skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
> Why does education/intelligence/morality not cull the inner devil of some?

This is honestly a far more complicated question than other commentors appear to be capable of engaging with.

Educational systems worldwide are constructed with the idiotic hope of job fulfillment. There are noises about a liberal arts education, but these are the first things cut when budgets are on the line. Educational systems, thusly, do nothing to help guide moral compasses: indeed, they do a lot to break them down.

Intelligence, on the other hand, very naturally cuts both ways. The capacity to reason is also the capacity to rationalize. These are people trained to vote with their wallet, because their wallet is the only meaningful measure of value they have. Short of coincidence, they have no particular reason to believe that this is untrue.

Morality, though, isn't innate. The purpose of philosophy--one of those casualties of an industrial-catered educational system--is to actually tackle the construction of a moral system and tinker with practical applications of it. It was never a widespread practice to engage in understanding how morals are made, even if you contribute no new thought, but we've done nothing to spread it wider.

We end up leaving it to genetic lottery and your local tradition of faith. When most people's "inner devil" is culled only by the least possible amount of thought, how do you expect it to be culled at all?
> He did not want to sentence her to die in prison, but his "hands [were] tied" because of her prior convictions for minor drug offenses three years earlier

This part struck me. There was grellas' comment on the Google vs Authors Guild thread were the judge decided to go against the 'mechanical' application of the law and took time to come up with a sensible interpretation to handle the case. It's crushing to think about a mother of two in prison for life for a crime the judge itself thought wasn't worth the sentence, potentially leaving her kids in the hands of an abusive husband (I hope they got sheltered at least)
Demo Haskell Application on Android NDK
It costs USD40k per year per prisoner? Wow.

As I understand it's substantially more than 40k GBP per year per prisoner. If the American system is costing less in the order of half what we're paying it must be absolutely horrendous.

Which is a side point to the absurdity of whole-life mandatory sentencing. It's incredibly expensive and pure vengeance; there's no way the cost to society in cash or emotional harm terms is minimised by spending MILLIONS of dollars depriving these people of their liberty for decades. So why does the Land Of The Free do it? Short, often community based sentences with strong rehabilitation would be orders of magnitude cheaper and have a very similar effect on the ultimate crime rate.
Forget about AA batteries, think about all the laptop batteries. All you need is 4-5 laptop batteries, and you can have a serious bomb going. And how easy would it be to carry that into the airport? Take 2 laptops with you, 2 backups, a cell phone, 3 backup batteries. No one will even blink an eye.
Or maybe it works very well.

There are different reasons why a country might be low on the list. Maybe they have little crime, maybe they fight crime without locking people up for long periods of time, or maybe they lack the resources to fight crime.

If a country is high on the list, it could be they have insanely high crime, but it could also mean that they punish much harsher than other countries, or crime is not the primary motivation to lock people up.
Because I think people would be willing to do much more than just rob someone's house in order to get a $40K / year stipend for life.

Honestly, I didn't (and don't) expect that to be a controversial prediction.
Video encoding/decoding are in fact not embarassingly parallel. Lots of modern codecs have complex interdependencies between frames and sections of frames that make it harder to do things in parallel, as I understand it.
I'm blown away by this. I really thought three strikes laws only applied when the earlier crimes were extremely serious (basically murder or close).

Really drives home the idea that in some ways, America really isn't like the rest of the western world.
I'm not a criminologist but my understanding is that murder is almost always a personal crime of passion rather than a general psychopathy, and that the repeat offending rates in countries which allow murderers back out of prison (such as mine) is tiny. So while I understand the high-tariff sentence for murder, they're not really a benchmark offender category for social transgression and rehabilitation because they (usually) lack the reoffending tendency that requires rehabilitating.
The music is really creepy and I am annoyed that there is no narration, considering the length of the videos. It's constructive criticism though, I like the actual info.
Why do people make assumptions on the motive behind other peoples' posts :)

I don't think the GP is making a value judgement on the fact that Make A Wish often does things that do not scale. Rather I took it as a way to partially describe the Make A Wish organization in the language used to describe startups.
Indeed, it's very stange to think like that. We don't punish some future consequences. We punish dangerous and harmful behavior. "Dangerous" does not mean "correlated with some future harmful developments". It means the immediate possibility of harm. This is why torturing animals is not dangerous (for humans at least), speeding is a minor danger and burglary is a severe danger.

Also, I believe you are implying that the guy from the OP got life in prison for the single burglary. I appologize if I get it wrong but in case you really are: even OP says it is not so. It's been his third strike i.e. he had been convicted for two more violent/gun/drug related crimes before (more burglaries in his particular case).
Stating the obvious: it is not true, since fictional characters cannot pay for things in the real world.

From some Googling, a WSJ story says about the police:

"It just cost us our time. We told the guys prior that they were not going to make overtime, the ones who chose to hang around it was more of having your heart in the right place. Obviously it was necessary to put police resources into it, that happens all over major cities all the time, but this was not publicly funded."

http://blogs.wsj.com/speakeasy/2013/11/15/police-chief-greg-...
Grooveshark exec shot dead in St. Petersburg
Just because you put a bunch of crap in your T&C's doesn't make it law and legal regardless whether or not someone agrees to it or not.
And what are the government's own spying practices ? Ah :

http://www.vorratsdatenspeicherung.de/content/view/209/1/lan...

(please note that the only thing the court did was place limits. Every ISP that has lines in Germany is still forced to (a) spy on all it's customers and report the data to the German government (b) allow Germany to tap any of it's customers. It's just that the resulting data can't be used in civil suits)

Given that Germany does this to it's own citizens, isn't it exactly as bad as the US ? Sure, it looks like the German government is somewhat less capable when it comes to spying than the NSA is, but it's not fundamentally different. And of course, that could be an illusion.

I seem to remember having this article about how Germany sold an old diesel submarine capable of undersea fiber tapping to Israel. I can't seem to find the article, but it does mean Germany has these subs. I find it hard to believe they're unused. Here's an article about the British version :

http://intelnews.org/2013/08/29/01-1331/

I'm in telecommunications and I know for a fact that all northwest european countries have these demands on ISPs. Germany's no exception.
There is a Star Trek episode where Kirk is forced to watch as Spock and McCoy fight as gladiators against Roman guards. There aren't any Klingons involved, but it does feature Roman clothing. There is another episode where alien brains want Kirk, Ohura and Checkov to fight as gladiators on their planet for the rest of their lives. There is a third episode in which Spock and Kirk are forced to fight in front of Vulcans as part of a Vulcan trial-by-combat marriage ceremony. Their is also a fourth episode in Voyager which features a gladiatorial combat but in a sci-fi arena that looks like the set of "Who Wants to be a Millionaire." Those are the only references I could find, but let's just say that this idea has seen its fair share of screen time on Star Trek.

References: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_Circuses_%28Star_Tre... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Gamesters_of_Triskelion
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amok_Time http://en.memory-alpha.org/wiki/Tsunkatse_%28episode%29
I really like coding in Meteor. When deciding instead of thinking as to whether I should use meteor I thought on why I shouldn't.

The main reason to not use it was scaling but It's evident the meteor guys are working on that for the 1.0 release. (See https://trello.com/board/meteor-roadmap/508721606e02bb9d5700...)

Hopefully they do this well but I feel from their work before they will. I've been using Meteor since it was sub v0.2 and its just improved each iteration.

First it was the license, then authentication, then it was routing, then its ability to play well with JQuery. Slowly all of the issues with it are disappearing.

One thing I like is in meteor code is isomorphic. And on the server I'm not in the callback hell I was having with node. So there are evented fibers that do all this stuff and the code remains clean! Best of both worlds.
Because of incarceration? Do you have any stats that prove that link?
A bit rough, but yeah. The 3rd world is not yet ready to do this much video, because of mobile data prices. Let's stick to the awesome plain text solutions & low bandwidth media for now. (Canvas, cached SVGs, bluetooth & wifi, etc...) If we stick to text and backwards compatible media we can solve all internet problems by tying phones to balloons.

We should aim to make rms proud, but choose MIT because that code is more easily reusable.
Self-host. YouTube produces massive amounts of traffic because it has so many videos. But if you divide all that traffic to small independent operators then the amounts would be far more manageable.

Once you are self-hosting you could alleviate any potential bandwidth issues with a CDN such as CloudFlare/Akamai and/or by using P2P protocols such as BitTorrent.
3D Printing Finally Confronts Medical Technology with Prosthetic Eyes and Ears
Haven't I seen this on Hacker News before? (that's not criticism, I'm just trying to remember and wondering if anyone else does?)
Deterrent? You would think death is a deterrent, and yet most terrorists aren't deterred by the prospective of death, what makes you think some overpaid government employee with far below average IQ is a deterrent for someone who is willing to die for his cause. For god sakes, most TSA people aren't even permitted to carry guns. You know why? Because they would shoot each other by accident, while taking a piss.

The only people TSA deters is honest an law abiding citizens from flying as often as they would otherwise.
> Bitcoin requires middleman, just like credit card processors

No it doesn't? Your address exists as a private key, no external middlemen play a part in the maintenance of that unless you want them to.

> It also is significantly easier to trace than current financial systems

No it isn't. Even if you're talking the base bitcoin without extensions like zerocoin, it is still effectively as hard to trace as it is to decrypt a widely distributed shared encrypted wikileaks file, for example. If someone slips up and a key becomes available to allow decryption, it can be done, otherwise no dice. Compare with OP's statements about full visibility into 100% of SWIFT transfers.

And if you add coming enhancements like Zerocoin? No, it's just nowhere near as easy letalone significantly easier.

> which don't assign digital fingerprints to units of currency

Serial numbers are quite common on physical fiat currency. Electronic transfers are done via SWIFT or interbank transfer networks which have the aforementioned 100% visibility.

> that they've formed an internal task force to see what they can do about spurring adoption of Bitcoin or other similar digital currencies.

The church was one of the foremost patrons of science at its peak, that they didn't understand the final implications of those developments would prove fatal to their foundations doesn't change that fact. So it is with states and bitcoin, although from what I've seen, and I look very closely indeed, the sentiment from the state has primarily been fear and trepidation. And they are right to fear, it could and hopefully will kill them.
No. It's pretty much always been like this.
Ask HN: How do you receive private notifications?
Email inbox, SMS, Growler... if I'm making an app and I want to be able to notify you or send you an event, what's the best place to reach you?

It seems like email is the only common denominator, but you hate to clutter up your inbox. The average user doesn't know how to use plus addresses to get better filtering. Then of course there's the spam filters to contend with, and lack of a good way to refresh quickly.

Seems like the only way to have complete control over it is to ship your own mobile app.

Is this an open problem? Is anyone solving this well? What do you think is the best approach?

It's too bad twitter doesn't add APIs to let you push events to users, it could be a whole new vertical for them.
I hope you'll be sharing with us what the results were!
Meteor is so great that your blog post seems to load only 25% of the time on my 3G connection, freezing for no apparent reason on a useless "We work at Cintrifuse" page the rest of the time (without any indicator that it's loading anything - and leaving it untouched for 5min does not help).

Scaling is good, having your website actually work is IMO better.
Phusion Passenger: Node.js tutorial (simplify Node deployments)
What's NEWs on one line of calling a library?
Titling crap.
> Honestly, I would be fucking happy with 100 million.

And who wouldn't? In fact, anyone who's not a millionaire would be happy with a million. If being that rich doesn't make you happy, why would being even richer work? Maybe you should focus on something more fulfilling than money.

> If someone came up to me right now and said hey buddy, I'll give you 100 million if you help me starve just 1 dying boy in africa right now, I would punch that cock in the face. I do not want to make money at the expense of other people.

And are you sure you haven't made your money at the expense of other people? I'd hate to depress you even further, but it's very hard not to make money at the expense of others. Particularly at the expense of the poorest people in Africa or Asia. Many of the cheap goods we buy are made by people who are terribly exploited for just cents per day. US and EU agriculture gets subsidies that make it impossible for African farmers to compete, and our surpluses get dumped below cost, driving them out of business, causing famine.

If you're serious about not wanting to be rich at the expense of the poor, and don't want to be the cause of kids in Africa starving, then focus on that. You've got enough money to visit Africa and Asia, to see how people live there, and do something about it. Raise awareness, build a school, campaign, whatever. There's tons to be done.

And you don't even have to eat up your million buck for it. Your 60k of passive income is more than enough to do something. After you've spent a few months or a year or a few years on this, you'll still be rich, and you can still decide that helping the poor isn't your thing and do something else with your money instead.

Just stop focusing on that 100 million, because almost nobody gets there, and focusing on that above all else will only destroy you at no benefit to anyone anywhere.
What do you use for the counter showing how many current users there are? GA API?
I keep wondering how people can possibly defend what Snowden did. He used social engineering exploits in his job as sysadmin on a large scale, then published the resulting information. He apparently even compromised personal accounts of the people he was supposed to help.

Are we seriously suggesting letting people do this if they think the goal is just ? It seems so. I shudder to think what the consequences of that would be.

Maybe we should create a "politically correct NSA" that spies on everyone who might be involved in unpopular politics ? How about spying on every company and violently extracting their labour practices ? I'm sure quite a few European unions wouldn't mind doing that (and at least in .be and .nl that would be a legal grey area, illegal but not punishable).
The US should get rid of its Old Testament vengeance mentality. You cannot lock away social problems.
What Hackathons can learn from NaNoWriMo
Yeah, It is really cool app to increase the visibility of your app in twitter. The most interesting thing is that it also shows users related twitter Hash-tags according to user Query with a lovely Octopus Diagram...
It looks like they're using a publish function (Meteor) to send down the number of users reactively.
At a guess, staffing the prison. People are the most expensive part of most businesses.
You are rich. You are richer than over 99% of the world. I'm rich, and I'm a lot poorer than you.

That you think you're not rich is a problem in your perspective, not your wallet.

Change your perspective. Stop staring on a handful of filthy rich playboys, and look around you at all the real people.
We are probably close to the point of diminishing returns on education and prevention, given people's limited attention spans, the time dedicated to reading warning messages, already prominent notices when you go to campsites, and limitations on human intellect/awareness/abilities. "According to the Ad Council, Smokey Bear and his message are recognized by 95% of adults and 77% of children."[1]

The cost of fighting the Rim Fire was $127 million dollars[2], and that doesn't include some much smaller cost to repair the damages it caused (cited to be in the tens of millions by "experts"). The Cedar Fire cost $32 million in firefighting plus 15 lives and 2800 structures. The Zaca Fire cost $117 million to fight. From my perspective it's just a mathematical question whether it would be cheaper to put a satellite in the air vs. other mitigation strategies, and what the cost would be over the lifespan of the satellite for accelerated response vs. typical response. If we plug in the expected value of $200 million in additional funding to awareness I think we will be dissatisfied with the results.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smokey_Bear

2: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rim_Fire

3: http://interwork.sdsu.edu/fire/resources/fire_facts.htm

4: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zaca_Fire
So despite listing all the extreme damage they did, you still think it is reasonable that they got "significant" prison terms and the guy who stole a wallet gets life?
<sarcasme>I for the love of the world cannot understand why anyone would do that.</sarcasme>
Seriously, between corruption and global spying, you can be happy none-one has tried to blow them up !
It is really a great collection of other Interview experiences in twitter. But, when i find it that most of them are non-programming sector individuals.

According to me, Now twitter wants only those programmers who can make their application more attractive and increase the usability.
Osgiliath framework available on Maven Central
I'm proud to announce the General availability of the Osgiliath framework on the central repository!
Take a look at the <a href="https://blog.osgiliath.net/?page_id=224">presentation</a>, the <a href="https://blog.osgiliath.net/?page_id=272">documentation</a> or even the <a href="https://github.com/Tcharl/net.osgiliath.hello">Helloworld</a> sources on github for code Snippets.

You'll not be disapointed if you come from the EE world, but will learn some more cool stuff coming from OSGI!

<H1>A framework to rule them all!</H1>
Another thing to keep in mind is that the world is generally becoming a safer place - the violent crime statistics are trending downwards.
What are you talking about?

"What we don't want to fix though, are the real causes of the problems"

I'm pretty sure a crap ton of people are working on solving "the problem" aka cancer. The world is filled with shitty things, can't people create the occasional extraordinary experience/ scenario just to make people feel good?
I think that falls under the "yelling fire in a crowded theatre" rule [1].

Yes, the US has freedom of expression, and you can claim whatever you want about the government (you can even lie). But if you yell 'fire' in a theatre with 500 people and 1 small exit, or 'allahu akbar' in a TSA line, you deserve to get sued and punished for that. That is not legally considered to be freedom of expression.

Personally I don't find that very controversial. If you lie to get someone else's kid into your car, that's not freedom of expression either. Lying to private security during an emergency is not freedom of expression either. Reporting a bomb threat because you have a math quiz is not freedom of expressoin. If you commit fraud on a contract, that's not freedom of expression either, whether or not "it was a joke".

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shouting_fire_in_a_crowded_thea...
Ask HN: What payment processor? (because plimus/bluesnap sux)
I have this side/hobby software project for a several years now. It was a fun ride and I learned quite a lot. In terms of money it was small but the feeling that you created something people pay money for is great. Now the product is in stand by mode and I focus mainly on its open source version.

I used bluesnap (former plimus) as payment processor and it worked OK until this week when I discovered a new fee of 75$ / month which for my project is quite big. One license is basically 150$ and I hardly sell 0-3 / month.

That's why I decided to close my bluespan account where I had about 400$. They locked all my funds for 3 and a half months for possible refunds (I understand that) and they will charge me 75$ for this 3.5 months (that's what their support said).

Basically I feel like they steal ~338$ from me (3.5 months x 75 + this month fee) just because they suddenly changed their terms and conditions. I'm not sure who's right or wrong but it still sucks for me.

What other (non evil) payment processor do you recommend?
You already got way more out of life in 8 years than most people get in a lifetime. Financially, at least. If you want more out of life, maybe you should look at other things than money.

Now is a perfect time to look for something new. With your good passive income, you can afford to try lots of different things. It doesn't have to be a job. You can travel. You can spend a year doing volunteer work. Maybe that's more satisfying than this hunt for a goal that's beyond the reach of very nearly everybody in the entire world.
The reason why game devs use Scaleform is because of the great vector graphics authoring tool. WebGL is just a gl context in javascript and gives you nothing more than before.
No, WebXXX isn't always the natural next step HN.
If you save your dollars in the bank and earn interest, you end up with more dollars than if you spend them now.

Therefore, no one will ever spend their dollars to buy actual stuff.