crowdfund neighborhood security, the government isn't adequately responding to the community's concerns, for structural reasons.
It's a fair point, but you'd never go to Thailand mainly to save money anyway: it's one of the most expensive countries in the region and certainly no easier to live in (beyond the tourist/expat ghettos)
> At this point, it's easier to just buy an iMac and boot into Windows to play games.

I've personally had really bad luck doing this. The Mac Windows drivers seem to be very sub-par, and my recent Macbook heats up like an oven and the fans go nuts. I've only attempted to play a few games on a 2011 iMac, but the performance hasn't been very good as a whole (TF2, StarCraft 2) and there still appear to be heat issues. Meanwhile, I can fire up my 2010 gaming rig and play brand new AAA titles without so much as a stutter in Windows, and performance is decent under Linux as well.

As far as the games I have purchased on Steam, I actually have more that are compatible with Linux than Mac OS. I just don't think gaming has been a high priority for Mac OS (they make a ton of money with it on iOS). They seem to be very sluggish about updating their GPU drivers, and they fell pretty far behind in OpenGL support (10.9 is supposed to bump this up a little).
Reverse Engineering a D-Link Backdoor
That icon reflects exactly what I think of every time someone talks about S3.
Philip Hensher stirs debate among authors after refusing to write for free
> Capitalists can't do this? Because other capitalists will drive them out of business? My my, isn't the system really fucked! Time for some radical architectural changes.

Been tried. Didn't work out very well.
Asana is complex. Too complex.

Twice now, I've witnessed a roomful of highly skilled, intelligent people scratching their heads and shouting over each other trying to accomplish simple tasks with Asana. There's an excess of terminology, an even bigger excess of features, and a serious mental mismatch between "the Asana way" and just organizing some information within a team.

On the other hand, https://trello.com/ is an absolute delight.

Hell, the article even goes on to explain how to shoehorn a Kanban board in to Asana. Meanwhile, Trello essentially is a Kanban board.