skysight-inc/HackerNews huggingface dataset:
Your question boils down to: "Why not replace (insert hugely established system) with (completely new system)"?

The answer to this one is obvious. In order to grow, a replacements need to interoperate, ie. provide an "upgrade path". Instead of holding something up as the one true solution we are betting on the trend, which is certain. Besides, cash will always be around.

Cryptocurrencies, despite their huge number and numerous attractive properties, presently lack market depth, limiting both their stability as value stores and feasibility as trade instruments outside of rapid/realtime/automated exchange. Significant issues with the dominant one (Bitcoin) make it difficult to implement securely, hard for non-technical users to properly understand or trust (there is no benevolent dictatorial regulator, as per their established national currencies/financial service providers), they require connectivity or blockchain storage which is unvailable in much of the world's devices, and so on and so forth.

A parallel to your suggestion is the example of existing community currencies, which are essentially geographically bound equivalents of cryptocurrencies with an often more moralistic focus. I have been in contact with these groups and associations thereof, plus theorists in the area, and my understanding is that many face challenges in the same areas as Bitcoin; ie. new user education, balance of trade and interoperation with conventional established systems. Indeed, they are developing an inter-exchange protocol at present known as CXP.

As for your vast simplification, the best (from a moral standpoint) and hardest kind of change to reverse (from a potential opponent standpoint) is that which is is completely decentralized; an 'opt-in' from the edge nodes. I think this is what people are proposing in many spheres right now.

All roads lead to Rome.
Sometimes swipe using one of my cards never works. It just does not work. Even if you swipe 10 times, it just does not work. Weird thing is this happens randomly. It may work just perfectly at the next shop.

If this happens with Coin then I guess I'm screwed and embarrassed.

I agree wholeheartedly - the idea is good
One of the year's best reads on leadership! Thanks for sharing it.
So your solution is more of what's described in the second paragraph:

"it was a rare flicker of opportunity after a series of temporary positions, applications that went nowhere and employers who increasingly demanded that young people work long, unpaid stretches just to be considered for something permanent." ?
>Why does education/intelligence/morality not cull the inner devil of some?

I've seen some study (not handy sorry) that about 5% of people near-totally lack the ability to empathize.
Apple Cores are a Myth
Contact representatives in government bodies every so often. I'm not sure it makes a difference but I always figure that at a bare minimum it occupies some of their time (at least it does here in New Zealand, as the replies are not canned as far as I can tell, and they aren't from assistants either usually) which prevents other work getting done. I have a faint hope that it achieves more than this, but hope is about all.
Obama is pretty stingy on pardons:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/jacobsullum/2013/08/15/barack-th...
There is hope. Software is the key to addressing a great deal of injustice in the world. I believe that software programmers who want to make a difference can do so by collaborating on open source projects intended for use by government at every level.

Consider: if we can write the software that cities, states, and even the federal government uses to do it's job, then we can also have a material impact on transparency, usability, etc for the users.

Take the judicial system. It is badly underfunded, especially in California, which has the largest civil court system in the Western world. What if an enterprising group of civic minded programmers simply wrote awesome, free, open software to run a state courtroom, complete with a self-help web interface?

Such a project would not necessarily be fun. But it would be useful, and it would arguably contribute greatly to society.
I see the noun "underclass" here more as a factual description. Blacks and latinos are (especially in NYC!) treated like 3rd-class citizens, and they're far more likely to end up in jail for stuff a white person would just get a slap on the wrist.
At least banking isn't pretending it's a "meritocracy."
There are programming jobs for those that are decent. But I have noticed the wages have dropped a lot over the last ten years. Nothing like the amounts for jobs in the States.
True that, but my point is, it's really bad that journalist are trying preserve a false assumption that college is a proxy to a white-collar job. Kids are constantly hearing that they have to do good in school so later on they will be rewarded. That's intuitive, but not true. I managed to change my thinking on 3rd year. I stopped optimizing for high grade if there is no value. It's hard if you hear for 20 years the opposite.
A lot of people attribute it to Roe v Wade[1]. Less unwanted babies growing up in environments that lead to a life of crime.

[1] see Freakonomics
I when I first got the XScreensaver OpenVMS panic.

It fooled me for a couple of seconds.
yes sorry, you are correct. prefix z it is.
Life in jail for poor restrain and judgement? Are you trying to be funny?

Should you get life for your post, which shows poor judgement and no ability to restrain it?
Ironically, such 'war machines' are responsible for the device you're accessing this network on, and the network itself.

But yeah... it is a bit creepy.
If you hate this and want to do something for them, there is the option of petitioning for political pardons for them.

After all, even if three-strikes is reformed, that almost certainly wouldn't be reapplied retroactively.
> why not go all-in on cryptographic currencies?

Because with an armload of cryptographic currencies, and $5, you can buy a cup of coffee at your local coffee shop?
Sad stuff. Somehow I have hope that things will work out: that it won't all be a waste, that people's minds won't just atrophy. That this will be a opportunity to think different, get creative and scrappy, and focus on non-financial pursuits. But who knows. Maybe this really is a societal-level rot that will linger into older age... I sure hope not.
not that I know of. panes have numbers windows have names afaik but I might be wrong.
Theft is a bad thing but hardly deserving of a life sentence, even with a history of burglary. The economic cost of this crime is at most a few thousand $, probably much less. The economic cost of incarcerating the guy for 30-40 years is going to be a few million.
Perhaps ending the emergency low interest rates we have had for years, and letting economics work the way it should. Let house prices come down, let unviable businesses fail and make room for newer more efficient ones.
Awesome technology
Edit. [disagreement was expressed re: suicide]
breaking and entering seems like something people should probably go to jail for. That's what several of these were.
The timing couldn't be worse for them, with this publicized at the start of the holiday shopping season.

Talk about credit ratings -- their Dun & Bradstreet likely won't look so hot in a couple months.

Which I find 100% delightful and just. Reap what you sow, KlearGear. Thou art sleazy, scummy f-wads. Happy holidays!
You're right, this is wonderful.
U.S. quest for 5X battery boost seeks 'game-changing' tech
I have no words. None. At all.

I'm going to be honest and say that in general I am anything but a compassion. I have every bit of sympathy, however, for (relatively) innocent people being victims of things like bureaucracy, human stupidity, laziness, or sheer scumfuckery. It's hard for me to imagine what was going on in those judges' heads, but chances are it's something I despise.

This one was the worst for me:

> When he was 22-years-old, Lance Saltzman was charged with breaking into his own home and taking his stepfather’s gun, which his stepfather had shot at his mother and repeatedly used to threaten her. He was convicted of armed burglary and sentenced to prison for the rest of his life.
I agree re:winters, but am not sure about nights. I imagine nighttime storms are not infrequent and so you could get a reasonable number of lightning strikes at night, causing fires.

Though, the UVA—satellite tradeoff also requires thinking about how soon you want to see a fire after it's been started. E.g., is 12 hours acceptable?
Relax, they are more like a news company. If you checked the emails of CNN, Fox, or even BBC you might find similar stuff. All news companies, including Indian TV channels love bad news.

Stratfor is nowhere close to holding the kind of power you are imagining.
Thanks! Glad one even exists lol. Last I checked, Comedy Network hadn't even uploaded any South Park.

Man... geo restrictions... man oh man :(
There's a huge difference between 'going to jail' and life in prison.
UAVs are probably more likely to crash and cause a forest fire than a satellite.
How would the CC company know that the signature matched? At no point will the thief-signed card ever be sighted by anyone other than the merchant, briefly. The thief is going to dispose or destroy the card when they're finished with it; your bank/issuer is never going to see it to compare.
So, question- if you actively support putting people behind bars with the intent of seeing them die there, why not just kill them right away? If the intent is for them to not cause any harm to society, then that'll get the job done while saving money for society and making them suffer for a shorter period of time.

Unless the goal is to make them suffer for their entire life as punishment; in which case, why not just torture them? That seems like it would be more efficient.

I'm legitimately curious as to why one would support prison if one does not believe that society should aspire to transform criminals into better, law abiding citizens.
I felt like the title here was misleading. They weren't sentenced to "death," as in, given a death sentence, they were sentenced to life in prison, which in some cases means they will die in prison, this is pretty different, though no less a tragedy.
Right now in Poland and UK there is roughly 25% unemployment for people 20-25. Lots of them are already employed as contractors - you can't do better.

There are two problems:
- commoditization of job market
- different specialization

Quite frankly, if you look closely at Germany to find the reason why the unemployment is so low you can see some patterns for Basic Job proposition. incentives for business to employ kids and program for unemployed that work like generational garbage collector
Sadly, because it's cruel but not unusual. Oversentencing is so common in America that you can't make the argument in absolute terms, and some conservative judges are hostile to comparisons with extraterritorial penal policy - eg Justice Scalia got rather annoyed about such comparisons being made in a case about whether the death penalty could be administered to minors.
For example, Steven Pinker looks into this a little in "The Better Angels of Our Nature", long story short there's nothing conclusive, and a sufficiently motivated person can find reasons to doubt it (e.g., the big drop in crime happened some ten years after the ramp up of incarceration rates, Canada experienced a similar decline in crime over that period without the corresponding increase in prison population), however, Pinker himself thinks that when all is said and done it seems likely that incarceration was one of the reasons. One other contributing factor was a large increase in the size of police forces during Clinton's presidency. On top of that, he argues the culture just for some reason shifted to being less violent.

(I want to also mention that he debunks quite convincingly the theory that the decrease in crime had anything to do with legalizing abortion.)
Isn't that exactly what Google tried before giving in and buying YouTube?
I've lived in the southeast of the US as well as the west coast, and I am from Europe.

To my foreign eyes, infrastructures and poverty levels in the south east of the US definitely made it feel like a 3rd world country.
The other issue is repsonse times. Many of the responders are volunteers and the areas are inaccessible. The notion that there will be a 15 minute response time to something like the rim-fire is quite naive.

Second, the experience of the SD (Cedar) fires which I believe are still the worst in the state of CA [1] this system would likewise be irrelevant. That fire was well known for some time, but other decisions and resource constraints (including legal/policy directives) forced the fire to be triaged in a secondary rank.

I hate to be cynical, but this project really seems like a solution and a grant-money funnel looking for a problem and a pile of cash. The "several hundred millon dollar" pricetag would be better spend on prevention, education, and support of additiona fire-fighting infrastructure. Including preventive maintenace for things like controlled burns, etc.

The notion that we need 200-400 million dollars flying overhead to fight fires caused by trivial mis-behaviour is also astonishing. These fires are often set by people doing things like spilling over an alcohol stove, setting an emergency signal, or doing some other trivial but mis-guided task.

That all being said, the amount of CA forest land that has burned throughout the state in the past 10 years is absolutely insane. I'd encourage people to actively work towards solutions to the general problem.

[1] http://www.fire.ca.gov/communications/downloads/fact_sheets/...
Sure, but realistically what's the upside? Maybe your stock doubles if Amazon gets to be as big as Microsoft, but that's unlikely given how razor thin the margins are. Sure, it could happen, but if Amazon is spending several billion on data centers and warehouses every year, that's likely to make a dent in the stock price.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/laura-carlsen/immigration-refo...
> It is wrong to act as if you somehow should be looked at differently by the law because you had a "legitimate political cause."

You've got it backwards. The point of all political protests, whatever form they take, is to get people to look at something in a different way. I know you don't mean it this way, but what you've stated could just as easily have come out of the mouth of a racist during the 1960s.
Ever watched an episode of Cold Case? Public defenders in the US largely seem to be a joke
I feel like there's something major I'm missing here. Is this satire or a metaphor? Or is this literally an article talking about how you are physiologically capable of eating and digesting (mostly) an entire apple? Personally, I don't like the taste (well, more the texture) of the apple core, so I stay away from it. But... what? The absurdity of this article just leaves me confused... like I said, I think I'm missing something.
Jesus christ that looks terrible.
Black In Seattle
Where do you draw the line? I bet you wouldn't go for life in prison for someone who get three speeding tickets. Once we agree that there is a line, then it just comes down to which side of the line a particular crime is on. I don't see wallet theft as being all that serious. Yeah, it sucks to be the victim (been there, done that) but it's fairly minor in the grand scheme of things.

Ultimately, the point of letting him out is that he is still a human being who deserves freedom unless we can show some very good reasons why he doesn't. What would be the point of keeping you out of prison?
Considering it has happened several times since 9/11 and people HAVE taken action, I think you are wrong at this point.

http://www.cnn.com/2012/06/29/world/asia/china-plane-hijack-...
http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/default.aspx?pageid=438&n=m...
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-149289/Italian-plane...

etc etc etc
No suicide jokes were used you illiterate boob.
In Australia, if you try to use a magnetic strip in situations where you could use the the chip (i.e. both the card and machine have chip support) it is refused, and the machine tells you to insert the chip.

It's entirely possible that Coin may still be useless outside the US if most machines will reject your card's strip.
Not some cases, all cases, as it's a life sentence without parole, meaning they can behave all they want in prison, they are never coming out, period. I think it's clear why this is just as good as a death sentence.
Edit. [disagreement was expressed re: sockpuppet]
this really could be awesome. think of the possibilities. pair up pfizer with.the fda, epa can work for bp,
Disneyland, 1965
While I definitely agree with the unix philosophy in a lot of circumstance (thanks for linking that by the way -- have never seen that article) for the smallest common denominator programs that we can make, the typical program nowadays that people make money off of selling as a standalone product is an amalgamation of a lot of these modular components. For the most part, any modular component you want that does one thing and one thing only is already built in some form. It is the ability to properly mix and maintain the abstraction of these components' functions that is the programming philosophy for the new generation.

In a way, I tend to believe that the clash between the older programmers (who tend to intricately understand the underlying components that they manipulate) and the newer programmers (who have tend to be able to manipulate a lot of the built components much quicker) comes from the crossing of this philosophy threshold.

As far as the original article is concerned, the point is that we shouldn't just be following one philosophy or another just because some people that might be more intelligent than us created it (directly against this comment). You can cherry pick what paradigm works best for you in whatever situation you find yourself in, and change it if it's not working out as expected. It is exactly one's own skill that determines whether or not the philosophy one selects are correct for the situation.
Welcome to the real world...

Even my VPS with no public facing content sees a great many attempts at unauthorized access.

So the problem then, is not any "hacking spree" on government agencies, the real problem is government agencies failure to implement acceptable security measures.
Never heard of a gang have you.
To pay employees, taxes, and utility companies.
> I don't understand this one at all. Shouldn't the truck owner have testified on his behalf? Declined to press charges?

Maybe, just maybe, the ACLU account is deliberate fuzzy on the details? It's difficult to conciliate the claim that the accused "borrowed" the truck with the allegation that the co-worker found the truck missing.
"(...) we found out that seven out of every ten black men behind jail, and most of the men behind jail are black

Seven out of every ten black men never went to the ninth grade

Didn't have 50 dollars and hadn't had 100 for a month when they went to jail

So the poor and the ignorant go to jail while the rich go to San Clemente"

-- We beg your pardon America, Gil Scott-Heron
from the album The First Minute of a New Day (1975)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MDCfEkopryo
Am I the only one here not seeing this as propaganda with nicely worded articles masking a lot of the reality here? Some of them seem a little unreasonable I'll agree, but lets go through a few of these:

"taking a wallet from a hotel room" - we blame it on the court appointed lawyer. He's already been convicted and sent to jail twice for burglary and he continues to break into other peoples places and steal their stuff. Poor guy just took a wallet from those rich vacationing golfers. Screw that. If I was there I'd be scared to death. How many times do we let him keep doing this. Stop doing it stupid.

"stealing tools from a tool shed" - oh he was just riding along. sure he was. already been convicted multiple times for burglary. The fact that he desperately misses his children does not make him less guilty of continuing to break into other peoples places and taking their things. Stop doing that stupid.

"borrowing a co-workers truck" - i think there is clearly more to this story. generally speaking, people don't normally drive other people's trucks 3 states away without letting them know. If it really was harmless, i'd expect the other guy to not press charges or testify on his behalf. Hey guys, it was just a misunderstanding I thought someone else took it. Also, "inadvertently killing someone" is a really nice way of saying he beat the shit out of someone in a fight and the guy died.

Perhaps some of these don't deserve life, but I don't really have that much of a problem with it. Maybe we could lower it to 20-30 years, but I have no problems with escalating penalties. If you are a productive member of society this isn't a problem. These mini-articles are all worded as if these people didn't do anything wrong and just made a tiny mistake this one time and now they are in prison forever. Not the case. Most of them made pretty big mistakes, and they made them repeatedly.
I think that was the point, my wife eats the core, she always has. Eats the 'strings' on a bananna too. Me I'm a bit more picky than that :-). So the article is trying to point out that the whole apple is 'edible' and tries to frame it like you're "wasting" the good bits.
> At what point does society get to tell people "you know what, knock it off"?

You're thinking about this the wrong way.

First, ask yourself: Why is there the justice system and prisons?

The answer: To reduce occurrence of crime.

Now why are prisons meant to help reduce crime? By scaring people into not committing crimes? That obviously doesn't work, especially when many people live lives so bad that they can't see a way of improving their lives but by committing crimes, which is pretty much all the people in that document.

Now how would you actually get those people to stop committing crimes? The document actually shows that:

Educate them. Once they know enough to actually be able to meaningfully participate in modern society they see life entirely differently.

Only problem is: These people have reached that point and are barred from actually acting upon it.
Bitzer Mobile gets acquired by Oracle